"Where was the biggest earthquake in the world, where did that take place?" Part of a string of infinite questions, all summer this thread of what-is superlatives, the tallest buildings in the world the biggest mountains in the world the biggest jets in the world the biggest tornadoes in the world. When not at google he's at one of us, the atlas in one hand. He drafts elaborate cities of towers, massive hotels hospitals apartment complexes office buildings airports streets and highways, all with names, he builds them in a day, destroys them in a day. The city of bridges--"every tower has a bridge so we can walk in the sky"--we lost to terrorist airplanes. Xian drowned in a hurricane.
"What is the biggest thing in the world?"
"What do you mean? On this planet?"
"Yes."
"The ocean I suppose."
"No I mean thing. What's the biggest thing?"
Exhausting because inexhaustable. The top twenty becomes the top two hundred. A pad of paper run through one afternoon, forty-six towers. "I will go to sleep and dream of my beautiful cities." No stories, no populations, no time in which these structures exist. They are built, they are extinguished.
"Where was the biggest earthquake in the world, where did that take place."
"I don't know." Exasperated in that glad you're so interested but can we talk about something else for a change kind of way. She is just done with lunch, laundry, bills, the baby fighting her nap. Now dinner. The dishwasher. The monolithic days.
"You don't know much, do you."
We played trivial pursuit one morning, the three of us during nap time. He is a formidable contender, in geography, science, history. Up to now, innocent of it.
"I know a lot. More than you do. I might be the smartest kid in the world, or at least in North America."
No we say in unison and laugh, no no. Everyone has their talents we say. And there are many forms of knowledge. Some you are good at, some you'll need to work on. Like modesty, we half joke. He is building structures in his head, half listening. He is unconvinced. We are very small in his towering cities of glass and steel. He can hardly hear us from where his buildings sway in their foundations. "You don't know much do you." The city against the storm.
"What is the biggest thing in the world?"
It is not the ocean. Though its vastness often triumphs.
***
Ran that bitch. Damn straight. One hundred degrees, baby, and the last big hill of the last leg.
***
Archie Ammons once sat me down in his big stuffed office chair and read this passage to me:
What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poem? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind. A poet, described in *ideal* perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) *fuses*, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control (*laxis effertur habenis* [it is carried onwards with loose reins]) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.***
--Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chapter xiv
