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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