In his many years of living in Ithaca, he’d made a hobby of drafting simple sketches of its most distinguished buildings and trees—the Masonic Temple, State Theater, and Clinton Hall; the white oaks, striped maples, and shagbark hickories—and making crabbed black notes in a small black journal he’d kept for the purpose in his oilskin vest. With no regard for chronology, and with the occasional prompting from his journal itself, licking a finger to turn the wrinkled pages, he’d told me about the once-thriving Tutelo Indian village of Coreorgonel, destroyed by Washington’s troops in his war against the Iroquois, and about Ithaca’s largely unsung role in the Underground Railroad, even taking me into his house one day to show me the cupboard behind which a half a dozen runaway slaves had once been ingeniously, luxuriously, concealed.
Such was the illusion of Ithaca, he’d insisted to me, on more than one occasion, the town I knew, the town I saw with my eyes each day, but a fraction of some larger, more numinous whole. “Take the lake down there,” he’d remarked to me one day, directing my attention to the wintry sliver of gray through the trees. Did I know that there were caverns deep beneath it, a dazzling netherworld of tunnels and chambers more than 18,000 acres in size? Of course I’d had no idea, had never even heard of the Lansing salt mine in which he’d served as foreman for nearly twenty years, though I remember the delight I’d expressed at the thought of that ghastly, Stygian realm. It was a reaction, however innocent, that had only angered the man, furrowing his normally placid brow.
“No, no!” he’d exclaimed, swatting the air with impatience, only to cock his head at me, as if appraising me anew. “It’s nothing like that, no, nothing dreadful at all.” And there he’d faltered, so that for a moment his lips had quivered mutely where he’d stood. “It’s like…it’s like nothing you could know,” he’d stammered at last. “The darkness, the light… the deep thrumming silence down there—so ancient, so lonely, it sits upon your chest like a billion tons of rock. And then there’s the air,” he’d whispered, amazed, snuffling abruptly through his thick, bullish nostrils, “like a baby just born—that greedy, gobbling breath…”
In our frequent encounters he’d often talked that way, circling round some mysterious core, which he’d never seemed willing or able to name.
Parsimony, 24-25
Comment: Mr. Rabinovich arrives at that profound confusion (amazement!) out of which all true poetic utterance arises. Thus, when he tries to tell David about the air in the caverns, he expresses it in poetic analogy,“like a baby just born—that greedy, gobbling breath . . .” It is from such 'profound confusion' that all true poetic utterance arises, the rest being but decorative verse.