Free Essays from the Nick of Time by Mark Slouka Page B

with the knowledge that the causes of our grief, however inscrutable, were after all but His instruments.
    Well into the nineteenth century, in other words, we lived in a legible universe, the record of our days—and their meaning—running like a never-ending stream of ticker tape from the mouth of God. The universe was didactic and was to be studied because it was the providence of God in operation. “When a man lookes on the great volume of the world,” wrote Puritan divine John Preston, “there those things which God will have known, are written in capitall letters.” In seventeenth-century New England, as in the Paris of Louis XIII and his court painter, Poussin, life was the text—a living, breathing allegory—and God was the author.
    Something changed. Our lot improved. Death, though still and forever in the garden, was pushed to the margins. And God, reluctantly, went with it. Having washed our hands of blood (dinner now arrived without the quick crack of bone or the “thup” of the stick on the rabbit’s neck), having pushed even our own deaths offstage, to the quiet ghettos and discreetly lit reservations deemed appropriate to such unpleasantness, we allowed the myth that gave blood meaning to slip quietly into something like obsolescence. It became, slowly, inexorably, an anachronism: the metaphysical equivalent of the moldboard plow.
    So far, so good. Many of us today miss neither the skull nor its apologists, and I, for one, harbor no hidden nostalgia for the golden age of death’s dominion or for the architecture of humility and suffering that made it bearable. But, alas, that’s not the end of the story. At the turn of the new millennium, appropriately enough, thanks to the wonder-working providences of the communications revolution, death is once again a daily companion. Open the paper on any day of the week, and there is Poussin’s skull, set among the harvest of the burgeoning market. Like an icon we can neither override nor delete. Like a boulder in the bitstream.
Et in Arcadia ego,
it whispers—arrogant, insistent—from the columns adjoining the cashmere and the chrome. Et in Zaire. Et in Rwanda. Et in Milwaukee, you fuckers. Turn the page. Delete me.
    There’s blood on the tracks. A mother and four sons have died in Connecticut. Reflexively, we reach for the myth. But we’ve forgotten how to read. And we’ve forgotten how to believe. And the text has gone dark. And the author, whoever he was, if he was, has left.
    Necessity and absence are giving birth to something new: a bloodier God, or a truer silence.

Historical Vertigo

         2003
    I moved to Prague the same time I started doing e-mail: two gestures—or embarkations, I suppose—so perfectly opposed in direction and meaning that I’ve come to think of them as linked, a kind of metaphysical push-me-pull-you; a subtle rack, on which I, subtly, am being stretched. The first, I want to say, is stone, goes deep, is mute. The second, like helium, surfaces relentlessly, is all gas and fiber-optic chatter. The first is about the endless negotiations between time and place; the second slips these coordinates, by which human beings have always plotted their position, as easily as… what? As nothing I have ever known.
    A dissonance worth reckoning with, if only because it is inescapable in our age. To spend a winter walking about Prague—before the great river of tourists that begins to rise in March has transformed the city into a giant bazaar, a marketplace almost medieval in its pageantry and babble of tongues—is to bear witness to an essentially ontological conflict. On the one side is being inscribed in stone and plaster and brick, in the continual descent of sediment in whose layers our days, and the days of those who came before us, can be found. On the other is the Internet Café (whose vaulted ceiling was built two hundred years before Columbus) in which being has been, quite literally, disembodied, displaced.
    At