The Synthetic A Priori

     What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all
     this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely
     unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of
     perceiving them. . . . With this alone have we
     any concern.

     —Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

At a church rummage sale, I study the perfection of shadows

in a painting by Caravaggio, although what I hold

is only a small print of Christ—its frame broken—dining

at Emmaus with three of the Apostles. And because the table

is dramatically, if not unbelievably, lit, the bowls & pitcher

& loaves send their dark crescents onto the immaculate

white cloth. When the Savior raises his hand to offer a blessing,

its shade deepens further his crimson smock. Tenebrosus:

that rich, convincing darkness. As though the master understood

that the obscured world only seems to us somehow

even more familiar, as though our sense of our own unknowing

had at last been made visible—even if what we do not know

cannot itself be seen. The future’s drape, the carnival fortunetellers

of my childhood might have called it, but also the now’s,

displayed as it is—so many unmatched cups & saucers, old coats

& wicker baskets—all around us. At a party last week,

someone said verisimilitude. We were huddled on a tiny porch.

It was the first cool night & the wine had no conclusion.

The talk turned quickly to shepherds & the pastoral & then,

to opera, before someone recalled a horror film he’d watched

late one night with his brother. In black & white vignettes,

an evil tree stump possessed by the spirit of an executed prince

hunts the scheming tribal elders who have destroyed him.

A former pro wrestler in a costume of wire & rubber bark

& wearing a permanent scowl lumbers after vengeance

in the confusion & fear of 1957 on a half-dozen root-legs,

driving his victims into quicksand or toppling himself over

upon him. Though here the point is the teller’s small brother

& the boy’s allegiance, even in a state of suspended disbelief,

to what we call sense. How, he wanted to know, suddenly

unusually earnest, did the tree manage to get itself up again?

Yesterday I spoke to a friend who is despairing: back home,

waiting tables, he’s dating a woman whose marriage has only

just come to an end. When he wakes, he discovers he does not

recognize himself. One afternoon, walking home from school,

I hit my best friend in the face with a book. It may well be

that she hit me. Thin pages flew out into the street. More punches

were thrown & I came away bruised. In that book, a novel

by Emily Brontë, the land is violent & unjust & we are violent

& unjust upon it. Even worse, our greatest passions

change nothing at all. Before one of us hit the other,

there must have been a cause, but I can’t recall it, which makes it

seem nonlinear now, &, thus, apocryphal, both impossible

& impossibly real. I failed, though I tried, to offer comfort.

It’s not that our lives don’t resemble our lives. I’ve been alone

so often lately I sometimes catch myself watching myself—

breathing in the fresh spears of rosemary or admiring the shallots,

peeling their translucent wrappers away, centering one on the board,

making the first careful cut, lifting the purple halves.

Before stories, we were too busy for stories, too busy

hunting & suffering to invent the tales of our own

resurrections. Caught out in the kitchen’s brightness last night,

the handle of the skillet cast its simple, perfected form

across the stove—pierced, like the eye of the needle, so that

it can be hung from a hook, as pans, presumably, have always been.

Outside the wind picked up. Thunder. The dog trotted off,

hid her head beneath the chair. But today: a charity sale

at Trinity Chapel & sun on the tar of the buckled walks.

In the cracks, beads of water spin into light. Tell yourself

it’s simple: this is where it’s been heading all along. Tell yourself

something you have no faith in has already begun to occur.

Source: The Eternal City (Princeton University Press, 2010)