A Missing Star

A Volume 7, Number f. March 1997 Ithaca, New York FREE A Missing Star Paul West Certain much-heard voices impose themselves on posterity. My old friend, astronomer Carl Sagan, had such a voice: a tutored baritone no doubt practiced in bathroom or laboratory, bouncing about among tile and glass, a calmative among the wets and clinks, the squeaky faucets and the hoarse Bunsen burners. In the old days, when he never wore a suit, the voice wasn’t quite so manicured, so crisply mahogany in hue, when we chatted about salary, Swinburne, and stars, and in a much later year I wondered how that voice had fared when, reduced to heart broken banality, he found himself saying to his dying father, “Take care.” I knew his parents quite well, having become a fan of his mother’s potato pancakes, of his father’s burly wit; besides, his mother, Rachel, knew my books and urged them upon her son, who complied, I live in a house only a short downhill walk from where Carl now lies horizontal in a box, still a neighbor I suppose, motionless and dumb. And this new image of him fills me with ontological horror that his cherished cosmos has done this to him at sixty-two, renewing Beck ett’s warning that death does not require us to keep a day free in the calendar. We abide its w him and its deadly design with what the Greeks called frike, a hair-rais ing shudder, and then hope to think of something else. Surely it is naive of me, child of the Nazi blitz, to feel such shock and outrage at the demolition month by month of a friend. I felt the same way about my mother, who surprised us all by dying at ninety-four, also of pneumonia. We had thought she’d reach a hundred easily, but she was weary of us, of life. Irrationally, for months, I fretted that her corpse would feel the cold. Clearly, I did not believe in death, in its ability to wipe things out, but, in some kind of defiant nostalgia, denied it. I still hear Carl’s ing the dead with us longer, hygiene be selves, shunting it away from us like the usually denied to novelists and poets. In voice, just as I still feel my mother’s damned, so that the state they have entered plague. We suffer from synecdoche, tak this love story haunted by astronomy, he warm square hands. Indeed, trapped in becomes a piece of the real, like their ing part for whole, when we need corpore lived again before he even died, all the some post-mortem passacaglia, I live on, loquacity, their sarcasm, their charm. al impact —no more memorial services way through what I think of as his golden hearing and sensing the dead more and Death, about which, as distinct from sanitized by the body’s having gone. days, when he excelled at the graces of the more, as if they have at last come into dying, we know too little, deserves to be Maybe death comes first, then the dying amateur, the fervent savant, before the their own, invulnerable and stark, unique better known, looked at .with less disgust, begins; or death happens in a sea of dying prospect of nuclear winter filled his mind. ly reliable. almost as if it were what Aristotle, who that both precedes and follows it. The upshot of all this is that, at least There is such haste to get them out of knew everything, called a form of imita There is another problem, in this man’s until the novel gets published in 1998, I sight, certainly in Carl’s Jewish religion, tion without a name. They are trying to be case anyway. More seen on TV than in will have his remainder, or rather my pur even in temperate climes. Perhaps this is like us, and something holds them back, life, he may have achieved a replica of loined version of his body, on my premis a more majestic version of our eagerness but they are wonderful in their hidebound immortality anyway, in which case, es, more or less to myself, which is per to warehouse us as soon as we begin to striving. according to what I have just written, we haps better than trying to deal with him as age and no longer fit the eugenic para Could we bear it? Could it be worse than need to see his body even more, weekly on a cloud of disembodied memories. Con digm of flawless maturity in the best of living among those compound ghosts of the tube, lying in state like the Crab Nebu gealed in cold print, not by him but by me, possible worlds. Sometimes, when it’s the departed cobbled together, in Carl’s la. I think I saw him as much in life as ever he will haunt me still because I know now, snowy in the Finger Lakes, bodies await case, from the sailcloth crackle of his on TV, perhaps more, so I have a double as I did not while writing the novel, that burial for months, hoardcd-up until the brand-new yellow swimshorts as he once image of him to cope with, complicated the real person, of whom Raoul Bunsen is ground softens again, and I wonder about plunged into the waves off Cocoa Beach, even further by the fact that, only months an imitation, a translation even, lies a little the housing of the dead in attic, outhouse, the way he held a tape recorder to his chin before he died, I finished an autobiograph way downhill from the house, yet oddly or gazebo, erect as in a catacomb or at as if shaving, the empathetic irony in his ical novel in which he, as Raoul Bunsen, dispossessed of himself, a star that winked some wakes, remembering a Hemingway voice when he called me long-distance on figured as the character who talked a pair out, whose image continues to travel story in which the bereaved hang a hurri my fiftieth birthday, I in darkest Pitts of lovers into astronomy, taking them through space. cane lamp on the deceased’s frozen lower burgh, to reassure and fortify, he four along with him to Cape Canaveral, as it jaw. years younger? Perhaps what horrifies us then was, the Jet Propulsion Lab in Paul West’s most recent novel, his fif There is something to be said for keep is the smidgen of death we allow our Pasadena, and many other holies of holies teenth, is Sporting with Amaryllis. page 2_______________________________ T he r o o k p r f s s March 1997 Staying on the Line PIANOS • Rebuilt alities emerge despite the naturalist’s intend • Reconstructed IS AVAILABLE AT ed objectivity, and we watch one squirrel, • Bought Barbara Adams ABC Cafe Ithaca College nicknamed ‘The Pleader,” pass, over several • Sold Aladdin’s La Forza A Slender Thread: Rediscovering Hope seasons, from territorial ascendancy to defeat, • M o v e d • Tuned Autumn Leaves Ludgate Farms at the Heart of Crisis. battered in body and spirit. Bookery II Mano’s Diner Diane Ackerman It’s only a quick side-step to the human City Health Club Mayers New York: Random House, 1997 callers on the crisis line, known also at a dis Center Ithaca New Alexandrian 305 pp.; $24.00 tance, anonymous except for observed, Cincmapolis Northeast Bagels shared details of their lives, sometimes given A t Collegetown Bagels P&C Last winter, Diane Ackerman’s non-fic distinguishing names by the counselors, and Cornell Cinema The Post Office tion work The Rarest o f the Rare celebrated like the squirrels, seeking a way to endure Cornell University The Public Library several species of endangered animals; a year deprivation and somehow continue. Acker Courtside Fitness Rebop Records later her most recent work celebrates the man’s parallels of humans with animals are DeWitt Mall Silverbird Espresso endangered human. A Slender Thread: never reductive, but compassionate and Fall Creek Cinema State Street Diner Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis is occasionally ennobling. Ithaca Piano Rebuilders Gino’s Pizza Stella’s Caf6 a meditation on people in extremis, in partic The repeated juxtaposition of the two (607an) 272-6547 Greenstar Coop Tops ular those who reach out for the lifeline of a worlds constitutes the basic rhythm of the 310 4th St., Ithaca (O ff H cncock St. 2 blocks from Rt 13) Ithaca Bakery Wegmans crisis center’s telephone counselor. Three book, and we ferry back and forth, at first Complete rebuilding services. years ago Ackerman herself became one of somewhat startled, eventually quite easily. No job too big or too small. Call us. ANI) OTHER LOCATIONS IN I l'HACA the 75 people trained to staff the Suicide Pre Anyone familiar with Ackerman’s previous vention and Crisis Service hotline based in works, particularly her “natural histories” of Ithaca, N. Y. (where she now no longer coun the senses and of love, will recognize the pat What Do You sels but serves on the agency’s board). That tern: a delightful crazy quilt of fascinating Think... experience led to this work, an insightful facts and essential digressions. Here, we learn commentary on the neighboring worlds of that goldfinches prefer thistle seed, that rats humans and other animals. can’t vomit, that squirrels may live 20 years As a writer and naturalist, Ackerman has in captivity but only a year in the wild, and Interes always acknowledged the continuum of life (hat hummingbird hearts, normally beating hearing forms in her work.

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