A Heaven of Others

Maturing To Infinity

A boy grows. It’s inevitable as is any Aba’s pride, by which I mean heartache — the two of them panned, weighed in honest enough scales slung across the gray dead of his eyes. A boy grows because he must. To know the earth from further. Height marked short above the threshold, at seven, eight years a full two hinges tall. A screw stripped to posture. Turn the knob. A boy matures. Even in heaven. Even in the wrong heaven, which, in the endless end, is more a question of Who. Behold the Who becoming another Who who by the time he’s become yet another Who is by then wholly unknowable. Me. Open the door. An eternal boy matures eternally. What do you want to be when you grow up? the Queen always asked though she had all the answers, as if breasts to suck to satisfaction, hers as much as mine. A nipple doctor? A slip ‘n’ fall lawyer? Wait. Maybe a government minister? An Israeli perhaps? A Semite? I know — a Jew?

No not a doctor and no not a lawyer and no not a government minister — not even with nor without a portfolio. And Yes who wants to be a Jew when they’re grown?

Maturing to infinity is not the worst of all means. Neither is it the worst of all ends. It is a becoming unnoticed and unnoticing. Nonetheless a becoming. A becoming still. To mature is not to grow up but to grow In, is another dimension of growth I was never to have realized had I survived, had I lived. No one ever does in life, I mean realize, recognize, Actualize is what the Americans say except of course for the Cabbalists and the — good — Slavic poets and that ancient I think she was a woman in that tablecloth stained then knotted around her head into a kerchief the Queen she gave a shekel to outside the Kotel because her as Aba said Birdosaurus pecker of a face seemed to prick her and hard. But no not even them I say, that the realization of true growth occurs only in heaven, that only in heaven can this growth begin only to never end ever. That in heaven one grows eternally and infinitely In. Through yourself. Into your skin.

In heaven maturation is unending. Maturation is ripening not to rot but to riper. To grow unendingly is the ideal, with an aspiration to tempered by a recognizance of the impossibly ripest: a sheen of skin under which our lives are packed deep, densely, juice straining the thin peel of neck, exploding the seeds of our Adam’s apples to sow a wind for the gleaning of our inconsolable widows. Upon the Messiah, we will become arisen as if worms to our fruit, to live within and without the world simultaneously, surfacing for air, then again burrowing down to the core. Bite us in half and we will grow back ever bigger. Call us a snake and our tongues will no longer be bitten. Understand. This is what we once believed. I am sorry. This was once the belief that was us. We beat our breasts at which we have suckled our gods and our murderers. Forgive us. Forget nothing.

Yea though I walk around this heaven unshod a boy, in appearance to all those who would not know me to be me a snotfaced pitfisted bratchild of ten fat years of lean age, the mind within — or lo the soul, if that you prefer — has or was gifted all knowledge at death (along the way losing any sense of personal, or let’s even say tribal, achievement), and, further, was given the opportunity, perhaps burdened or curseladen with the opportunity to know itself, to know within, in depths denied to the living. To the floorless ocean floor of all mind from whence we arose to beach ourselves back when. Maturation to infinity means evolution, though not of the kind they taught at the school on Tchernichovsky Street the Queen, for one, didn’t want me to know about but that Aba he never seemed much to mind: Galápagolgatha & co., all that business with the ape monkeys mating abominably with their cousins the chimprillas, hooting themselves into pillowy moustaches, argyle, paisleyhatched, widowsheaved, fleurs-de-lis socks limp like intricately patterned foreskins retracted from their tushwiping, opposable paws, armpitsniffing themselves into most auspicious bank and clerical positions, nits and grubs being rendered vital to the matrix of State, a centrifugal integration of instinct as opposed to the six nightless days of Creation and only then, the prime eternal seventh of rest — Shabbos, when the true effort actually began.

To say again because repetition. Because repetition is the death of death.

To say maturation to infinity means an evolution beyond who you were born to be. Means a boiling to the point of air. Means an assimilation to the sky and its vault. Never forget the vault. To say an escape from all conditions and contingencies inescapable in life. A means of divestment, of all assets to prove anything but. A denial of inheritance. Dissent from who. A negation of lines, fences, walls in the shade of their very existence. Exigencies. Means that though I am in the wrong heaven it is only because I think this is the wrong heaven (and so to say that once I believed the wrong heaven was possible, that wrongheaveness was in fact fungible, a presence the universe does not contradict nor even challenge). Doubtless I will mature past all thought at some future of eternity. Now. Or other. Soon in the oases’ prism of soon, I await. An I, I wait doubtless.

Listen and I will say what I have said. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no longer a Jew. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no more a Jew than I’m not. Jewful and Jewless. Listen. Then hear. Understand. To be religious in heaven is to be truly fanatic. Every day is no day and is Sabbath. There is no more reward. There is nothing to live for and no whys to pray. Listen in no heaven am I named what I once thought my name was. What once I Jonathan knew my name to be. What my Jonathan had been according to those who had named me (Aba and the Queen, after my greatgrandAba dead) and not what my name is of myself. My name for myself is now merely Listen, to follow the laws, which are merely the hatreds, of the living while in heaven is to disrespect your own death. To adapt. No longer. To survive. Not anymore. In no heaven is my Aba my Aba, and the Queens here are no Queen of mine. To be forever estranged, even amid your own congregation, and to be forever wandering, even within your own encampment, and only because they make me a stranger, and only because they make me a wanderer, they who would be I only if, I who would be they only why — the selfelected elect, the selfchosen chosen, the selfrighteously rightful inhabitants of this heaven who are still religious, amazingly so, even here, who have here become even more religious, ever more religiously religious, amazingly so, especially here. Listen to my mouth disembodied. Hear through my ears, one pierced, the other is shredded. Understand through me exploded, dispersed, ensharded, in pieces. That parts of me: a finger, a toe, a nose or else a liver, an antique residue of our anatomy: a spleen — they are still occasionally what those alive would regard as sentimental. Nostalgic. But this too will pass. Sometimes the death of these habits or traditions or laws (whatever you want to call them, they’re called) saddens me in the extreme. Other times the passing of these frequencies, these inevitabilities, these inescapables, makes me happier than the vault can contain. Mostly however I am ambivalent about and to this death. Thriving off the fund of numb. And so to my death too. Sunned. Both were inevitable. Are. Or at least one happened and another will happen, and so you will notice that I still say and so think Will happen because a mind of mine still needs to think of or at least wants to believe in a future. Listen that that too will pass. Into waiting for waiting. Which will pass as well, on its own. There is no waiting in the future and there is no future in the (you understand). Listen and then passing will pass. Hearing too. Again await the all over again. Understand then listen anew.

A part of me: usually the head of my penis, or my left sagging testicle, the enraged animal yellowing a kidney of mine or else a fetus forever gestating there, maybe the taboo hindquarter of either thigh, perhaps my right fluttery eyelid — all destroyed once, all to be made whole once again and again in the sanctuary of every memory had — a part of me, whichever part, now still holds fast, cleaves one can say in my second language: Cleave, which in American means both To rend and To adhere, To cling close or Cleave that Aba said often Cleave that Aba always said was one of his favorite words in any language, in any of their opposing definitions sundering two meanings from one sound. Whichever shard of me cleaves to, still cleaves to and must cleave to history overwhelming. Whole half a millennium of waiting and waiting for redemption when our true redemption was in the waiting. And waiting. Again scales, slung across the whites of my Aba’s dead eyes again. If only he could have seen me now. And especially now that he can’t. An allowance, allow me. I left my permit in my pants on my body in blood on the earth. This me an indulgence as harmless as the Three popsicles? how the Queen always said You indulge him too much and how Aba wouldn’t disagree before dinner, bathtime, bed and then sleep (the way those red pops would melt from ice to water is my stain on the street, sticky with litter and pain). And so while this me lasts, however longingly long, I should like to consecrate this homesick history, mine — to vial and stop this mad gushing past. To save it. At least a portion thereof. To store it up for the famine attendant on hope. Bottle it corked for the Friday. Not for the sake of martyrs or teardrop lineages, of victories and all that insensate fell star stuff who could ever have hoped to have understood in life. But for and only for the sake of Them, theirs a sake of one dark’s duration it seems to me now if only for Their sake. I and this is almost too difficult, too said for me to say that I cleave to this identity for and only for the memory — mine — of my Aba and the Queen. For them how I loved them. And for the expectations they once had for my own memory. Expectations becoming love in their ripening. A memory to be had by others. Becoming. Others I never made in an image I felt becoming the world.