Obligations of the Harp. Arthur Saltzman

the collector’s coin. Then I might be the Arobin of the bibliophiles, whom not acquisition but purgation fortifies, whom relinquishment frees.

      

      The American-led war for the liberation of Iraq broke the government’s grip on its property as well as its grip on its people. As of this writing, tens of thousands of artifacts are still missing from the National Museum of Antiquities, many dating from the earliest civilizations. Some maintain that this illicit network must have roused to action the moment the bombing of Iraq began, so precise and efficient were the strikes on the museum’s most priceless objects. As archaeologist Paul Zimansky dolefully admits, “A whole industry developed after the Gulf War of people going out and digging up things at night. We’re talking about organized, armed teams.”

      Rumors have been as prolific as the looting itself. It is said that pieces are trickling out of the country inside suitcases and spare tires, sewn into collars and cuffs, heading for the elevated netherworld of high-stakes art connoisseurs with an appetite for the forbidden. Because these items are instantly recognizable and because identifying information about them is spreading with unprecedented effectiveness, experts are hopeful of their ultimate recovery. “These things are radioactive from a legal point of view,” says William Pearlstein, co-counsel for the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art. “They are hot, hot, hot and simply unmarketable.” Should anyone try to sell clay tablets bearing the earliest cuneiform writings in existence, the 4,330-year-old bust of an Akkadian king, or the so-called Mona Lisa of Nimrud vase, intelligence agencies throughout the world, not to mention the global offices of the Art Loss Register, are on the alert.

      It must be pointed out, however, that the fact that the thieves will never be able to broadcast or cash in such holdings does not necessarily mitigate but may actually intensify the delight of procuring them. Although legitimate dealers would never touch the major pieces, says Jerome Eisenberg, owner of New York’s Royal-Athena Gallery, “I could visualize some multimillionaire hiding a piece away and gloating over it.” Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; therefore, by confining ourselves to the getting alone, we keep more of ourselves in reserve.

      For what consolation terminology is worth, it is more accurate to speak of the artifacts as “missing” or “transplanted” rather than “lost,” in that certain people undoubtedly do know where most of the objects are. In all actuality, with the exception of gold artifacts that may have been melted down to re-enter the bloodstream of international capital, they are not only intact but better protected in some hidden vault than they ever had been when their location was both familiar and open to public view.

      Our most acute drives drive us into privacy. From the highest echelon of corporate embezzlement on down to pickpocketing in the street, from the tycoon who godfathers the pillaging of Mesopotamian heritage to the centripetal Collyer brothers holed up in their decaying freight, we steal to steal away, restricted to what we are surprised to learn is necessary. To reference Steven Wright once again, you can’t have everything. Where would you put it? So it is always a quirky version of the world that is too much with us, something about the size of our cellars and obsessions. And even though it may not be exactly or all we long for, we take it anyway, if only because it’s what there is.

      7 Taking Pains

      The soul is our capacity for pain.

      —Marina Tsvetayeva

      Going by human testimony alone, one would have to conclude that the chief reason behind alien abductions, the main impetus for their taking the trip and the trouble, is biological. According to the accounts that inspire summer movie fare and dominate the tabloids, aliens are fascinated by what makes us tick—or rather, by what makes us slosh, secrete, and expend ourselves on this out-of-the-way planet of ours. Thus it is principally for scientific intimacies that they snatch, transport, or absorb us aboard. Folks who claim to have been diagnosed and discarded by visitors from other worlds describe abductors that vary in height, hide, and hue. Their captors are as likely to amble as to ooze about their spaceships, whose interiors reportedly range in décor from stark Mondrian geometry to the sumptuousness of the Playboy mansion. Their communicative efforts run the gamut from mental telepathy to barnyard squabble to a din reminiscent of the mingled ring tones of cell users on the floor of the stock exchange. But whether they do their probing with paws, tentacles, or titanium rods, make no mistake: it’s our orifices they’re after.

      Verifying Hamlet’s nightmare, things rank and gross in our nature possess them merely. So as to sample our functions and our fluids, they insert and extract, siphon and scrape, filch, defile, and file away the blood, capture the excrescence and possibly the odd gland, upload the physical data, the scruff, the sludge, and the dung. By their reasoning, anatomy is all there is that matters about us. They do not sacrifice light-years to get our takes on the Poincare Conjecture or the designated hitter. They do not travel all this way to clarify foreplay, French cuisine, or Finnegans Wake, nor to elucidate punk culture, minimalist art, or the subjunctive. They have no interest in our sit-coms, our politics, or our gods. As to why we quail in fear or hunker down in love, forget it. Subtler concerns are for the sublunary—they are content to analyze our organs and glean our meat. Whatever shape aliens take, and whatever brilliance you’d infer from their getting to Earth at all, rumor has it that they are basically buzzards colluding over a carcass. They are anally fixated, intestinally tracked. When they come, they come for our guts.

      If you want to satisfy alien curiosity about human beings, you won’t have to share corporate secrets or surrender your soul. Their penetrations are literal, surgical, and will not be stayed by protests that there is more to you than meets the polygonal eye (if eye it is that confronts you). In this, more or less everybody who has fallen afoul of aliens and managed to return from their extraterrestrial incursions concurs. Argue between your agonies that you are altogether more complex than the gelatinous clinical staff can adduce through technology copied from the back lot of Industrial Light and Magic. Protest that people are more profound than their plumbing, that it is not enough to scoop out our slop to reckon the sum of us, that their lack of further curiosity about humanity insults us as much as their instruments do: those cries fall on deaf ears (if ears are what those alleged vegetal protuberances are). Say that the body may be the citadel of the self, but that architecture is hardly the whole. The heart contains a legacy of romantic connotations centuries long; the brain is the armature of a mind. None of that blather affects their conviction that you are your body only, and the point of the body is to invert it to get at its wet meld, much the way you delve past a lobster’s shell to get at the dinner inside. By your prostate, not your poetry, will they know you. Metabolism, not metaphysics, most deeply intrigues. No need to bandy philosophies, just bend over.