The New Yorker - USA (2019-11-25)

THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 69

“I, for one, will be glad when rock season is over.”

• •

letter that is not even a real letter. I’m
asking you for nothing, Mr. Jackson,
though I understand how you or other
people might believe that I’m asking far
too much. For a piece of you. Like any
parasite demands. You must have en­
countered plenty of parasites, especially
when you were at the top of the charts.
Notorious pests in the entertainment in­
dustry as elsewhere. Parasites. A word I
looked up once and discovered its ori­
gins Greek. In that ancient language the
word signifies folks who are always show­
ing up at your table for a meal, hands
empty, mouths full of gimme and much
obliged. Parasites. A word associated fre­
quently with artists. With art’s arrogance
when it proclaims art for art’s sake. With
the proverbial, well­earned reputation of
artists for laziness, greed, selfishness, nas­
tiness, irrelevance, fecklessness, and fick­
leness. Parasites one more compromis­
ing word in this letter, this story. A word
getting in line with murderers, mum­
mies, mafiosos to suggest art’s unsavory
and /or failed ambitions.

W

alking last fall in Brittany with
a neighbor on a 10K charity trek
to earn money for the local elementary
school’s arts program, I pointed to a
stand of trees atop the crest of a low hill
in the gently rolling terrain of mainly
pastureland surrounding us. The trees I
indicated were not quite bare of foliage
but stripped enough for limbs and
branches to reveal lots of roundish puffs
or nests suspended in them, big blots,
blobs within the larger, more or less
oval­shaped crowns of five or six trees
ahead in the distance. Gui, he said after
I stumbled through an explanation in
English and halting French of what
had caught my eye and wanted him to
give me the French word for. Closer up,
they are networks of something like
spider webbing or skinny threads of
black bone on an X­ray plate of bright
morning light. Gui. Mistletoe a loose
translation. Mistletoe carrying, mixing,
and matching stories from numerous
languages, the plant’s name in each
language suggests. Saying the word in
English gets me thinking about Christ­
mas. St. Nick. Santa. Love. Lovers and
strangers tempted, ordered to kiss under
mistletoe. Nat Cole crooning about chest­
nuts and fire. Druids with their mastery
of oak lore and oak magic in charge of

forests. Deer. Wizards and Witches. Elves.

Gui are parasites, my neighbor said.

Infest the host tree. Berries poison, I

learned later. Sticky. Berries stick to a

feeding bird’s beak and when a bird

scrapes them off on a branch, tiny, tiny

patches of resiny stuff adhere to the

tree’s bark, gradually penetrating it,

though some species of gui in a hurry,

I read, shoot missiles, clocked at fifty

miles an hour when they exit, deep into

a tree’s heart, where they begin to suck

and grow and send back messages of

food, water from the tree to nourish the

microchip­sized growth on the surface,

and if the chip is lucky, it flourishes and

becomes a shadow, a cloud, a thriving,

bulky colony of new life like I’d been

curious about in those trees on the hill,

silhouetted against the horizon we

walked toward.

That morning in Brittany as my friend

got me finally to repeat the sound of the

French word he was pronouncing by

spelling it aloud—g­u­i—and also ex­

plained in a slightly disparaging tone

that gui a parasite, I resisted my usual

negative reaction to the word parasite.

Parasite. What was not a parasite. Who

is parasiting whom. From what privi­

leged point of view do we decide para­

site or host. Were gui parasites any more

or less than those six or so trees, behind

us now, scuffling for nourishment from

sky, ground, neighboring trees, rain, stars,

those trees feeding on birds, mice, cows,

insects, microbes feeding on them, up

and down the food chain, Great Chain

of Being, the latter chain a concept orig­

inating in the fifteenth century, popular

through the eighteenth, that I had come

across when I studied the birth of the

English novel, both chains signifying the

same grand plan and interconnection

and infinite coupling and interdepen­

dencies and eating and being eaten nec­

essary to create and sustain each mo­

ment, everyone, everything large and

small, past, present, and future, Mr. Jack­

son, all of us parasiting our way through.

Chains linking, binding us, like slavery’s

chains link and bind us, though slavery

seldom if ever mentioned by my Oxford

professors in the early sixties, whose sto­

ries taught me the origins of fiction.

Chain, Chain, Chain ... like Aretha

sings, Mr. Jackson. Like you sing. 

NEWYORKER.COM

Read more fiction by John Edgar Wideman.