Essay on Constructions Albert Goldbarth They seem so obvious now, these concepts, “gravity,” “childhood,” “outer space,” and the rest. But once they didn’t exist for our species as concepts—not even as words without a concept attached. And can there be “words without a concept attached” ? Well, yes: if they’re gibberish. Foofaw. Slorg. Kathung. Although even these might bear deep meaning we simply haven’t evolved to yet. In any case, the meanings are out there, whether or not the sounds for them are here and waiting patiently for their own assigned ideas to arrive. To know those ideas would be to see the future—and, of course, we can’t. We see the clever nanobots but not the changed cognition of their cosmos . . . how, before, somebody saw the automobile—as a shell that could be moved by internal combustion—yes, but not what the idea of “motel” would mean to cultural values for sex; or what the ease of “leaving” would mean to changing cultural values of permanence and community; etc. When Amelia wears her glittery, slitted version of her mother’s dirty-flirty party dress, it’s “cute” (ostensibly) exactly because it plays against our ideas of children’s attire—now that we have an idea of “childhood” that’s a bounded, sanctioned category. And when an inquisitive chrononaut appears here from the future—kathung!—he (although our words for gender may be hopelessly delimiting for “him”—but let’s assume it’s “he”) might see us, every one of us, as the childhood the species needs to su√er through, and learn from —he might see this in our geniuses (as they labor over chromosome science, or cyberdermal communicopods with which we hope to love and shop, or ultraparticle resonance fields) just as well as in hot Peeping Tom peeks of Amelia’s mother slithering out of her sultrywear for Asshole Joe at a freeway-spur motel. He sees us, all of us, our glories and our decadences, inching up—full-throttled and half-sighted— toward his own far time. Just think!—once, in the twenty-first century, humans drew a line between outer space and inner space! Once, they believed constructions like “self ” and “other” and “death” and “universe” were matters of utmost gravity! Albert Goldbarth has twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his collections of poems. At publication time, his latest book was Everyday People (Graywolf Press), though by now he surely has something newer available. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, where he works hard to be a thorn in the side of the state’s typical voting record. “Essay on Constructions” appears in our Autumn 2012 issue.