corresponding to the English "game"

What a death-like existence she must have had, Katherine Anne Porter, whose life was incomparable according to the blurb on her biography by Darlene Unrue, what a ghoulish mortality, how strictly repellent: the black hole of her presence making people uneasy as they witness eerily a pit or vortex in the air where this woman should be; she is the answer to the sum of her actions and the actions that would have made up each component of the incomparable life are incomparable too, an intense or lax nexus of null multiplication and plus, and so she looks as if she is doing nothing; she is doing nothing, she is not doing anything that can be described; she is performing actions but no one can describe them, they are inhuman troubling actions; she seems to be a god and yet she does nothing miraculous.

She moves her right leg forward. Everybody feels sick. Finally one of the people near her decides to describe her in any way, even the wrong way, because they think that would be better than not describing her at all.

They pick up the closest book, which is a translation by Robert Firmage of poems by Georg Trakl (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and they point to Katherine Anne Porter while they read this line: "Something sick weeps silver." Everything is easier now: there is a starting point. Porter moves and the person reads again, "A pure blue flows from husks of moldered dullness." Soon everything she does can be described with a line from a Georg Trakl poem. People stop throwing up around her and finally she can write a sentence people will understand although all of it is Expressionist. Nevertheless it is recognisable words in an order that can be deciphered and that is a blessing.

But everything she does now is an extreme thing, that is how it is understood, that is how she understands it, because Trakl wrote extremes and juxtapositions, saying, "sweet corpse," or, "the dark cries of the blackbird | In childlike gardens," savagery corresponding with children and angels: his poetry is that correspondence, which becomes known by its other name in such circumstances, and that is juxtaposition. Her behaviour exists at extremes, the moon dies when she walks out at night, and nondomestic animals that come near her become Wild, a German word that Firmage usually translates as "prey," though he is cautious and writes an explanation in the introduction to the book: "Wild, however, is primarily a hunting term ... corresponding to the English "game," and thus bears the connotation of victimization of innocence, of something born to be destroyed ... the best English equivalent possessing both the connotation and the objective reference of Wild ... is prey, which is neither as common nor as specific as the German term."

Katherine Anne Porter's behaviour can be described but it cannot be reconciled with the moderate behaviour of other people: she is either extremely peaceful and silvery because Trakl has used the word silvery or else she is cruel and holding a corpse, though some aspects of her being remain static: her eyes are always blue because Trakl likes to write blue eyes. Ideas that seemed apart from one another are brought into conjunction by her presence; her nouns are reasons for colours to be closely settled, "A blue moth crept out of its silver cocoon," "The river glimmers greenly, ancient alleys silver." A colour is a complete thing, an utter thing: here are two utter things, here is energy between them, like a relationship between two nations. Her closest friends insist that there must be something in the middle, unobserved; these extremes are like parentheses, they say, constraining or bordering the inexpressible. "Which makes her no different from anybody else," they tell her detractors.

The detractors respond knowledgeably: "You have been reading Heidegger on Trakl."

capturing the incomparable life

Bob Rochester, diswived by the freedoms that have made this country great, decides that he is going to resurrect his personal morale with the help of a good deed: he will save the Devil's Hole pupfish. He puts it in a bucket and the pupfish is saved. "What else can I do for Nevada?" he wonders. He attends a Preserve Nevada symposium where a man insists that Las Vegas does have a history though nobody thinks so. "And you don't have to dig deep either to find it. It's sitting in the old part of town, in all the old casinos there. The bones are there. You just have to look under the shell to see what you can find," he says, and his speech is noted in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Las Vegas loves its old historical bones so much that it puts them behind walls where nobody can damage them. Lucretius tells us that sight is possible because all visible objects spew little balls, which we take in with the assistance of the wonderful dark pupils that have punched two holes into our faces with unnoticed efficient modesty. The concealed sections of Las Vegas have been saved from the wastage of atomic spewing. They can keep all their molecules. No one looks at them. Preservation! But the catwalks in the Imperial Palace ceiling are still visible from the blackjack tables. Security used to dawdle there and stare at the customers through darkened glass. The owners have decided to destroy the ceiling and rename the casino. History is everywhere! One of the metal accoutrements outside Planet Hollywood has rust.

Rochester decides to make up numbers at a cultural evening. He takes a forty-minute walk from Planet Hollywood down Harmon to UNLV where a biographer is giving a talk in a room attached to the museum. I know that he was there because I attended the same lecture. On the screen above the biographer someone has projected a picture of her book with this line printed above the blurb: "A biography capturing the incomparable life and times of one of America's finest writers."

He is chilled by the thought of this incomparable life, which would not be able to be described or measured, because, without comparisons, you would lose your place in the world: you would not be able to say, "My life is tempestuous," because you would not be able to compare it to a tempest, and you would not even be able to say that your life was good or evil, deprived of the ability to compare it to other lives. It can't be an impressive life, or a boring life, or any kind of life; if it is incomparable then you can't even describe it to yourself, and you never know how well or badly you're doing and can't guess, because every time your brain tries to make a comparison your estimations are blanks. Even the Elder Gods can be descr -- I want to stop mentioning H.P. Lovecraft, this is ridiculous, back to William Hope Hodgson: even the demon in Hodgson's short story The Hog can be compared to something, namely a hog, and a giant pig coming through the floor, and Carnacki, although he has found this comparison, is still desperate and keeps asking his friends if they see, if they understand? And Bob Rochester tries to imagine Katherine Anne Porter, who was the subject of this biography, desperately asking her friends what they thought of her, but she would not have any friends because they would not know what to think, and she would have to go through life like a black holes asking like Carnacki, "Do you see, do you understand?" but she would not be able to help or prompt them with even such a sketchy definition as, "My life is like a giant demon pig."