The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt

Author:Siri Hustvedt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The Barometer

(excerpt from Phineas Q. Eldridge’s taped conversation, October 15, 2001)

PQE: How did you get interested in the weather?

B: From God. Beginning and end. He is, I proclamate, all weather, the weatherman of all and allness, of all’s well that ends well. Windy pressures ride high in his blasted being of beginnings and endings. You understand he is a totalitarian, but also a hotelitarian, who takes in mankind, takes him in to the inn, but then blows him down. The song goes, “Blow the man down, O give me some time, and give me some rhyme and blow, blow, blow the man down.” Blow that puny little butthead, Man, man and his kind, into ribbons and smithereens. How does he do it? It’s a big secret deal of the Potentate, the Reprobate, the Pulverizer and Mercifier, the Big Blue Sky Daddy who dreams on our screens. That’s what happened with the World and Trade, the Power towers. God had a nightmare, you see, and it went viral onto every TV and computer and also into the heads of every geek tuned into the net. Divine Head, the godhead storms onto the earth, his curse on our things, but no things we can understand or demand or remand or take in hand. I am blessed with inside scoops of ice cream and then I scream on these matters, these barometric matters that aren’t matter, but air issues for fair, fair weather, which should be fair, but often are not fair, in that life is not fair. It all registers, tremors and tickles and rumbles, ups and downs in my organs and my head, in the gray pulp up there with graphs and that little needle wobbling, you know, in there, too. My head has a direct connection to the godhead, two heads, and it can be too much, way too much for me, and some days I can’t manage the management of the bandages needed, too many, when the earth and the air are crying outside and inside my head . . .

PQE: You’ve lived with Harry for quite some time now. I’ve heard you say you want to leave, but you end up staying.

B: The reasons are demonish.

PQE: Demonish?

B: The bad angel who comes sometimes at the dark hour, stealing around in Harry’s things, into her world of the metamorphoses and the changelings. The Barometer can feel him, his omens. I stay as the barrier, the needle speeds when he’s here. I can wrestle. I was on the team. I will wrestle. Jacob wrestled him. The sinew of Jacob’s thigh shrank.

PQE: Yes, they wrestled all night. I always found it rather homoerotic. But you don’t mean Bruno, do you?

B: Bruno is not an angel. Have you no eyes? Are you blind, blind and unkind? He comes when you’re gone, Phineas. He hides behind the buildings and the trash cans. He keeps his wings folded in, big, awful, veiny wings. He’s fallen, you know, fell from Heaven to here below, to

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