By: NORMAN FINKELSTEIN.

◊Image credit: Aldon Nielson

A Tomb for Tyrone Williams

Hauntology: the study of things that are
gone but are still there; the study of the
invisible powers that move us, control us,
or perhaps free us, body and soul. Body
and soul: the body living and dying,
the body politic, Leviathan, or isolated
monads, caught in a zone that is a café
or a bar, Blue Sufi Lounge, where we may
meet again, you and I, lost souls, brothers, in
“the unraveling fabric of the corridor of time.”

Now you know more about this than me.
I believe you always did: such was your
position, such was your fate, such were
the tasks you willingly fulfilled. Ease,
calm, acceptance: how you amazed me,
and still do. Absence of nostalgia, meaning
it was all nostalgia, leading to that banked
fire, however the words you read might burn.
The words you read, the words you wrote:
spectral agencies infecting the futurepast.

And are we not, the two of us, secret agents?
I had to invent a place, a hero, a mission,
a time hollowed out of time. But you passed
through passage after passage in real time.
The syntax! That is the place of the specters.
They lurk among the words, in the orderly
knots, the compacted clauses, so that every
maker makes a compact with his chosen
ghosts. Or is it the ghosts who choose us?
Now you know more about this than me.

And you know, there is a bookcase in the hall
outside my study where books go to die.
Unread, they shuffle themselves about from
time to time—philosophy, sci fi, the Japanese
and Hebrew novelists in distinguished translations,
memoirs, journals, The Best American Poetry
from ten or twenty years ago. When we sent
your library hither and yon, I thought of those
ghosts too. There are spaces on the shelves,
voids waiting patiently for your books and mine.

Nor does it matter who we are. My copy of c.c.
inscribed (7/1/02) “Norman—my alter alter ego—”
And the shock of that poem’s title—“I Am Not
Proud to Be Black.” How you flicker among
the “polyentendres,” positionality unmaking itself,
unmaking self, but identity remaining the heartbeat
of ineluctably black humor, “or, if despair, sublime
despair.” Nor is it a matter of theory, regardless
of what we may have taught our students. Shock
is never theoretical, the uncanny is never theoretical,

and ghosts are either there—or not. So what
is left to ponder, what is left in the account,
left to take into account? When you joined
that church so many years ago, keeping it
not quite a secret, but still unknown to so
many of your friends—were you guarding,
were you saving your soul? Eschatology:
the study of last things; the study of the future
of last things; the study of things that end,
or things, Tyrone, that may not end at all.

Help us celebrate Tyrone Williams and his legacy by donating to this scholarship fund in his name, here.

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NORMAN FINKELSTEIN (b. 1954) is an American poet, critic, and scholar whose work bridges contemporary poetry, Jewish mysticism, and postmodernism. He has authored acclaimed poetry collections such as Track, Passing Over, and The Ratio of Reason to Magic, blending experimental forms with spiritual and philosophical inquiry. His critical works, including The Ritual of New Creation and Like a Dark Rabbi, explore the interplay of Jewish tradition and modern literature. A professor at Xavier University for many years, Finkelstein has been a significant voice in American poetry, particularly in Jewish and postmodern poetics.