Popular Culture Review Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2009 | Page 130

126 Popular Culture Review “In my lap / 1 hold a book I’ve been reading / all my life. / Why can’t I turn the page?” In Talarico’s case, there’s no need to do so. Staying in one place is just fine; for once, even the law of motion is at rest, and “violent events / in the universe” are suspended or at peace. Socratic ignorance (“I do not know; / I plead not guilty”) haunts the future as well as the past; in the “Disembodied One” we hear an echo of impotent God or Yahweh confessing to His absent Son (“I am nothing more than / what I am”). Grief becomes Belief, which (like William James’s definition of religion) “grants me strength” to survive shipwreck—to accept the chaotic order of an amoral universe, mirrored all too neatly by a broken heart. No doubt Ishmael sang the same song, as he swam to safety amid the shards of the Pequod, left to fathom the depths of “walled-in” Walden, to hear the prose-poet sage loner intone “while men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.” That’s the original voice, template, the wild, untamed Platonic form, Ur-Talarico at last. The union of pantheist and transcendentalist is the inevitable, all-American synthesis—one that turns reptiles into mammals, mammals into reptiles, and both into homo sapiens. That’s the only conclusion I can draw, in a universe that draws no conclusions—one in which (as Kurt Godel showed, ages ago) the last word is that there’s never a last word, but only a flight from fears to tears, and from the swamp to the study, and back again. Dennis Rohatyn, University of San Diego