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.