THE BIG DIG
AUGUST 2, 2011. An archeology professor finally put it together.
He knew where it was.
On a Thursday afternoon, he went to his bank in Brooklyn with a Glock 19 in his coat pocket.
After strolling into the vault where his safety deposit box was, accompanied by a teller, he took out the gun and told her to close the vault door.
She said, “I can’t. I don’t know how.”
The professor took out his cell and made a call to the bank manager and told him he was holding the teller hostage, and he demanded the manager shut the vault door.
After a few minutes, it swung closed, and the professor and the teller were alone.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not going to hurt you. I just need a little privacy for a few minutes.”
He paced around the room looking at the floor. He saw a patch of worn concrete near the far wall.
“You’ve been having trouble with that, haven’t you?” he said.
She nodded. “Yes, it tends to crumble. We don’t know why.”
The professor put his foot on the patch. It started to give way.
“It’s soft,” he said.
He stomped on it, hard, three times.
It collapsed with a roar.
There was now a round hole, and a short staircase.
He went down the stairs and found himself in a tiny stone cave. On a shelf, there was a large volume bound in what looked like calfskin. He opened the book.
The handwriting was Sanskrit.
He read the opening words out loud, translating into English.
“I am the poet. It’s raining outside and so I’m starting a long poem. It will have all manner of ideas in it, because sometimes I like ideas. Retribution, for instance. A thing I’ve invented called karma. Then there is also my invention called God, and a condition of ultimate and final and bizarre knowing I made up in which a person melts into a clarified butter of All Consciousness, and thus finds the end of the road which I call Enlightenment, after which there is no more action, only existing. And what else? Salvation. A minor idea I cooked up last year. And what was that other idea I concocted while I was drunk last week? Dharma, I called it. Truth, wasn’t that what I said it meant? The final truth. After which there is no need for more truth. And heaven, a hypnotic spot in the woods with unappetizing songs. Yes. So I’ll fold all these ideas into one long poem, and who knows who’ll read it and what they’ll do with it? But I should say, at the outset, that I don’t intend for any of this to be taken seriously, any more seriously than, say, a great storm in the sky. I’m a poet. I always stand at the beginning of things, which is to say I imagine what hasn’t been imagined before, like any good poet. I invent on a fresh tablet or page. I’m ALWAYS beginning. I’m always beginning, with every line. I may use, but I don’t rely on, what I’ve already written. I don’t rely on lives I’ve lived in the past. I don’t care what other people think reality is. I may write about all sorts of higher powers, but that’s just a conceit of image, you might say. It’s a way of carving a territory that wasn’t around before. It’s a poem. I write many poems. Thousands and thousands of them.”
The professor smiled and nodded.
He thought, I may catch a little hell, but so what?
JON RAPPOPORT