how angels would walk the oceanif they wanted to walk.They don’t. They hover.
—”Water at Night,” Marianne Boruch
—or did you get past us, just far away enough for us, to say, you are post-people? Or perhaps you came from elsewhere? I’m sure we are a curiosity to you nonetheless, a questionable, strange group who in the name of science injected our own kind with plutonium and tested mustard gas on sailors, we who ruined our rivers and built our mansions for two. How we boomed from our microphones on podiums in war rooms in which we created and extolled our hierarchies, exponential and cruel.
I’m sure you can’t possibly understand how I live in a developed country that doesn’t (didn’t) invest in the welfare of its citizens but made well-being a competition by velvet-roping health care.
And I’m also certain that you’ll have to look up “country” and “velvet rope” in an ancient volume on U.S. culture, along with words and phrases like “ICE,” “trade embargo,” and “hate crimes.” I assure you these were not just words either, but actions, consequences, the fate of all.
And it’s true, that even our arboreal barons built cement treehouses, and innovation often was a crisis, a great divider, a clock rewinding backwards.
Perhaps you can pinpoint when we stopped moving forward.
When the hierarchy died within—or with—the human.
*
I have a niece fascinated by the possibility of intelligent life outside our world. Stephen Hawking, a well-known theoretical physicist, thinks they must be like us—that is, would-be scavengers looking to take over our planet, having ruined their own home planet, depleted its resources, rendering it uninhabitable.
In the taking, of course, comes establishing new hierarchies. New extinctions.
There’s scientific evidence that hierarchies are embedded in our biology, as they are in all living things on this planet, which is why a brilliant man like Stephen Hawking believes our behaviors and choices must be—or be like—that of all else. That our acceptance of how we are could shed light on the survival mechanisms of life that exists elsewhere.
Still, this belief does not deter my niece and so many from looking into the sky with hope: Where are they?
*
I remember the day she asked me this question—Where are they?—and before I could answer, she followed with: Why are we here?
And I knew that any answer I could give her now was a clock rewinding backwards.
I mean: I no longer pray in a synagogue because I love the Judaism my father created in our house. And I also loved the House that my father created in the synagogue that didn’t quite accept my family.
And I loved both too much.
And now my house of prayer will have no doors or walls.
I wanted to tell my niece that we are here to walk through such entrances and barriers, exactly as they are (not), and the moment we do—the moment we think we have it all figured out—the answer will change.
Of where are they? I wanted to tell her: They are around.
That you are around.
Already here.
Silently observing us.
That you have been trying to see us apart from, say, the nuclear weapons we’d fire into space if it meant one more gold coin in our world.
For now, I won’t tell her these things. I pretend I have not seen your face often impassive in the dark, weary with not being able to understand how we are. For now, I hold onto the simpler things, which are difficult to explain anyway, like how a little girl can love and study Torah, even if she wasn’t meant to.
Because my father taught me to see beyond the word as a clock rewinding backwards.
Because of that house my father created but did not build, so that I might carry it with me.
*
Everyone I know—family, friends, students, and yes, even my politically aware eight-year-old niece—has expressed fatigue keeping up with the most recent news since the 2016 election. I’m rather tired, too, of waking up to hear the latest transgressions on human rights and civil liberties. I’ve called my elected officials, signed petitions, and written letters to protect the people I love—all of which I’m sure you find as baffling as our nuclear missiles and conducting covert human experiments on those we won’t grant universal health care. It doesn’t make sense, I know, and these things take up precious time and make that damning clock all the more real. That such things keep us bound to a time linear and simple.
Why are we here?
Then I think of the terribly specific conditions that our lives necessitated from the beginning.
Our beautiful planet for which we were always just barely not here.
The one-in-a-billion chance we get to live.
What are we doing?
*
There is something strong within me, stronger than my body whose nerves sometimes behave unpredictably and wild, and I wonder if it’s you interrupting the past tense: anglerfish in abyss; the present hand from which I’m cliff-hanging; the future continuous angel wrestling with me in the darkness.
This, I’ve only started to understand.
For now, when my niece calls, I answer as if the future is calling. I answer the future calling. I share things of this world that I wish to hold toward the infinite.
Why are we here?
And I tell her the beauty of her question is that the answer always changes. That’s there is something new we’ve created or found or given, undestructively, to this world.
(“Undestructively” our dictionaries will tell you was never a word, but often our dictionaries, like our history, are incomplete.)
I share with her a list of ten new species discovered on this planet, which we discuss in detail. I tell her about Exmoor Ponies, a very old and semi-feral breed that still wander the moors of England. And I tell her Chen Chen’s book When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities, has gone into its third printing (she loves that title). I tell her Joshua Jennifer Espinoza has two new poems in Hyperallergic that I’ve already added to my Fall syllabus and that Craig Santo Perez’s poem “Off-Island Chamorros” is a stunner. I read the poems to her, although some friends say she’s too young to understand. And I tell her that there are new theories on how dying stars turn into black holes. And that even now we still aren’t really sure what they are or if they are truly as we imagine.
Black holes, she says, with a longing we share.
And then: where are they?
Each day the answers to both her questions change.
Each year I learn a little more about both.
You: the train in which there will be no seats and no seats to take
As the linear grows fainter, there is less opacity to the train.
Why are we here?
And again, I tell her something of this world. I tell her to cherish this world alone, for it might be all we have in the end.
Only she knows I’ve started writing to you, to elsewhere, as much as to her.
Only that she knows I love both too much.