1 excerpt
from The Adventures of Pascal Wanderlust
Pascal sent forth with a temporary familiar:
Sprechenbaum’s cat. The resentment is palpable
on both sides. “I’d rather be back in my room.”
“I’d rather be napping on the Professor’s couch.”
Below them, endless birch trees shiver in the wind
as the aero passes. Wanderlust opens the file.
The narrative is sketchy, the photos are blurry,
and drifting off, Pascal picks up a weird Cold War
vibe. In dreams, only in dreams… the emperor
wears shades, holds an orb, the plaintive voice
swelling into a great chorus. “Old Church
Slavonic,” says the cat. “We’re getting close.”
She kept the ghosts in a linen backpack from Minsk,
binding them with spells from farther east. Whoever
taught her those spells had taught her well. Later,
the cat’s report would document seismic shifts
in the Bray scale, intermittent thinning of dark matter,
and unaccountable temporal tremors. The ectoplasm
was peculiarly volatile; samples disappeared within
minutes, even under the most secure conditions.
None of this could have possibly been known
at the time. At the time there was only Wanderlust
face down on the ground, blasted into ecstasy,
and the cat hissing, not knowing which way to turn.
“Unaccountable temporal tremors”: at what time
did this or that happen? Not merely a break in
the narrative, but a break in the narration as well.
And the narrator? Also susceptible to temporal
turbulence, shifts in the atmosphere of sung story,
storied song. In illo tempore. Myths of origin
assume deities, primal scenes, seeds of time
from which spring demi-gods and their heroic
deeds, the dark embrace of love and death,
the birth of wisdom and the passage into truth.
From a blank page, the cat looks out at me.
“You really have no idea. Let me tell you.”
So he tells me the story of Pascal and the shaman,
of the last lesson learned, and of the price paid.
Of her hunger, her appetite, of Wanderlust’s desire,
and Pascal’s resistance. Of her powers of deception,
the hungry ghosts evaporating, just at the moment
Wanderlust came to. How they flew back bewildered,
dissatisfied, chagrinned, the forests and steppes
dissolving into mist below them. “Would you tell me,
please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That
depends a good deal on where you want to get to,”
says the cat. He’s already slowly vanishing, leaving
nothing but a grin on the page. “We’re all mad here.”
These stories then—are they the means through which
we seek to contain our madness? Pascal contemplates
misfortune, contemplates a narrative of failure, failed
narrative, a breakdown in reportage leading (per
Sprechenbaum) to success. The shaman’s yurt was full
of wonders, none of which (per Sprechenbaum), Pascal
is able to recall. More bower than yurt, more psyche
than bower. “I wandered in, tempted by the magic
of her soul. But desire always leads us to a haunted
house, as I soon learned. No wonder then my familiar
could not aid me. No wonder then the story ended
so disastrously and so soon.” The cat nods, nods off.
We long to be haunted. We are haunted, haunted
houses, inhabited by others who are ourselves.
Our arts are haunted, and by our arts we haunt
those others who long to be ourselves. Identity
is nothing; the soul has no politics, no polis,
no marketplace nor temple that is not
the habitation of ghosts. Wanderlust, wounded
by love, finds a romantic old apartment, haunted
by lovers, the politicians of desire. What meetings
took place here, what noisy gatherings and intimate
rendezvous? Displacements, encoded messages,
substitutions—Pascal feels the specters gather round.
The cat reports to Sprechenbaum, Sprechenbaum
reports to the Committee, the Committee reports
to the Board of Directors, the Directors leak
the report to the various cabals and sub-cabals,
Sprechenbaum, as a member of various cabals
and sub-cabals, gets the report again, and shares it
with the cat. In the apartment, the spirits are moving
the furniture while Pascal looks on. Otherworldly
feng shui, ectoplasmic ergonomics. According
to the report, Wanderlust’s ecstatic trance, courtesy
of the shaman, amounted to little more than the standard
response to amanita muscaria. The report is inaccurate.
Pascal thinks of the sign in Sprechenbaum’s window.
Maybe a shingle outside the apartment door? Saying—
what? naïve young adventurer, no mission too big
or too small. occult consultant, free estimates.
How about a sidekick? A wirehaired terrier might be
nice, to put that cat in his place. A raven or two,
whispering secrets? No, no sidekicks, no familiars.
Myths transformed into boys’ (or girls’) adventures,
comic books with one author and a rotating staff
of artists: in the debate between reason and imagination,
imaginative souls are far more pleased with themselves
than the prudent and reasonable tend to be. Or are they?
The imagination leaves us hungry, and Pascal
is always hungry, alone in that apartment
or out on the road. Wanderlust on assignment
seeks fulfillment, seeks gratification, seeks
a world that only fantasy can provide. Hunger:
it sends us forth, assigns a mission, and we
imagine how fulfillment might appear. Pascal
begins to understand. A knock on the door,
a voice from the Beyond—it’s all the same.
The ghosts who followed Wanderlust back
from the steppes thump about the apartment,
making themselves at home. Time to go.
Pascal reworks the text, walks it back
not in space but in time. Revisionism:
neither creed nor cult, neither devotion
nor transgression. A way of being? Not
quite—a mode of utterance requiring
initiation. The adept’s double meaning
turns the commonplace into the angelic,
however it may sound like nonsense.
Would we cling to the commonplace
or hear angelic speech? Can even the
initiated tell them apart? Wanderlust
has a headache. Puts down the book.
Foolishly we wander about in time. The past
does not belong to us, nor does the future.
We remember, we anticipate, we never live
in the present moment where we belong.
We are burglars of our own chronologies,
perennially out of phase. Pascal’s imagination
has a temporal screw loose. That’s how it is.
We see what stands before us, but it’s never
enough. Such is Wanderlust’s fate at every
crossroad. Flash back, flash forward—
the imagination has its own reasons,
reasoning continually, in and out of time.
In and out of time, Pascal imagines ancient
starlight continually falling, illuminating
innumerable paths, uncountable adventures.
Wanderlust’s time may not be our time, but
like ancient starlight, it penetrates our time,
saturating all we see. Gleaming domes and
towers. Auroras in the polar wastes. We imagine
Wanderlust’s adventures, and they become our own.
Wanderlust’s adventures, in and out of time, are
inscribed in ancient starlight along innumerable
paths, which neither we nor Pascal Wanderlust can
choose. What did you imagine, says Pascal.
Norman Finkelstein is a poet, critic, and Emeritus Professor of English at Xavier University. His most recent books of poetry are In a Broken Star (Dos Madres Press, 2021) and Thirty-Six / Two Lives, co-authored with Tirzah Goldenberg (Dos Madres Press, 2021). The author of six critical studies, he has published widely in the fields of modern poetry and Jewish literature. He writes and edits the poetry review blog Restless Messengers.