“Originality and … splendid insincerity” is how, acerbically, Vladimir Nabokov described what it takes to design chess puzzles — unrealistic and weird scenarios that may involve a sudden half-dozen of rooks, shuttered queens, or utterly unachievable clustered positionings. All serious chess learners get to sweat trying to solve those — there’re books and books of them.
What are these puzzles for? These are not scenarios that will ever come up in a real match. Their purpose is to make you temporarily forget the chessboard dynamics you’re used to, to stumble you into hidden dimensions of the pieces’ powers, into the mystery of their relationship to other pieces. The urge to write speculative fiction, or science fiction, is not dissimilar, except those half-dozen rooks are reality’s components. If I rearrange reality slightly, would humanity be better off — and would that make us somehow less human? Would there still be hierarchies? And if eros isn’t at the center of it all – what is? Could someone still be me without a body — and would he have as hard of a time getting poems published and making a living?
Space travel is a speculative question I’m obsessed with. I read with great excitement about each new probe, seek out photos taken by manned and unmanned crafts. But there’s a lingering sense: we’re doing it all wrong. Have you noticed how many sci-fi narratives depict seamless space travel? None of that awkwardness of floating “round my tin can faaaar above the world” —and the mortal danger involved. Somewhere deep down we know there must be a way to solve the puzzle of getting to stars (the stars!) without having to burn an unthinkable amount of fossil fuels and spend so much money that is needed elsewhere. It isn’t a purely scientific problem, but a more sinister, societal one, as poet-prophet-griot Gil Scott-Heron sang it: “A rat done bit my sister Nell /with Whitey on the moon.” The distance between society’s classes feels as vast and unsurmountable as the cosmos. And recent privatization of “tin cans” is another awkward step into the same abyss.
What if, instead, a self could be deconstructed into a text that can be transferred or read, into elsewhere-ness?
And if that were true, what would it do to human self-perception — to know that a self can be read as a multi-dimensional, sprawling text? And that there are other texts written in exactly the same genre, and also texts you have absolutely no overlap with? And that if you layer your text with texts of many, many others, you may end up with something we can loosely term “Sacred Text”, the reading of which can add a dimension to your own and move you much faster, into yet another kind of space? The dream of this Text and its possibility is more of a puzzle than a poem, although it is fueled by poetic untenability.
What if, instead, a self could be deconstructed into a text that can be transferred or read, into elsewhere-ness?
“All art is inutile, and divinely so,” is what Nabokov wrote about chess puzzles — or “problems” as he called them — and he had not only invented a considerable number of such puzzles but actually included them in his collection of poems called Poems and Problems, refusing to apologize for the juxtaposition. “Problems are the poetry of chess,” he wrote. The speculative setup itself — a raw and mystical act of imagination — is the poetry— while the conventional, realistic chess match is always the novel.
Nabokov’s poems — and I say this as a devotee — are awful. Particularly those early Russian ones, which he chose to couple with chess problems. Sentimental and rhythmically uniform, and, as he joked in regard to another versifier in his book Pnin, “every intonation, every image, every simile had been used before by other rhyming rabbits.” Somewhere in the introduction Nabokov casually points out that he started composing his chess puzzles in 1917, “a date easy to remember,” as he put it. And that is no simple quip, no dusty chronological fact, but a hint about the roots of his obsession with these problems. It’s a confessional self-observation that makes all of those bad Russian poems of his worthwhile.
One day I found myself composing a speculative puzzle: what if you had an exclusive erotic relationship with an invisible being, possibly, divine one, for years, and then, suddenly, another invisible being showed up there too, right in the middle of it all? Would the two invisibilities recognize each other, and gladly combine efforts — or would they each get really annoyed? And if they didn’t notice each other, would you fess up to the first about the second? What sorts of rules would apply, and how would you know the rules if the three of you have never spoken? The whole setup, as it appeared in my mind, was not really a problem, but rather, perhaps because it remained insolvable and “inutile”, it became a poem, one that ended up in my new collection, Cosmic Diaspora. And it was also recorded as a part of the Purple Tentacles of Thought and Desire jazz-klezmer-poetry album. When I shared the poem at one of our band’s rehearsals, Josh Horowitz played what he described as a variation on the “Delphic Hymn”, one of the earliest musical compositions we have a score of. It was found scribbled on a rock in Greece. It occurred to me then: isn’t this how music works — the counter-point of invisibilities, a puzzle we understand instantly, without having to solve it? And poetry, what is it but a scribbling on a rock, a score waiting for invisible voices to set in motion?
Here’s the poem:
Second Invisibility
I look between my fingers where your fingers are— I know they’re—
I am the body who translates the invisible there’re others like me
but you — how many of you are out there?
all I know are the brushstrokes across my body
your language
last night
there was a touch
of another—
a third hand painting across me
I accepted it as yours
but from deep inside, watched counter-points
wholly random
the two of you—
unaware of each other
can I hide my thoughts from either one? who am I in consent and concealment?
last night
I learned I am
as invisible to you
as you are to me—
as both of us to this, third hand—
I am the voice who translates the invisible I am the voice whose hunger is a language
Jake Marmer is a poet, performer, and educator. He is the author of three poetry collections: Cosmic Diaspora (Station Hill Press, 2020), as well as The Neighbor Out of Sound (2018) and Jazz Talmud (2012), both from The Sheep Meadow Press. He also released two klez-jazz-poetry records: Purple Tentacles of Thought and Desire (2020, with Cosmic Diaspora Trio), and Hermeneutic Stomp (Blue Fringe Music, 2013). Jake is the poetry critic for Tablet Magazine. Born in the provincial steppes of Ukraine, in a city that was renamed four times in the past 100 years, Jake lives in the Bay Area.
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