Um, some of you will have seen PT Anderson's-- probably all
of you; young ones, anyway--
will have seen PT Anderson's marvelous movie, Magnolia.
I was just amazed when I first saw it.
He had-- we'll remember, it will--
you will remember that it features, at one juncture,
a rain of frogs.
The director, being exceedingly hip and young,
did not know that he was making a biblical allusion when
he made the film.
I love that so much.
He'd read some sort of Victorian novel, a 19th century
French novel, in which the rain-- he thought,
cool, a rain of frogs.
So it was one of the older actors in his production who
said, you know, that's really-- how did you--
you were reading Exodus?
And he said, what do you mean?
He said, you know, the frogs?
Then he said, what do you mean?
He said, no, it's in the Bible!
He said, really?
And so this actor brought-- and then Anderson thought it was
so-- that he'd been being--
he'd been speaking in prose all his life.
He was so amazed that he'd been making--
made a biblical allusion that he stuck
chapter and verse in the film.
And you'll notice, if you look at it
again-- somebody, it was Frances,
was trying to locate a Bible for me
somewhere in this building desperately 15 minutes ago.
And we didn't quite locate one.
But I would have chapter and verse for you, had we done so.
What Anderson did was he planted it
all over the place in the movie.
So if you see it again, you'll see
that there-- an exit from the LA freeway
will be to Route 18-1 or something.
And it's all-- he's just planted the Exodus chapter and verse
references, which I very much like.
And I learned that from the website, which makes
me very modern by my standards.
I think that's-- so I have both PT Anderson and the biblical
passage he did not have in mind in mind.
This is in four sections, and it's called "Pass Over."
"1.
Plague of darkness.
You point a camera at a kid.
The kid will try to smile, he said.
No matter part of his mouth is missing, eyelid torn,
the rest of his face such a mass of infection
and half-healed burns, they'll never make it right again.
You know what the surgeon found in his scalp?
Pencil lead, six broken points of it.
Puncture wounds, some of them 12 months old.
They figure the mother made him wear
a ski mask for those thousand-and-some odd miles
on the bus, or why didn't somebody turn her in?
The kid is eight, the camera belongs to forensics,
and he thinks he's supposed to smile.
Do the math.
If anyone here were in charge, my vote
is, scrap us and start over.
2.
Plague of frogs.
Indicator species is the phrase, I think,
which means we pour our poisons in the streams and swamps,
and these poor creatures grow an extra leg or lingual tumors
or a cell wall so denatured that the larvae fail.
In my new favorite movie, it begins
as rain, a burst of guts and mucus on the hero's car.
The hero, such as he is for men, who's lost his gun,
and now, he's lost himself before the windshield's
slick indictment.
Throat of frog, webbed foot of frog,
split belly sliding down the glass
in red and yellow close-up, thence to join
with the carnage on the street, boot deep now,
bred of neither air nor water but of God's disgust
with humankind.
Behold them, said the prophet, in thine ovens and thy
kneading troughs.
And then he said, take, eat.
This is the body you have made.
3.
Plague of locusts.
Because there's never enough, no,
not in this bright field of surfeit.
Milk rings on the phone bill, tracked-in honey
where the cats came through, lost homework, last year's
coggins on the tack room floor.
My neighbor back in Somerville had only the narrowest path
to walk from table to toilet, toilet to bed.
The rest was floor to ceiling with what
normal people throw away.
I see how it comes to this, never enough of it
battened down.
I lose my pills, he said to me once.
They're rolling around on the floor somewhere.
The Parsis bring their dead, as Zoroaster
is construed to have taught them,
to Malabar Hill, where when the world was well,
the birds restored them to simplicity in 90 minutes flat.
The birds are purpose-built for this.
Their scabrous faces bear a nearly paraphrastic kinship
to the fetid stuff they tunnel in.
Oh, who will come who will not choke?
The birds cannot keep up.
4.
Hyssop lamb."
Hyssop is what the Jews used to paint blood on their door posts
to keep the angel of death away.
"Hyssop lamb.
Explain to me the writing on the door posts, will you?
Now, while the angel gorges on them and theirs.
Each that was first to open the matrix first
still matters in this first world.
That much I have seen and do, in part, acknowledge,
archived in the space behind the lintel
and its hasty script, a logic of division that has made
the world articulate, a portal for each fine discrimination
of the covenanting mind.
And heaven has its discards, too.
There's not a book I know that tells me otherwise.
I'm having trouble reading in this light, though.
Was it something in the water or before?"