Consider the most marvelous book of all, the book of matches. Matches: the name alone summons to consciousness a dream of perfection-for what is a match? A match, in the broadest sense, is unity within plurality, the formal cause of all philosophy, the answer to all faithful men's prayers, the impalpable palpable, and the undulating, imperturbable body of what we can know and what we cannot know; yin and yang, the marriage of light and darkness. At the mere mention of match, the mind flies to a last vision of Adam and Eve, there upon the plain under the eastern gate of Eden, fended forever from their recent seat of bliss by the fiery sworded angel, our first parents, who...

 

... hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow

Through Eden take their solitary way.

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    Was there a more perfect match? Woe to the serpent! Our wandering parents walk hand in hand, yet solitary, united, yet not as once they were, but forever two singular beings.

    I sing of the metaphorical match, the match of redemption through suffering. Was ever a match consummated, that was not first struck, and roughly so? All matches first must be torn out and scraped along the raw, sand-textured striking strips of this life, if they ever are to confound oblivion and live! One thinks of the poet who sings of his old age and failing powers as he gazes into the fading furnace of his hearth, reduced now to glowing charcoal:

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In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of its youth doth lie

As the deathbed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

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    Just so, the rough scrapes and raging fires that nourish youth do finally consume the body that delighted in them! Yet, without the first striking consummation, can one ever say, "I live"?

    I sing also of the allegorical match, the match of our divine origins. For who cannot conceive a match, the ideal match, perfect in all matchness? And are not all matches manufactured in some likeness of this ideal match? Yet look deeply into the book of matches; is not each plagued by an imperfection, a falling away from the ideal? Here the cardboard was cut unevenly; there one accumulated less sulfur upon its head than the others; another stretches taller; another bears a longer, more tapered neck. Some swell to red-tipped heads, some green-tipped, some hoary white-tipped. Yet all bear the image and stamp of the one, true match. Who has not observed at first striking how the sparks leap up, the flame shoots skyward, seeking from the moment it takes life to give itself back to the splendid face of divinity? Thus are men born shining babes, trailing wreaths of cloud, as it were, that point to our diviner origin. The first sparks and burst of flame-the idealism of inspired youth-last but a second; failing to touch the sky, the match forgets what it once knew and burns steadily towards its end. At last, in old age, it shrinks, it fails, it swells, it dies; poof! Thus all transient things return to their elements.

    But let us descend from these heights of Promethean Caucasus to view the match in the dimmer light of everyday, a tiny fire stick, useful in a myriad of small, human endeavors. With a match you can pick up a girl in a bar, while her "...Soule transpires/ at every pore with instant fires." With a match you can find a lost contact on a dark stairwell, unfreeze a frozen car- door lock, revive the doused pilot light. Yet in this mundane fact lies a great truth concealed: just as every fiery romance is also an ordinary affair between ordinary people, so the match is at once philosophic and extraordinarily ordinary.

    Let us pause and see what we can find written in the books itself. Feel its outer skin-smooth, like plastic, as though oiled. What other book has so many colors and such varied artifice upon its cover? Its variations outnumber all the species of fish in the fresh and salt pools of the globe. Yet each book of matches is the shadow of its ideal, the one book from which all others take form. At first, it appears as two flat, rectangular surfaces back to back, yet not flat against one another, but somewhat farther apart at the top edge than at the bottom, shaped like a wedge or the head of an axe, to enclose a space that is roomier in the head than at the feet. This skin of the book is called the cover, for it covers the book's contents. On the cover you see the celebrated colorations and designs which mark the species-collectors value the cover above all else, for often the sight of a rare, long-missed cover shakes free the memories of past pleasures-a trip, a dinner, or a seduction.

    Upon the seamless plane of the cover is laminated a band of rough, fine grit-the striking board or striking strip, a surface designed for friction, and contrasting with the oily, glossy skin of the cover itself. Its sole purpose is to create enough heat through friction with the match head to ignite the match, called striking the match, or giving a light. But let us delve deeper inside to unlock further secrets of the book.

    Turning the book on its edge, you can see the inner contents; is it a mummified choir? a petrified garden of extra-terrestrial flowers? a visible catacomb of the dead? Look closely; as from one stem, four overlapping rows of stalks tipped by ovular heads rise from the blade-edge of the cover to nestle in the broad back-edge, like seeds in a seed pod. Peering into the book from the side like this, you experience the same revelation as when cutting into the guava fruit for the first time, to reveal a hive of black, umbilically tied seeds; just so the head of the matches-for that is what they are-appear umbilically tied to the center of the book, from which they radiate like the seeds of the guava-womb.

    Open the book by sliding the moveable portion of the cover upward with your thumb and peeling it back. The first thing you notice is that the cover consists not of two pieces at all, but a single strip wrapped around the matches and, when closed, tucked in upon itself, so that the unresistant match heads are completely ensconced. Not only that; the striking strip on the outside stretches along the blade-edge of the book while the heads nuzzle a safe distance away under the folds of the broad-edge; moreover, the striking strip traverses the back of the book (though, to speak rightly, the book has neither true front nor true back, for it can be read from either direction, but since it must be entered from the tucked-in side, and since our concept of "frontness" implies the gates of access, and when we show our backs it is as if to say, "Keep away, don't come near, I wish to be alone, I wish to deny you access to me," I will call the tucked in face of the book-though truly whether it has a face or not one may dispute-call this face of the book, its front) so that there is no way a striking match could pass over its unexposed brothers to ignite them and striker, in a painful and injurious conflagration.

    But let us return to our investigation of the interior structure of the book. The inner surface of the cover is to the outer, as is mere paper to plastic. The surface feels less smooth, and not at all oily. The inner skin soils easily, and it cannot be cleaned, except by wearing away, through friction, as one does when erasing pencil marks from paper with a rubber eraser. Having both texture and form of paper, the inner cover of the book often serves for jotting down names and phone numbers, significant dates, poems, and messages of all sorts, for which (because of its smallness) it is often found more convenient than a journal. In this respect it contrasts with the outer cover, which will not take the inky impressions of a ball point, as though you tried to write over a grease spot or a peeled stick of margarine; press harder, you'll only crease the surface with invisible lines.

    Now look at the exposed match heads from the top down and you will see four parallel rows of staggered oval heads; those four rows spring from two strips of cardboard stapled at the base, and the staggering effect results from the heads being broader, due to their accumulation of sulfur, than the stalks upon which they stand. Looking at the stalks from this vantage point, one cannot escape being reminded of broccoli, whose tiny seed heads are similarly attached by filaments to the great, muscular central stalk of the plant; the seed heads of broccoli being larger than their stems, they, too, flower out and spread themselves broadly, like these matches, although there be only twenty matches to a book but countless thousands of seed heads to a single stalk of the vegetable.

    Proceed now to the great lynch-pin, the fragment of extruded steel which clawlike grips the cover and sandwiches the match stems between its circling arms, the prime principle of unity in the book; the small staple. Its arms hold everything together; take it out and the book falls apart in your hands, and no glue can replace it, no reinsertion can bring back the firm unity that was before; the process of extracting the staple may not be reversed. Taken apart, the book reveals itself as no more than a twisted particle of wire and three unmatched pieces of cardboard. Once the matchboards are out of their protective casing, they rapidly decay from moisture, friction, and bending; moreover, they become a safety hazard. Lose the cover, and you lose the best of striking surfaces, rendering your matches unusable. Better to leave the complex structure as it is, clasped in the circle of wire, tight as a loving woman's arms hold the object they love and keep it from flying apart like a universe bereft of gravity and all natural laws. In shape the staple nearly makes a full circle, but its ends stay perpetually an eighth of an inch apart, like two hands nearly touching, though they are one and the same staple.

    Numberless are the works of art bound by the feminine encompassing principle: to name but two, there is Lena in Faulkner's Light in August, and there is Molly Bloom in Ulysses, who begins her day with a sleep-muffled "No" and ends with "yes I said yes I will Yes." Just so, the looping staple and the book itself contain all yes and no, all birth and death, all opposites. All this you may read in the book of matches.