The Obligations of the Harp
Essays
Arthur Saltzman
Parlor Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
www.parlorpress.com
Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906
© 2009 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Some essays in Obligations of the Harp originally appeared in the following journals and magazines: "Castaways" (Drunken Boat); "Clique Song"(Under the Sun); "Falling with Style" (Lake Effect); "From the Notebook of the Human Cannonball" (Asphodel); "Get Up and Get Away" (nidus); "On Reading with a Pen" (Gihon River Review); "Reason Not the Need" (Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art); "The Table on the Planet" (Delmar); "Taking Pains" (Prague Literary Review); "Time Out" (Slow Trains); "Watch This Space" (Mid-American Review); "What All the Fuss Is For" (Center: A Journal of Literary Arts).
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Saltzman, Arthur M. (Arthur Michael), 1953-
The obligations of the harp : essays / Arthur Saltzman.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60235-115-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-116-5 (adobe ebook)
I. Title.
AC8.S227 2009
081--dc22
2009021504
Cover image: "MASS Ensemble with Earth Harps in the Utah Salt Flats." Used by permission of MASS Ensemble.
Cover design by David Blakesley.
Thanks to Susan Bales for providing editorial assistance on this project.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 816 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [email protected].
Contents
8 From the Notebook of the Human Cannonball
12 Chapter Thirty-Four, in Which Our Hero Cuts to the Chase
17 A First Course in Aperture Therapy
1 The Table on the Planet
The arrangement contains the desire of
The artist. But one confides in what has no
Concealed creator.
—Wallace Stevens, “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch”
It may never have happened, or it may not have happened precisely as the theory would have us believe, but if evolution happened, it apparently happened according to one of three models, for they are the models that have endured.
One is the racetrack, along whose color-coded lanes the earliest vertebrates, given a running Precambrian start, sprint through 500-plus million years toward the here and now. The planet has been fraught with offspring for a few billion years, in fact, and the majority fail to complete the marathon, their collapses occurring invisibly and ages before they’d have come into view of the grandstands. Indeed, most of the dinosaurs whose fragments we’re familiar with cannot leap the steeple from the Mesozoic Era to the Cenozoic, and the next contestants tread upon their fossils. Some who do survive the marathon do not survive as they began it. Eohippus, for instance, drops out, leaving the modern horse to deliver the mail. A given lizard may streamline every thousand centuries or so, sloughing a dozen or more precedent semblances on its way, dumping ballast for the long haul. Certain amphibians carry the baton legless ancestors brought the first half-million generations. Meanwhile, a few mischievous species prominent in the Holocene stretch slipped in recently, perhaps ducking in from behind a dying herd during that catastrophe’s distraction; some would say their success is tempered by the deceit. The fittest are left standing, slithering, soaring, or treading water at the ever-receding finish line, leaving immeasurable time and carnal tonnage in their wake.
Tolstoy wrote that happy families are all alike. From the long view of biology, unhappy families