...of the end of the day

How quiet. The lights have left the building - as I should leave - and the corridors will echo with me. Rug-smothered stairs are also silent. I open my door and listen in the hallway. Brick, glass, plaster... the tunnel's unbreathing. I hold my own to hear its heart thud. When large sounds are gone the smaller ones swell up. Like those undernourished girls, so sweetly bunned. My blotter is also a cushion. Fanless air and cunts are quiet. Through pipes someplace a vein of water must be moving. On the window... nada... thickly brushed. Like coffee steaming from its cup, light streams from the punctured ceiling while I hang on for dear life, riding a spider who's suspended down-side up. I've closed the case on my typewriter; there are no children noisily dreaming; my wife floats wildly in her anger somewhere like a slowly exploding pillow. The fog's hush is mostly propaganda, but drapes do muffle. There's soft wool and pewter, blood flooding my penis, swans swimming on eraser rubber, ashes and velvet. Stuffed chairs are quieter than skinny ones, and books dampen sound like the ground in a drizzle. My head expands and I hear my own voices, for when large cocks are absent, the small ones will cack-a-daddle.

[The Tunnel, Gass, W. H.]

...of last respects

Nevertheless, whatever posterity might say, the fact was that Tabor had no friends, and that I had not been bidden to his doomsday doorway as if I were one. I had come on my own account to pay my last respects to what was left of the composer of history's hymnal, the singer of history's lays. What was left to respect proved to be his accusatory eyes. Which roved when I did.
I had actually come to say goodbye in a sincere and simple way, if I could find one. But I could not wish good luck or bid Godspeed - hey, I hope you get to heaven, I think you've got a chance, I really do - and I could not utter the cliches which embarrassment sent to my lips; in fact, I could not say anything to someone unable or forbidden to reply, who could only tremble as if in fear, cower under the covers in shame of his situation, with his eyes glowing like an animal caught in a cave, alone, the last of his species, no longer enraged and ready to retaliate, no longer even brave.
Could I hold out my hand and hope to sync its shaking with his? could I break off a smile like a crust of beggar's bread? speak my mind? die quickly, my friend, let's get to death without the dance. There was no way to say: you leave one pupil, Professor, among all those who flocked (yes, like sheep) to hear you, who gave you their one minute of admiration at the end of every holy hour; from them you earned, possibly gained, certainly obtained a single disciple; and you will die now - we both hope, soon - before your solitary follower can disallow you, before he can go back on your word, and besmirch your reputation with the tarnish which will surely darken his own. There is some strange justice in all this. The blot upon his honour, furthermore, will be your gift to him: a set of disturbingly honest and repulsively accurate ideas. For these, he comes to your deathbed now to thank you - for simultaneously giving value to, and ruining, his life.

[The Tunnel, Gass, W. H.]

...of illness

I knew that the last weeks of Tabor's life were his last weeks when Tabor fell silent. The phrase, in this case, was not a cliche. I saw him fall. And his eyes would fix on some nothing beside me and seem to glaze. One hand on my arm, he would suddenly peer into emptiness like Rilke's panther, the hand gripping me as if he wanted to take me along. I can't see the past, he told me. I'm blind. When he did speak he spoke slowly, mechanically, wearily turning a crank. My one -ruth, he said, I -un -uth. Hissreee -ass -ree -ages, -ree. And very slowly he would pull one finger away from the rest, and then another, until he held three. A chancre, I made out he said, a sore, the source of the event. This was followed by a pause, a false calm. Then that sore or irritation would break out everywhere. Quibbles, quarrels, strikes, riots. This second stage was divided from the third as the first was: by an interval of peace. Then the disturbance which had been on the surface would sink inside the situation, and the nation would begin to come apart from within. And I would watch him shake and his eyes dim. That extraordinary seeing was gone.

[The Tunnel, Gass, W. H.]

...of a rapt audience

Magus Tabor. Mad Meg. He holds up a ghostly bucket. Full of them, he says - facts which we've seen him gather - little one's like pebbles, snails. Or like beads or buttons or bottle caps. Coins. He rattles them around in the pail while we listen. Little lives, he says. Small deaths. Like marbles or match covers. Prizes in Cracker Jack. A soupçon of souls. Paper clips, knucklebones, candy corn, nails. Left over from the Franco-Prussian War. Jean Andre Veau, for instance. Heinrich Klein. Are they historical? Tabor is menacing. He waits, hands on hips, as if about to exercise. The little lives, their deaths - impatiently he taps with the toe of his shoe as he ticks them off: a, b, c, d, e, f, endlessly, g, h,  i, j - are they historical? Lives lost at Cannae? or a man who might have died in Paris Sunday of the itch? And before this question, as before the others, we remain silent, watchful... silent.
Tabor's on to something. It's lightly verdigrised, vast and reticular, yet he envelops it. The next one is craven; the next one is blue; the next one is badly barbered. He discovers more; he captures another; it's long and thin - so thin and long he reels it to his thumb as though he'd cast it fishing. Like a magician pulling a silver dollar from an ear, he locates them behind curtains, under chairs, in thin air. He pretends, like a Mud Man, to fart a few. He hugs them all, gathering every kind together, while we sit mute... mesmerised. Why didn't we laugh? why didn't we howl and shake and topple from our seats? No one in anger cried clown. He might have been Oedipus after his eyes, or Antigone mourning her brother... when he measured and he counted for us: k, l, m...

[The Tunnel, Gass, W. H.]

...of students

...The students are weary of my cheerless aphorisms, my Culpagrams. These pithy sayings got written down in the old days, they were guides for the good conduct of life, mottoes hung up in the head,

BLESS THIS HAPPY HOLE

but now their bored fingers fiddle with those cheap felt-tipped pens, and the eyes, which once ran hands excitedly along a tablet's laddered courses as if heading up a thigh, look on in puzzled wonder while I rant. Highlight me, dammit. Run yellow lines over my voice. To those students a paperback book is a disposable rag. It gives them a hanky to honk their heads in. The subject, students, is the aphorism, or the quarrel between form and content. When sentences are sufficiently condensed the sweetness gets squeezed out, I tell them. I ask if they know any cheerful ones. Aphorisms, I mean. Silence greets that. At least one dumbo out of this herd ought to offer me a proverb. What does Culp call them? His slobwebs. "Little by little small things don't get large." Silence greets that. The slogan is also short, I say, but in the slogan's case it is the thought that gets trimmed. And set aside. You know. Like fat. Silence greets that. Brief entreaties are common, terse petitions frequent. The subject, students, appears to be brevity. Brevity is not the soul of wit, of course, but its body. Prayerful outcries are curt because they neglect to stipulate the grounds for their request. Whines without whys. No response. They couldn't take a shit without consulting a pony. God Bless This Happy Home, for instance. JESUS SAVES is a slogan, okay? How about WORK IS SALVATION? whereas "Never underestimate your insignificance in the eyes of others" is an aphorism. The students were expecting a mini-lecture on Wolfgang Kapp's abortive Putsch and the governments failure to disband the Freikorps. Not that they are disappointed. Since it is nearly impossible to interest them, it is also nearly impossible to disappoint them. They study the initials carved in the paddle-like right arms of their chairs. Lefties may use their laps. Lefties must use their laps. The students are diligent. They darken the designs with pencil points. They lay up in little abysses like boats in a bayou. Playing with words is a sign of an infantile imagination; it is worse than playing with your tiddlywiddler, it displays a gruesome... what was it? it demonstrates a disagreeable... deplorable... no - it argues a... a loathsome mind. Sometimes I modestly attribute my own smart remarks to Benjamin Franklin or Aaron Burr. The students are still and their silence continues. They are confident. They are silent. They are still. They know nothing. It comforts them. It promotes peace. Their heads are as empty as the hole the anvil did an Alice in for forty nights some days ago only to light in a lake of fire on whose ordered surface like a gas drill the shadows of the acid-shitting birds are sharply defined, and upon whose verge the tourists stand, shading their shutters. Just as well, for if the students knew what I know (and won't teach them), they would run amok with their felt pens and bobbies, defacing bystanders and marking up other innocents. Life will get you bastards yet...

[The Tunnel, Gass, W. H.]

...of a town

The town I was born in was made by a crossing of tracks. A rare and momentous event, this intersection, for those two tracks had passed over mile after mile of prairie as if the earth they lay on were space through which they were falling - two lives, two histories, two kinds of loneliness - with no idea they were converging, and must cross; yet in the moment of their meeting, they were silent, for what did they compose then but an illiterate's X? So my town did not have the shape of a string stretched briefly beside a track as so many did, in imitation of their makers; it was little and round, swelling slowly in the arms of its X, filling out a pie already cut in four pieces; and the portion with the trees was served with economic ceremony to the rich. The town called itself Grand - not Grand Crossing or Grand Junction, not Grand Union or Grand Meeting or Grand Chance - simply Grand, and the grand trees there, also an accident, shaded the roofs of the mighty. The citizens put in a few, of course, and over the years some grew respectably large, but mostly the wind blew, and the sun fell - molten - to run in the streets. One lived all summer through the burning of Pompeii, and during the dust bowl years that substance billowed like ash through the town, sliding beside fences in loose coils, streaming along walls, and drifting onto porches, into stables, exposed shops.

Night. Joked no one. Sat silent at the dinner table, forking

in rage, not pie or potatoes; the children marshalled round me;

Carl's lip swelling where I'd struck him; my wife, for a change,

like a smiling Buddha. Wrong. 'Tis below you. 'Tis bad habit.

No more of it.

Atoms, motion and the void, Democritus has written, are the three imperishable things.

[The Tunnel, Gass, W. H.]

...of the page

in, among, amid people

                    each like a wind, each wanting you face to  face its way, and with the wind's

                    ineluctable  reach  compelling  you  -  invisibly  -  as  might  oh - so - many

                    helpful  steering  palms  at  your  helpless  elbow:  wife  and  lover,  full of

                    silent  entreaty:  parents,  friends,  bringing  to  bear  what  once  one

                    could call "the                                                                            very breath of

                    their being":                                                                               students, crit-

                    ics, colleagues,                                                                           puffing from

                    every point like                                                                          those cherubs

                    of the wind                                                                                 till their urging,

                    your yielding,                                                                             flood the whole

                    compass . . .                                                                               except perhaps

                    here, on this                                                                                little windless

                    page,  where  I'm  beseeched  by  no  one,  heard  by  no  one  -  unaffected,

                    unaffecting  -  and  can  point  my  own  direction  if  I  any  longer  have

                    one;  live  as  though  I  have  (and had)  a  life;  let  this  vacant  paper  win -

dow frame a world

[The Tunnel, Gass, W. H.]