Molecular
transliteration
I feel too much. Sometimes this can be a good thing, lately it hasn’t.
Here are some local moments of molecular life.
I am sitting at the kitchen table, same view since 2001. The tree outside whose crown was not visible at that time now waves wild in the wind. I have just driven the teen crazy as he was registering for his first semester of college. A generational gap combined with the problem of being a college teacher makes a potent psychological combination. He is working to separate himself and those are the covalent bonds, which I have just learned are the strongest chemical bonds, hardest to break.
Two weeks ago I rented a car in New Jersey and drove to Pennsylvania and picked up the younger teen from summer camp. We dropped the car off in New Jersey and took the train back to New York. She fell asleep on the train and so did I. Our knees were touching and the molecules moved between us.
I have been to hear music recently and attended my first album listening party at a place called Public Records in Brooklyn. A whole lot of people went upstairs to a well-designed room with enormous custom speakers in the front. We sat and got drinks and waited for Lucrecia Dalt to drop the needle on the new vinyl of her new album. Which she did. Then we all listened. She listened too, head tilted way down close to the turntable absorbing its spiral.
When I listen to music I feel the molecules in my ever-extremely-rattling brain realign, they horizontalize and I feel myself deep within sound and afterwards often able to see what is around me more clearly again. I have to do this over and over. It also happens when reading, but differently.
I never studied chemistry and almost no math. My only math abilities come from the two areas in which I have practiced the most. The first being coupons and unit pricing with my mother in the grocery store. Sorting through coupons in the little metal file box before going to the store was a pleasure. The coupons then connected with their own bond, a paper clip inside a mailing envelope. We drove to the store less than a mile away. In the store we scrutinized not only prices, but unit pricing and that is where I learned that what seems the cheapest might not in fact be that.
The only other math skills I learned were at my high school job at the local Baskin Robbins ice cream shop. Mike, the manager, would not let the employees program the register to perform calculations for how much change to give. We had to do it in our heads. I am ever grateful to him for those years of math. At this point, with cash being nearly obsolete, this skill of mine is too.
I cry a lot, I text my friends, the cat pees on things, a stack of shopping bags sits on the windowsill. The beloved stuffed animal has gone missing. I wake up multiple times a night with my heart pounding, the free-floating anxiety yet more molecules flying around looking for anything to hook up with.
I visit the Ben Shahn exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Sacco and Vanzetti, sharecroppers, striking workers, mass migration, global war, nuclear threat, solace in the uncoupled bonds of religion and alphabets. I wonder what molecules from my scattered scrabbling heritage propel me towards letters rather than images.
A couple of Shahn’s drawings are listed on the wall text as “barbed-wire drawings” and I don’t know if that is literal or a kind of brush I wouldn’t know about. One of those “barbed-wire” ones is called “Lute and Molecules.” another one is of Gandhi.
Shahn, like William Carlos Williams, whose In the American Grain I revisit yet again, lived not far from each other in New Jersey. Nor far from relatives I don’t know. Near where my parents grew up enclouded in fumes of paint thinner, lead, and steel smelting. Toxic molecules.
I’ll never forget the intense teachings we endured in school about radioactive elements because of growing up in nuclear-afeared cold war Reagan theatrics. We didn’t learn the metric system but we learned about the half life of radiation. Half-lives: time-torments.
Then I think of the duration and time of poetry, of film. Of Derek Jarman’s Blue, tinkling bells, music, effects and disembodied voices emerging from and closing themselves in on the perpetual blue projected film. The molecular structure of film grain dancing within the perceptual impossibility of the rarest color. Butterfly wings. Jarman’s fearless repetition of the titular word. Remembering visiting some church in Italy, long ago, learning about the rarity of blue, ground up lapis lazuli, pestled, sifted.
The smell of ozone before the thunderstorm. The relaxed lips of a sleeping child.
I download a bad academic journal article about the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and also a digitized copy of Lichtenberg’s Waste Book D. I remember on an artist residency in Sweden I was going to hear a choral concert and as I headed out to the concert the residency director asked if I was going there to “do research.” So now I don’t question if anything is distraction or digression or not. It may be escapism, a way to realign the scattering molecules, but I could also call it another kind of research. Surely you do that sometimes too.
Reading quickly through Kafka’s “Letters to Milena” in search of something I see this:
and its transliteration:
Calm, deep forest; molecular transpositions.
Thanks for reading.