On Alleys, and: On Error, and: On Theoretical Reconstructions of Imaginary Objects Using Genuine Parts

Abstract

On Alleys, and: On Error, and: On Theoretical Reconstructions of Imaginary Objects Using Genuine Parts Kathryn Nuernberger (bio) On Alleys Weeding cuticle deep in the loose soil mounded around the zinnia roots at the community farm and my hands tingle with the breathing of all these transplanted bacteria, protists, fungi, and archaea grafted to the packed clay of land that carried a convent on its back and an open-pit gravel mine in its belly for six decades. ________ I might not feel it so much, this ecstasy of a microbiome, if I weren't trying not to miss the place I came from, where I loved the elder and wild carrot, [End Page 41] yarrow and goosefoot and did not know how to live anymore either with the flags my neighbors loved to fly over their soybean acres. ________ How much of her microbiome does the bobtail squid feel when the bioluminescent garden of the bacteria Vibrio fischeri is so bright in that organ behind her eye? Is it suffering or elation to spume 95 percent of them into the open water, where they will mostly die but some drift into the bodies of younger and more empty squid who sense they need something but don't yet know what it will feel like to be answered with a city of light? ________ It was such a moonlit beam of blue flashing across my kitchen window that night, before we knew what had happened. It looked like we were all living together at the bottom of the ocean. ________ When morning came I picked up a bouquet of those zinnias. As I passed through our alley, over the debris of yellow police tape, my neighbor was taking out the trash with a gun holstered to his chest. Packing has never been his way before, he who opens his garage with its flat-screen and homemade bar to the whole neighborhood on game days and also fills the block with the smell of deep-fried tacos for three dollars every Friday. I gave him the bouquet and it was frail and pretty beside his revolver. ________ He must have been so afraid. He must have had no idea what to do. The back doors of our houses look at each other all day long, but I didn't hear a single one of the four shots, each aimed at his brother-in-law, but grazing without apology anyone in the way. He is pissed at his brother, calls him an idiot for what he is mixed up in, but thank God that fool is still alive and everyone else is too. ________ The squid use the light to blend in with the moon shining on the water, or they shut the lid and disappear completely into the depths. They can reflect and refract and direct their light in all directions. But, like any living being, they have to learn how to do this and they may not always know precisely the most perfect way to cast that glow. If they make a mistake, they die of it, or of bad luck, or they die just of having lived so long they didn't already. [End Page 42] On Error Beyond the stained-glass glow of the library's windowed wall was a garden of medicinal plants. Purple bells of foxglove and yellow buttons of calendula flourished among the leafy blankets of chamomile and sage. For a summer I worked at the mahogany table where the man who invented the pacemaker once took tea. My fellowship was for researching quack medicine, particularly as it related to matters of electricity and the heart, but on the first day I was scolded [End Page 43] for using the word quack. One curator said it was a judgmental pejorative that misunderstood how important unproved theories are to the development of knowledge. Other fellows objected on similar grounds to pseudoscience, dead ends, mistakes, and folk. It became hard for me to say, when asked, what exactly I came to that place to learn. ________ Fortunately, there were many distractions in the archives. I followed a little question about luminescent aether into the whole history of...