THE NEW WORLD
AN EXCERPT FROM THE FOREST
Three wealthy and prominent men (Adolphus Philipse, Stephen DeLancey and Pieter Schuyler) commission an eccentric Albany-based scholar named Samuel Kip in late 1723 to write a disquisition on the first one hundred years of the New York colony. . .
AS MY father partook in de nieuwe wereld, I too expended taught labor (though labor of the Caravansary, rather than the field): that of Youngest Boy for my hard-eyed, basalt-haired Walloon-Huguenot mother, a doll-like donative function, playing Marais on the viol and other conformations of Lully on the gitarre; like a Catholic Man of Expertness and Obsequity, not a first century Roman, but still, a Personage, like and different from my father, dancing, smiling, seed-planting; mining, unnaturally but necessarily, medial gray-bearded intonations upon village ministration and Judicature, matrilineality among the Haudenosaunee. Those painful flexes, those instances of Smertan, his and mine, of what I might define as shame in the face of our triumphant homing; and more ill-solvable — and yet another natal generatie advanced — when you contain the many-homed blood of the American. I might be described as piece of that maiden colonial generation. What art thou? Well, for many a year, ephebic, ripped by descendancy, chimneyed by those natural palisades of origin — Amsterdam, Navarre — and moved by a durating love for my distaff artificer. I perfused the acorn with that song of soulchase, of dark and distance’s ambire. A bastard of shape — a loved, white-slated bastard of shape — quintessent of the lot.
To retard the deceptions and affectations of my speech, to stretch at my more dissimulated self, to avoid the eye of my cloth-discerning elder sisters and brothers — of mine own word — I found books, abandoning song, moving seldom, amassing and mislaying time, widening, body and smile each, weighed, j'étais, by Septuagintal integrants, madenned by self-mastery (not its rectitudinous product but by its procedure) and the abstemiousness of Mark, acceptive of improminence, chagrined by man’s odium, impaled by that blackened love of a son’s death, bowled forth by excel in comprehension and virtue (that the act of hand-raising-book is not good-minded for toil spent, but for ego submitted, and, thusly — and to return to that infinite, pre-supernal vanity — the prospectuses made imaginable), by paternal practicality, by the borean vulnerability of my and Margrietje’s companionship.
Not three and twenty, we married up the river — away from the Landgoed and the easterly Kips — a marriage of beloveds but, too, of stinging, gelid Albany, of the slantshot life, of strange-pullulated wheat, of the phatasmic Wilden.
“Meneer Kip, by transcribing those signatures latent within the human and communal sciences by dictating their many transposing lines of narrative validity, might you mean that you seek not to bring your studial focus nuisance?”
“You neglect to cite my key historiographic method,” I respond to my alien. “You collect such tessellated accounts away from the Longhouse.”
“And this method, in turn, a Sumerian wheel toward the post-tribal, panoptical, celestial still?”
“There is no such verity in a world of fragment and spall. We speak here of a respective integrality,” parting, far as I’m apt, like a governing farmer, with the ceremony of the Ale, repressed and oversecure, with no inner heart for the beasts, for that theophagous mateyness.
“And let me ask: do you wish to write primarily of the respective or integral?” Unconditioned as I am to live social vexation and bothered, in penitent admittance, by my fellow punter; too proud for ignorance, too mean for that full curiosity of God’s tail.
“Mon dieu, Sir, that is too much of an unravelment,” my entrant’s eyes fettling into sore and dim, permitting me back into a stance of explication, of Protestant diaphaneity. “Each are rock and water, orthograph and hieroglyph, form and illimit.”
“And might you be Livy or Cicero?”
“And might you ask Sir John Hayward to set his sights upon Lancastrian intrarivalry over the new lingual Diliculum?”
“But surely you would choose the second!”
“Indeed, this is where it turns technic. What of science, but what, too, of catharsis? Might you advise Titian himself that Francis and Suleiman never met in false merriment over an emulsified liquid?”
“And thy ocular organs suggested a wager of war upon The Quarrel, a bonhomme! So — and do accurize me — the aim is much like a Hals needling and cubizing noses?”
“That depends upon social usefulness and fancy, and then upon self-direction. Does the brush-struck man concern himself with occurrence (particularly amid a vacuum of few facts and much time)? The Classicists and Verists, yes. But what of the Mythicists? Proximators, yay, but, too, effectors of the Human Gospel: Raphael of Spiritual Objective, Michelangelo of Self-Possession, Brueghel of Community — of Aspirant Daytime — and Bosch of Omnihavoc.”
“Such are the men for whom we have accounts. All else: lost to the bisonmarring gales.”
“Indeed, to those pyrexias and algidities of the brain.”
“There’s our bonny letterist!”
“This,” with the foreignness, pushed and spent by vexation, of Teutonic certainty, “is where men must engage themselves, for the creatures and objects won’t. Arouse that moment of enervation and skivvy. Think: That, there, is where grass meets wild.
“But what if all, Lord and Man, are The Holt?”
“Friend, no curse levies like that of keenness meeting irascibility.”
“Before I further empurple you: Am I Lord Fauconberg, and might Fort Orange be Towton?”
“Dub me histrionic but I talk of partnerships — funded ones, like Sir Raleigh and Thomas Harriot — that lead not to an excess of feather and horsehair but toward an expansion of knowledge.”
“And you leave for the rest of us the sawing, climbing, lifting and bolting?”
-
A collateral means to state my ambition, insuperable without the Hestian excellence of Margrietje; I range — nay, I ingermanely maunder — but for that square.
Grandpapa — the one, familiar through word and attestation, to you men: the honorable Hendrick Kip — allegedly dubbed me Vrolijk before his passage, a gladness I at least spake and sought to equalize; for such a stance would have naturally, by that Gravity of convergence, destined me a creator but not a protector of my own work, sateen modesty in the stead of bloodfull pride. But my mother was mistrustful of Dutch non-candor, conforming and regarding me as she might a loveful oat, smart and ultimately forgiving, if not precipitously so: honest, a face-to-the-Sancta Sedes Thomas More; humble, much like the watched upon; unbent.
He, Grandpapa, was a kind, strong, controlling, conceited, competitive and connected (in industry, but mainly in heart) man, one who’d perish out upon the quiet of the stad’s limits in minutes (and indeed, a vicissitude for him, for this, principally, is a world made for survivors, and, by such logic, cenobites), affordances granted to his daughter by marriage as to his walled, self-adequate Kleinzoon even while he, beneficed, accepted his destiny as stretched and transmuted, a corrival. But luck for him, as those vulnerabilities were long past relevancy by the time of my birth. I do believe I remember him but I can’t vow to it (adult memory is but the prior day’s performance — a colligation — far more than it is a fugacious point of transcendence). When — amid the height of his service under Stuyvesant — mother first met him, he bid Francis, his Gambian slave, to bring down the bobbin lace (Diocesan in stitch, sinew and shape) he’d brought over across The Deep not yet twenty years prior, the same year of Grandmama’s death, which he’d gathered for purposes elliptical as he consoled mother and vied for words about when he might meet her father, the celebrated surgeon; about when he might learn more, from this Dutch-fluent (though with Gallic maniere, with a flowing, expounding aura of the English diacritic) descendent of de Forest, of those still recent events of familial and general histories.
Mother, like a fatidical tide, lacked Granpapa’s early-century vivacity, but such marks the human course once you incise with perspicuity your glade in the forest; one might say that home eclipses dream.
-
The age between my two mentioned avuses is about that of you gentleman and I — not quite a generation; or perhaps a squat one.
And are we companymen or are we remote? Both, but indeed — and I speak, of course, from a finitude of glare and pocket — to me, it is the hindmost, with word, family and legacy existing between us much like a Daoist thaumaturgy: of Sir Pieter’s mouton-covered red equipage riding down Breede weg; of Sir Adolphus’ aspect, enough for the whole of the royal domain to resemble that capotain-to-foot form, as I proceed up the Gentlemen’s Way through Philipse Patent; of Monsieur DeLancey, in klomps, hair coursing, downwardly canalizing, becoming the very docks. Think of those same winds, but untouched: this is how Grandpapa must have regarded de Forest; and as with politicians, it marked praise not liberally given (Munificence is vouchsafed only to those less edged blades of Damocles. Like a bird, always, your attention goes to that next pneumatic sphere, to the danger aloft). But he was far too latticed with query: Leiden’s aberrancies, the Company, and even, but with far more keep (as with all mortal mysteries), that which was meridional of Barbados.
I FATHOM the kinesis; indeed, it makes one move, collide with and market to the disparate man: What makes distinct his relationship with sun and star that we cannot perchance? What turns him anxiously queer over his Jacob’s cattle and other littoralia — oysters, clams, trout, cod, bass — before even accounting for his Pelt, cervine and attenuated, that stray lore of Labradorian winter; and then, the second pelt, inverted, funneled, placed like a murine urbanity, like a heavier and less profitable turmeric or oolong, in the orlop.
-
“Captain Hudson, I find it knotty to reckon a fluvial structure with such length and diametric confinement that doesn’t end in cessation.”
“Indeed, sir. Gibraltar marks only, say, ten mijl.”
“And sir,” to swelling chagrin, “we’ve already passed a near thirteen since firth’s end.”
“Thirteen?” But what other way to truth than an additional twenty mijl of confirmatory narrow?
“We are working upon the scholarship — the pleonasmic scholarship — of a glazed land.”
“These bronze tribesman,” like the determinacy were all, from food and succor to war, “What is their art?”
“Mate and survive.”
-
The Captain never perched in London more than a quarter-annum — contumacious in the face of aperience, fabular-dreamed, future-possessed; a shallop-bound saler and trafficker of cause.
And, whether in Ice or by the tribal wand, now forever benumbed. How to honor him; by, maybe, describing the flow which made unique and consummated that Sixteenth Century: passages wind and skyward, into grueling planar depths, personage unknown, Commonwealth and Kingdom — the specter and blade of power — legal limina, constricture and invention, the out and gentle, the gradual up, the empyrean knower and known; into that devil of all directions. It is the After-Garden Work — for within the lattice they sweat obversely, with gravid design — the work of the glaucous man as much as the redly wicked, with all hands tasked.
USSELINCX, though adherent to the credences of Bacon (as he would too have been to Locke), experienced such consular tragedies of demise weightily — emotionally gullible to anecdotes of will and risk — so that, in successive years, the extraordinary crevice of Hudson’s disappearance proved more haptik than dialectic.
“Do you fear a national entrenchment?” de Forest, in latent acknowledgment — as would a pathically condoling friend — of his more tight-concepted compeer.
“Does a Lutheran wax solemn about the head and sky?”
“‘Tis such a small land.”
“I appreciate your stocktaking. Like the loom, they need us only to feel the journeyer’s accidie, the worshipper’s despair.”
“Mind the sarcasme, Willem. There’s a future yet.”
Usselincx, soaked in struggle without being turnt from his visions. De Forest too: Stadtholder Maurice’s man but also a keeper of family; determined, but keen on that paragon — even if, circumstantially, Gomarist — of the Plebiscitary Constituency. “Indeed, de Forest, in the shadow of van Oldenbarnevelt’s durance, you see future?”
“His project, to assign to it caliber, is to value us,” de Forest says of van Oldenbarnevelt, “which, in a cavity of his acquitting, ecumenical mind, he believes is mortal grace.”
“And in valuing: keeping.”
“As if your unbelief was never born!”
“But what of the argument that an active soul is an acquisitive one?”
“What if it is merely remonstrative, a Non-Avertive Soul, one stirred by ephialtes and bone scar?”
“Which leaves you naked and two-footed upon the zavanna’s aurora, it seems.”
“Does the capacity for preliminary peace — preliminary in that it’s worldly — not concern you?”
“Why might it?”
“That — and based upon machinery and predicament — you’re evading that inmost apologue.”
“Again, de Forest, you flirt liberally with the soteriologic frontier.”
“Because I cite God’s hand in the Human Narrative?”
“To return to your honest query: you are suggesting that I display a grand vitrine of free will as an offering of gratefulness (of grace) and affordance.”
“And more so for a man of such pelagial breadth!”
“Whereas you — shipping your fellow Paynim to the next Glow of Passion in Castile — lack such breadth?”
“I’d be readied to fight at Maurice’s hip if I didn’t fear it’d all end in dust.”
“And?”
“...Are you dubbing me a Piper of the seas?”
“You dubbed me Outside of Life!”
“You know of my perturbations. I seek to be preparatory.”
“It becomes a torus of endless, Stichomythic depth if you’re incareful. If I interpret properly, Augustine states it is a matter of the Maker contriving the string’s illusion in our borrowed perception. That like an acme unseen, we are offered sight of the grace we already seat and feed.”
“But what if the yarning of thought is the devil bribing us to overshare our gift?!”
“One, again, with that anti-Supralapsarian kineticism!”
“...And what of the Carthagian’s prevenience, is it inborn or, say, a supine bestowance?”
“The Swiss receives you back.”
“But prithee, Usselincx: Why exercise an illusion?”
“Smart, de Forest, but, like the Volga, you are bowing west to east to west.”
“Que sçay-je?”
“All this habituation just to quote a Jesuit?!”
*Characters in order of appearance:
Samuel Kip (1682-1748) - narrator.
Jacob Kip (1631-1690) - father of Samuel Kip.
Hendrick Kip (1600-1685) - grandfather of Samuel Kip and 17th century colonial magistrate.
Maria de la Montagne (1637-1711) - mother of Samuel Kip.
Henry Hudson (1565-1611) - English explorer.
Willem Usselincx (1567-1647) - merchant and founder of the Dutch West India Company.
Jesse de Forest (1576-1624) - Walloon separatist and great grandfather of Samuel Kip.
Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547-1619) - Dutch statesman, revolutionary and Arminian; placed on trial and later executed.
JACK’S POSTSCRIPT:
but such marks the human course once you incise with perspicuity your glade in the forest; one might say that home eclipses dream
The eponymous mention (excluding the onomastic de Forest) of ‘the forest’ in the accompanying passage marks its sole mention in the whole of the book, which, when I sent it to Harold, I told him was (and value-neutral, for poor sentences mark renal-podical constancy) maybe the saddest shit I’ve ever written. He said “funny, I read it hopefully.” I love that and think he’s right; it speaks to my big-bodied boredom that I so discount home. But then, mayhap, if not for want of the dream I wouldn’t have fared all the way back to that hearthless year of 1624.
Jack Houghteling is an American novelist: the author of Goodman (2022) and Sunnyside (2023).
9/5/25
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