City station: midnight.
A deathly heavenly dew.
The noise of wheels.
Rain-hushed pavement and yellow pools of tears.
The dull brick facade of a stage set.
A soft kiss goodbye from the shadows – corridors of darkness.
The clicking of bright eyes at every window fill me with emptiness.
Let go of my hand!
As the train begins to move,
as the figure is really leaving,
I feel everything – I call out.
It is only dark against the darkness
From the platform comes the crunch of some routine.
The shadowy figure pours away – down into the darkness.
I stand marooned on an iceberg walking about the night,
watching the moon-cloud,
preyed upon by an insanitary brick wall,
silver light sliding away down the steel rails,
the final lurch as if the scene has stopped.
I can see she may never come back.
The cracking emptiness,
a thin pure drizzle like needles,
the silver drops singing in the dawn,
intense light behind cloud,
a light wind wonderful on their necks.
Walking about her room
I write these tawny lines here
under this olive-tree.
I write and believing that night
has taken place somewhere else, in a great study,
the book lies beside me now
in very different circumstances.
Whatever it wishes to get, it purchases
at the cost of the soul.
The horrible feeling of some great
impending orbit.
The long silence.
Breathing into my ear.
I said nothing and sunk out of sight.
And now the words vanish like a spilled cup
of sun-cusped memories.
The long pull of everything
denied with a rose.
I had to come here to the full black ruins of this androgynous city—the melancholy clang of the metal landscape, everything varnished with static electricity, sea-damp sulking bodies passing uneasily under coloured petrol-lamps—every stranger, every struggle for breath, disturbed and dusted by the pollen of unromantic secrets.
It mattered so little somehow to those who might still be trying to rebuild this city—that is, the hunt for the heart-numbing strains of the great music that still lies buried deep and subtly everywhere under the brick-red variety and profusion.
After all what is the good of the constructions of art shuttering completely beyond the naked indifference of the natural world?
I had to come here to the city smiling with the selfless feeling of a creature who had given over to drinking in the sweet-smelling snatches of song inflaming the anarchy of my body.
I had to come from so far away to see the child who sleeps quietly echoing the symbolic invention of itself.
I have escaped to this island with a few books that only a sick man would choose.
I do not know why I use the word “escaped”.
What is this city of ours? What is this flash in my mind’s dust-tormented eye?
Flies and beggars show me summer afternoons, but what happened in the bare existence of the past?
At night when the wind roars and the sea is high, the city is a thrilling flush of inventions, chains of memory we ransack for our own in order to understand it all.
I was haunted by the silence which engulfs the whole city hanging like a great prayer before the sweet voice of the birds awaken it and impregnating the whole morning with the perfection of the forever-existing.
The intimations of a dense gravity wound their way into my sleepy consciousness which had become possessed by a coil of words like a marvelous shining serpent feeding on human misery.
To return to myself from such a remote place, I see at last that none of us is here to heal—that we must pay the price.
Inhabited every night by darkness, I light a lamp to our beloved, echo-laden city which uses us as its memory, the city which we enjoy so briefly and which should be judged far from the intermediate existence between today and what happened in the past.
I remember chiefly those interminable evenings at the café, a sky of Arcturus so impossibly far away from the city.
In those days the archives of the city were in need of a new evaluation.
In speaking to you now I feel that I did not understand then.
I still see the tall man in a black hat with a narrow brim. He smokes a pipe with a long stem—the mediator between Gods and men. He is thin and has a deep croaking voice. When he quotes or recites poetry his indifferent eyes are those of a hypnotist. In not looking at you, he is a mystery suspended from the dark spurs of time—a trait sometimes regarded as a monstrous ugliness.
In the course of pitiless walks beside the sad velvet sea, I found myself wondering if he might have the touch of a minor oracle. But this was before I knew anything. I see now that he was one of those rare people who had found a philosophy for himself and whose life was occupied in trying to live it.
His vein is aphoristic. He once said dryly: “I live at the center of the city’s life—it is a sobering sort of place. We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.”
Once when I spoke enthusiastically of some remarks he had made, he sighed and said: “When all is said and done, man is just a passage for liquids and solids—a pipe of flesh.”
He is a strange mixture—the rare man whose masculinity of mind is neither puritan nor asleep in bed. He was by divine choice an exquisite balance of an unhappy poet and a bloodthirsty douche-bag.
What can we say we really know about his soul? One had the feeling that, in living, he was turning his inner self upside down. To the Cartesian proposition, he opposed his own religious tenderness like ratiocinative irony: “I imagine most people let life play upon them the unanalysed feeling: ‘I belong and I am free’.”
I remember one bleak winter evening, walking along the rain-swept canal, his skull ringing from under the black hat with the haunting illumination of a truth where his childhood lay.
The wind blew south—the sea-wall swallowed the urgency of its expression.
In the approaching dusk, he said he was looking for the key to the city—the symbolic meaning that flowed through unbound time.
I heard his voice tremble, the sudden gushes of emotion from the heavily loaded conduits sleeping underneath all that tiresome dressing.
“Today is Saturday,” he said hoarsely. “If I don’t find the key, it will stop. I have until Monday evening. Please help me.”
Without the key, it felt useless to examine the interstices between the watch that ticked and the gleaming masked eyes—just time fermenting in the wound of his mother’s arms.
I would gladly have helped him, but the black ribbon of night lowered itself towards the delicate reeds and we were forced to give up the search.
We went to the café on the sea-front pursuing conversation in between long bouts of black coffee while he croaked on about a little suitcase containing books too young to be more than hurt by the underlying spiritual city. Books of this kind—despondently preconceived and historic—have always been written.
But I will not say what sort of unpremeditated resolution we might have found locked under my bed.
It was there at the café that he told me of the Capuchin monks – he had been in their tombs – but he was unable to show me – they were, of course, elsewhere – just like everything else.
This is not the place to write what I know of the warring intellectual principles that historians always present as the deepest psychological problem of a disorganized and shapeless society and of which they are not at all conscious.
What is there to be said of the national peculiarity of the native inhabitants here? Even if I were slightly disposed to try to define their disposition—their habit and behavior, their sects and gospels, their religious landscape, their mixed sensuality, their lusts and impulses—their roots are not to be revealed—they are raw experiences which only lovers might truly share.
I regard this whole field of study as fragments of revelation and that in them I might find a pathway which could only ever lead me to a deeper understanding of myself—the self which is not even a question but a forlorn house of the mysteries fading in the dusk of this little corner of the city though flickering with a tremendous, dramatic significance.
I have dabbled in these matters in silence as against the red earth of every evening and free from the toils of the domestic crowds. For almost a year I studied on the rickety terrace of this house listening to that soft cobweb of a voice with a strange sense of familiarity and trying with one half of my mind to visualize the whole amorphous atmosphere. How it must have resembled a disused and inelegant shack!
Sitting here in the benighted little café furnished with wooden chairs and doorways lined with little groups of pine-cone, one followed the muddy path through the stone gate to the interior behind the wilderness. One entered these walls on the earth side where the choice of such a morbid venue seemed very near to customary.
Did I know then—or was it afterwards I discovered—the hollowness I feel in everything I do?
Who invented artist-hood, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.
Memory: the archives of the city.
I once remember him saying, “I think you know Justine.”
I said nothing. This astonished me for I had never mentioned Justine. Did he perhaps mean Katherine? Metaphorically? For some obscurely magnificent purpose?
He paused and took a long pull at his pipe before adding slowly: “all women are Justines.”
Then it shot through me with a fearful confusion of feelings: Justine had disappeared one day—about six years before this time—and a frantic hunt for clues entered the imagination—a house of ill-fame discovered by accident vaguely seemed to offer passage through all that might have been kept separate.
That was the first time I saw the great house of whatever. It was both beautiful and horrible. From room to room the inexpressible engulfed us. In sweetness. In silences fracturing all efforts, all the many ways of being directed towards the well-known.
He must have seen how much this loss preyed upon my heart since he said suddenly, “I do not know her. I have hardly seen her. Forgive me. You can understand why this really is a city of incest—there is no exit from the mirrors of one’s sister-lover.”
What good is my mind, awkward and a little shy, unslaked by the weight of her kisses, the open petal of her mouth, so fresh and so young, upon mine, each breathing quickly, the eyes, flesh-lips passing secret messages buried deep beyond shallow metaphor—what good to still stand there with so little left?
The world has no use for someone with my flat reputation, but I can say that my shabbiness harmed nobody.
No, the eyes of the world are led always toward whatever is both beautiful and horrible. Justine was bad in many ways, a two-headed animal, a tangled marriage of evil and love fracturing the repeated inexpressible silence. I recall all the scandalous rumors, the pain her smile inflicted, the words under her breath: “There are forms of greatness which when misapplied make havoc of ordinary life.” She harmed me, she expelled me, she mistook the nature of art and religion for compromised statues. I know this sort of paradox in a way that is impossible to explain. It was bound to hurt, but in a sort of way I thought Justine great. What was I to do? Justine was too strong for me. Her gift engulfed me. And in many ways she made me fruitful—a magnificent sweetness mixed with a harmful bitterness. For a short while I abandoned the great house, the great staircase, the great hall and immense library for Justine’s immense receptions and boring gatherings – but I rapidly tired of them….
For my part, I could offer no explanation of my presence. I had once been the poet of the city. Thrilling? Not I. Not in the eyes of the world. It was cold and I was small in that gruesome light of the city. One solitary amateur. A trifle unbalanced. Abandoned by the hand-modeled semicircle of society and culture. I had of course been forgotten by the direction of the sea. I remember only that I was haunted by a sudden longing to be lost, to disentangle myself from such damp, gloomy streets. Many had actually left them behind. Made their way down the stone staircase into the echoing indifference.
And since I did not know for what purpose I had been brought here I could only out-love every someone I knew and achieve some compromised solace in accepting the magnificent two-headed animal I could be. I gathered up my case and the last horrifyingly sad photograph of the room. The mirror opposite me heaved a short sigh as if it were trying to decide to what use I could be put.
“Doubtless you are a rider.”
“Doubtless,” I said.
What a thoughtful but crude way of saying that there seemed no point in pursuing all this. Not to be known always wounds. I felt my dark scorched flesh, my dark face full of a troubled, blue smoke. I would never understand this.
It was painful to me but I accepted because it meant I should have to pretend they had come along, that I was talking to an audience. And I should have to pretend they would be stupefied, that perhaps one person had appreciated my difficulties.
In diaries she recorded extraordinary fragments of thought, long self-tortured letters to God intended to penetrate behind the veil of reality, to discover harmonies in space and time – but always the writing later struck her as sightless as every alphabet, its ugly croaking voice that suggested its inability to perceive an inherent order in the universe which underlay the apparent formlessness and arbitrariness of phenomenon and as if some entirely new context could somehow match the wholeness of the universe.
We are enlisting everything I do not remember.
For a moment, the inner structure was perhaps her only friend.
For an hour the statues sat there between us listening with a humility and concentration that were touching – but then using a strange mental-emotional calculus, they winced at the word and – I don’t know how else to express it – they vanished.
In a night like a dark river where the ghostly stars are read as a text saying nothing, there was nothing else to do but sit with a tender tangle of emotion, spirit, and abstract thought – in touch with the beautiful silence called upon to give an account of life.
At the old house, with the curtains drawn back, one dined alone in a corner of the room lit by a sort of painful academic precision ever in danger of casting cheap biblical shadows.
After the episode at the beach, here I am, attempting to do the same sort of thing with new words in new forms infected by a vertiginous certainty. I want to tell you everything, to be so honest. Worst of all, I want to put things down simply and crudely, without style, a pure portrait made with the honest stonework of these important names we give to every understandable element. I have no pretensions to being an artist. And we must never forget that this infant science we are working at is founded on only the most blessed researches.
Look at the way you question me now – a laugh I do not dare recall echoed from somewhere and felt like some paper introduction of a diarist in my imagination. At the slightest discrepancy you are on to me, you who sailed in the thorny jungle of deep regret and guilty impulses – you who live now among my imaginary misconstructions – you who accuse me of an insupportable chimera. You know I never tell a story the same way twice. Does that mean I am lying?
The time we wasted upon futile likes and dislikes! What fun we could have had with some sense of humor.
I realize now I was a fool to waste my efforts to penetrate the curtain behind which I thought the mystery might read its confession. I tried to collect as much evidence as possible. I thought this long and painful examination which seems so full of shaky miracles and rough-cast promises might help elucidate the subject. Vain innocence…
These pages may be considered another form of virginity if you wish, these pages that tell a story of our relationship. Indeed so fascinating did I find this analysis of the subject that, at times, it penetrated me: though I lack the marvelous capacity for conscious dishonesty, I walked arm in arm with sundrenched intimacies and the rotting canal of doubt while my adversary stood, a black patch over one eye, looking upon me as an enemy and watched for the least gesture which might give me away.
I felt like I would never fade into tiresome innocence again.
She stood over me in the misty early morning light, that heavily-breathing nothing inexplicably underneath it all and every day nearer and nearer to us but nonetheless forever beyond reach behind the very last door of self-instruction.
I thought back among my many sorts of failure – the darkest unhealed wounds that flicker into memory. And I realized with horror that natural part of myself, the spirit, was slipped in between all of even the best sentences. The great bravado of every true, candid belief failed over and over again to capture or possess the painful buried refuge of that wounded mariner free to circulate in a world absolutely starved of selflessness.
But how difficult it is to analyze these depths with language which is only a sort of skin. My lips desire the illusion of a divine guardian desperate to successfully portray a discrete order. But the continuous failure of language – the permanent failure of all authenticity is itself the treasure of detachment – a detachment of spirit freed to escape into the nervous movements of selflessness and self-respect.
Like pleasure, passion ends in itself. As if from a high window, she was looking. In art, people are robbers and I believe she hoped they were wonderfully expressive robbers – the sort of loving robbers moved to render the sad pain that is the very jewel of detachment. I hoped she was to steal it from me.
And as if to make persuasion certain, she slipped off her skirt and shoes and fell softly into the treacherous bed beside me.
It was about this time I began exploring the city’s memories.
I began to write these lines, these words that said nothing, that startled me by breathing into my ear and, once described, vanished out of sight like a light wind behind a cloud of curtains.
The kaleidoscope of suffering, the desire at street-corners and in bars, the colored glass down in the margin, the intense encounters that ensued in hospital, the horrible feeling walking about the night leaving no birds singing in the dawn, the marooned orbit of the long impending silence…
On one page was written: the great agony of life is that we may never come back.
It was dark and already the city was lost like a useless historic figure. The old body was dead and buried, unable to be gently watched, confronted – but the memory murmured something obstinately inaudible to me: the rotted truth half-awake and too faded and steeped in new misfortunes to study as my love – and calling on me too late to study as my death.
I took refuge in the lighted cafes of the upper town slipping into a world of sleep as smoothly and easily as staring into the human emptiness and disgust of merciless habit and society.
Would you like me to awaken? Or elicit a cry of compassion and tenderness?
Constructions, only constructions.
It is not our brains or the sudden irrational thought at the dark heart of our messy history. It is the real man trying to insist all night, all day on his conspiratorial point and every misplaced criticism.
But what can we do? Give a little sigh? Deny anything he has said or done? Die the death of a dog?
I say nothing.
My silence is an absolute which takes all, forfeits all.
To be forgotten in this way is to have a point in this life: to conjure up the word turned to the wall that exists only on the periphery and belongs to the nothing that never was, that never will be.
It was dark and I thought I was drifting like a bed of seaweed but I had already fallen asleep as if to disinfect the memory.
To have written so much and to have said nothing is indeed one of the keys to the city.
The key: yes, an omission.
The inhuman bustle of the city was somehow like the first morning since the creation of the world. Before dawn, they had already said good-bye to the yawning, sleepy silence which for so long had lain and awaited them at the other barren horizon of life. In an instant the sort of words which occur only in diaries become the dark forgotten edges of childhood habit. Now all around them was the hollowness of wharves and factories, the unconfessed burden of a suit of well-cut clothes, the dank smell of hot iron and tar, office employees on a wearily named street corner too stiff and cramped and ill-at-ease – too reluctant to set off for a cafe where one could find a boiled egg and coffee.
And yet the sea was awake and present in everything and could find someone renewing in them their past feelings for the way forward – a man transfigured, a man who could act, a man who could murder his lover, the last residual encumbrance of the flesh, a man who could magically become his own unexpected shadow and enable him to become his own man.
The dark self-sufficient sea whose edges were one and the same was his mistress now – they talked and they lay together for a long time in the perfect darkness of their feelings under a fig-tree in the backyard just as a doomed brother and sister might. Desire all stirred within them, pressing their bodies together, they watched the first tendrils of sunlight uncoil across the coastline while a choir of mechanical birds filled the great stone buildings of the city.
She brushed back a lock of hair with one hand as she stooped before him. Changed as he was, he felt the utterly out of place beauty of a candle in an attic cupboard, forgotten.
If you look closely at the map, you’ll see secular winds lurking through the city: they go where none of our more familiar boundaries and markings can follow. Cleaving through what’s on the surface to what lies beneath, they mimic the ineffable reach of the ancient Almighty Nothing who might otherwise be listed as missing.
If you look closely at the map, you’ll see the broken bridges and a dusty palette of poster paints on pavement, brick and sandstone where the history of the city could be peeled away layer by layer, but whose defiant message of origin could be read backwards having been absorbed into its very geography.
If you look more closely at the map, you’ll see a confused uproar of voices, a mob of men shouting and interrupting each other, their cliques, coteries and clubs. One of them, his blazer too big for him, confessed to me that the object was to reduce everything substantial and difficult to ribbons.
“Are our souls to be saved out there?” someone asked.
But the question is not so much posed as opposed. The question, readily answered, doesn’t so much as begin.
Because if you look ever more closely at the map, you’ll see all this unsleeping commerce, the principal source of traffic, bobbing along the main road of the city – you’ll see the chewy unanswered and under-reported word of the black night cast aside, crushed under the piles of towering office blocks, the new bank buildings, noisy advertising, architectured museums (nothing more than fashion and snobbery), universities (entitled organizations selling mediocrity), the press (propaganda), and government (power) buildings – literally all the great friends of capitalism and Corporation.
The abandoned remains of everything interesting is preserved in its dwelling site, but you can’t get into it because there’s a supermarket on top of it, the heart of the city pinned under three-foot-thick steel floors. Men of cloth who have heard the word of God enshrined in their churches are as pious as traders manipulating the stock market from offices of authority. But the vestigial layers of history beneath them remain to be unearthed, to become the happy hunting grounds for researchers of a fairly underimagined topic: the great question that did not really begin and, perhaps, the only one that mattered.
If you look closely at the map, you’ll see at the water’s edge the kind of place I had in mind when I thought of the face of the city – the kind of place where I might unaccountably disappear or otherwise be listed as the precarious author of this fragment, this spectacle – a curtain-raiser to the rite of marking out the boundaries of the most venerable places of worship, the most famous parts of the city readily understood from the frontiers found down such and such a street or alley and the next that helped to orient us toward rebuilding the air where the bells peal once again and the meaning of the word stands at the very center of the question of the city.
Perhaps they sensed something of the extraordinary nature of what they were about to take part in for, as if in a dream or trance, each one linking hands with a neighbor, they gazed at the mystery works, the ruins that languished in unlovely empire.
I asked, “Do you feel safe out there?”
“Yes. Maybe. They were holding onto me pretty tightly.”
“Did you have any training?”
“For what?”
“Doing that.”
“Oh. No.”
I became aware I wasn’t the only interloper at this ritual tagging along with a notebook in my hand.
“Pairs!” cried the schoolmaster, “Twos!”
And, at this command that sounded like a concession of some sort, the wind threatened to be terribly recognized.
The great house was hitherto unknown to the city, as if hidden by it.
The great house was perpetually alive with a mournful echoing as soundless as death.
The upper rooms were empty now – the tall staircase, the galleries and salons dusty and deserted – even the air played slightly out of key, with such infinite slowness as to fill the interval with a sense of intimate hollowness.
Meanwhile, all this advanced the central situation not at all. There was little to put one’s finger on. The human world had receded and diffused itself, lost in the meaningless contemplation of a rose lying upon an otherwise empty plate.
The whole nature of the world was soon to relinquish us, the great society in its lavishness, the slothful, foppish faces crying out to the dark gold-spark-filled sky.
This particular night was full of piercing stars and a rare summer lightning display among the steeples. This action ignited a flood of breath-taking curiosity spreading from a specific member of the body into the thirsty heaven of the mind.
Elaborate nonentities began to haunt
the great house,
the long beautiful reception-rooms,
the alcoves
and unexpected corners,
the politeness of the drawing-room
deeper and ever deeper into the night where love and I lay.
The ice-smooth night punctuated by the hissing of surgical clocks.
Convulsions of a desire to study all the hidden motives,
the patterns of a plot
to capture the King, perhaps.
What else is there to add?
The King was not a frequent visitor to the great house.
When the calm goes on for too long, the important tasks foundering in the still water of the fountains, I watch the colored light of the autumn sky, the richest and most true of the city’s small extravagances.
At last: only what should always have been.
One of the consequences of beginning at the great house, one room bulging with darkness: it is another country, it does not even exist for us here. It is like a death – a death of the self uttered in every repetition of the word – the screaming insanity in the night behind its shutters, drawing in every breath on that crooked street.
Ah, the misery of going nowhere. A city becomes a world when one names it – and this city is haunted with names, soaked in fragments of every language. All attempts to circle that mysterious nothing have failed so far . . . and everywhere the veils.
Look! You are going to be noticed! You are going to be normal, very boring!
The author of the diary is engaged on research for a novel he proposes to do: a portrait of the girl met last night in the mirror. Glossy black hair, nervous eyes turned to sexual curiosity.
This little book is about her – a post-mortem on her.
What arrested me was the first person singular busy for weeks collecting information – “we have been making inquiries . . . “
The habit of restoring her name, that possessive symbol, to the text, the read book, was told in a breathless whisper turned permanently motionless in the mirror.
I have to confess! I am looking for a forcible remark or two. Sooner or later we shall find one another out.
Here, the image in the mirror speaks: “I am a ghost haunting my own life rather than living it.”
To wander endlessly
the same streets
in this city far lovelier than the common mind
but how long must I be confined here?
a heart buried in one plot of ground
having failed like a man tricked into a lifetime
of useless hopes?
when suddenly at darkest midnight
from the open window as from a dream
the mystical music of invisible choirs
turned into smoke
ah! black rapture
befitting some other land, some other sea
I’ll be gone—everywhere now
and look down in resignation
for the city will always follow
over the whole earthly landfall
no ship exists
farewell new land, farewell new sea
how long from youth, how long deceived
I knew well by sight various parts of the city. There was, for example, a violin, an elderly clock-maker, a chemist, a few nondescript elderly ladies, a low chair with twelve members of a small academy sitting in its lap. Still, I could not shake the thought: none of the great religions have done more than create desire in the form of pregnant aphorisms.
If you can picture a little park worthy of the name “park,” withdrawn and shut in by high walls of arbor vitae clipped at inervals into small niches which sheltered bits of white statuary, if you can picture such a little park set down in the midst of an inferno of fire, steel and smoke, there is no need to describe the magic of night glowing in the thick darkness because it was not yet dark and there was no one at the garden party where it was possible to see beyond the borders of death into regions filled with a confusion of ugliness of the most appalling nature: roaring furnaces, steel sheds, glittering railway tracks where there was no green at all but simply Victory as it seemed to soar high above the clouds of smoke – the flush of early summer flowers transformed into a tangled wall of hard, dead things. The fact that the house stood in the midst of the park as an intruder and in the most bizarre union gave the house its harmonious name.
To be sure, elsewhere had its being in the reality of this handmade house surrounded by a complete and trackless wilderness – and, in places, it poured like water escaping from a broken dam.
One more craziness no longer disturbed the world for it had been dead now for more than ten years, so perhaps the matter was of no importance whatsoever – no more substantial than a cobweb high up in the gables.
One must, of course, imagine the city in a language of all possible words. The whole story, whose precise origin is still unknown, always existed – a strange people already there, though at the same time introduced or invented. The use of the terms here is not to be taken as metaphorical – as that would imply that there are some words that are to be taken as something other than metaphorical.
Such fables have come down to us after the war: an archive of nearly 400 documents, the ancient remains of what we should probably refer to as the serious business of life.
The King and his Officials would constantly be sending problems for the private people to solve – while the poets recited stories for the purpose of improving the kingdom.
And somewhere in this mythical region of often dubious traditions was the forgotten beginning of man’s history. Occasional travellers, attracted by the magic of names took biased journeys through the vast ruins of this considerable literature. There remained, perhaps, much opportunity – too much that the precise location was not definitely known whilst probably would never be entirely lost.
But even travellers of great linguistic ability remained in doubt. The rarity of precious words were too soft – despite their magical properties, grown men and women had to take their part in the work of the nation: weavers, metal-workers, boatmen, painters, perfume-makers, fishermen, potters, masons, jewellers, carpenters, tweezers, needles, mirrors . . . special officials were paid to supervise them, pointing out to the population their actual primary necessities and that the most vital part of the economy was rearing flocks of sheep or workers that might sometimes be paid. The same official felt free to refuse the status of that impossible house which dwelt in that uncertain, invented place of the excessive remainder (where the division into two men seems on the whole to have been evident) – the desert we do not know – and likely do not wish to find.
Night after night, the great shadowy nothing loomed up on every side.
But by some curious paradox there was so much going on: marvelous shadows thrown from the eyeball of God full of clues and keys that did not convey information. One could only follow silently in the hope of touching some small part of the total picture, all of the weird customary attractions around us daily: shabby sea-front cafes, small inexpensive toys, bottles and syringes, post-coital sadness, a naked doll whose eyes do not close, the burning disaster of roses lit from within by electricity, a whole room of handsomely framed philosophers – the novels of the great ones aware of an increasing doubt and madness – forever unable to conceal the heavy futility, the Universe ticking at night like a cheap alarm clock, the imprisonment which afflicts the common kisses of lovers, surrounded by an open panic standing on tip-toes to thrust a torch through the throat to light up the out-of-order skull the eyeless sockets of which are so fully awake you can somehow hear the over-composed dialogues talk in their sleep, the graven skeleton jaw which clings to every endearment, which lingers like a sediment in the clear waters describing these vulgarities of which a human being is capable.
There was so much going on.
And always there was something exhausting and perverting about the mythology of self-exploration.
It should have been easy to write of passion, but where was the courage to question each other?
Imagine as we drew nearer and nearer to the idol on the far wall and too thoroughly ponder its private role as if to understand immediately and fully the ineffectually guilty mind weighed down by something as heartbreaking as an empty upstairs bedroom.
It was still not dark enough, not yet dark enough in the entire forty-three years. You could almost see out there waiting from one of the dark airless rooms in the little grim house the light would be out soon, you knew that.
You had not spoken a hundred words in the actual time the twilight burned.
The entrance closet, the cupboard, the overcoming of inertia . . .
With all the keys the house possessed, you never knew where to start. But the house had not yet disappeared. It was very unquiet save for on Sundays after sundown, twelve sides impervious to weather, impregnable.
Before this afternoon, before tonight, the switch was snapped, the cost of that light showed on the meter even now already wearing away a moving solitude you had thought to desert armed with a parasol, or an umbrella . . .
But you had not yet quit that house. It was still not dark enough yet.
The origin of this huge bulk of a world – entertaining and amusing, sordid and vicious – is to be found only indirectly undisguised in the course of every interesting, peculiar, and agreeably common story open to the attention and imagination.
I was born in the northern part of this kingdom – an autobiography would be exaggeration – in the house that has for some time disappeared from the memory of the public. This house – in the dark ages of the world – dreamed so forcibly by the devil – the first great traveler – from the vulgar bowels of the Lord – was the remarkable fruit beheld as a last return to native land.
You yourself in not daring to show your face and without the help of spectacles can now read something of the violence of this birth – modern methodlessness’ extravagant attempt to imitate the heathen mythology handed down to us with all variety of invention. Although nothing could be more ludicrous, I try to persuade myself some favorable interpretation might prevail over the base indifference of mankind by struggling with this friendless orphan. The world is already filled with infinite natural performances – the miserable unmeaning memoirs which proceed from the mouths of “literary” writers in the main – it now remains to proceed traveling in this most remote part of the kingdom that so successfully deviates from such mundane conduct.
Nothing could more effectually expose the absurdity of verbal representation than by making the chief personage of this work that immortal failure of a writer – that author of “true” literary ambition – permitted only sometimes to knock at the door of familiar scenes of social and domestic life, adventurous travel, career obligation – instead whole-heartedly living and writing in the presence of that vast territory – rusty yet honest and suffering a lifelong period of eclipse – detailing the crude, brutally passionate nowhere nothing so full of life that is stranger than all fiction – a person of unusual intelligence whose first-hand experience of sun, moon, earth, sea and sky provides the rare advantage, a peculiar power, of knowledge that the most faithful representation of this new material lying at our disposal is in truth a description of the impossibility to record it faithfully.
In the coarsest language: how might we live that we lay down without any strong feeling of regret?
the sighs of stars
obscure anonymity of time eternal
O you great heart
cresting, creeping then fall
back yawning
be with me now
the City’s invisible waves
unravel thy sleepless dusk
beyond the word here between
two worlds
dark waters where the sky is dead
unrecognizable dark
slumber on thyself.
There are forms of great quietness, you know, when misapplied in small ways in art or religion can be made fruitful – a great puzzle, the nature of which – impossible to explain to someone – both beautiful and horrible – every lapse making havoc of ordinary life – repeated softly under the breath – saying it just so – absently, magnificent – the words: Not I.
Remote from it all, half mad with being almost invisible, restless, filled with life-size worry – watching someone from time to time shuffling through an unlucky pack of cards – mentioning a sum of money – nobody seems offended by the mention of money in our city – sometimes they simply laugh – some openly stop – never once see evil in the eyes of the world – traveling backwards and forwards – from time to time someone on the street mentioning a sum of money – some openly stop – see only evil in the eyes of the world – always vexation on their features – devoted to political ends, business – though at first I was devoted to the immense library, I do not wish to write – besides you no longer care – no longer want to see everywhere increase – me, I still wanted to do something – all wrong in the head here – such striking monotony, the night – I mean did you not borrow the money? Here, take it and destroy it, gamble with it – like a beautiful drunkard – an unlucky number placed on the plan of the table…
These memories paid your debt. I did not want much – I did not want immense fortune, great outer life, the X-ray business – sacrifices! I do not wish to write! Still I wanted to do something for you – something obscurely related to pieces of a broken withered heart – a sort of sundering – then a figure slips in his name mentioning a sum of money – an unlucky number endlessly shuffling through history – through the marvelous night, traveling up the stairs, through the great hall, to the right and left, into the dining-saloon, a broken wineglass on the mantelpiece, a footstool by the fire – something to do – but I rapidly tired of their gatherings and boring receptions, the colored silk evening clothes, the model, the perfect woman, a wonderful wardrobe – turning her head, half drunk on the footstool – mentioning a sum of money – a passion for it – I pity her – her wardrobe buried with her heart – I simply laugh – the most natural and unfeigned laughter I have ever laughed – and my ancestors, family – psychological disturbance – noted for the number of suicides – simply laugh – unperturbed, touching my temples with a long forefinger – holding in these long reflective fingers a telegram, actually a sight to see – written across it in green ink, the curt word sitting there: “pain.”
Though they attempt to include me for a short while in these gatherings, I pause to study the matter of these two worlds – the living and the dead – an unlucky one remote from it all – and afterwards they made like conspirators, business colleagues and later pleaded illness – I slunk through the dining-saloon, into the great hall, up the stairs, back to the table to observe the numbers – coolly expressionless – like the live faces from every point of view – rumored to be on their last breath – in a time that is no more.
Some observations – committed moments – playing the table by candlelight – dead Pharoahs covering the ceiling – the game assistant recites in a sing-song voice at regular intervals each unlucky number to his victims with relish – and I am astonished by the sudden flights of French poetry of which he is capable – as he says slyly: “Le temps qui n’est plus,” his eyes squinting slightly at the ball or at the double meaning round everything he says and punctuated by remarkable world-weary sighs. I politely ask to cash out. “What, are you trying to halt the motion of your mistress’s whirling wheel? You think you can steer her unmeaning reverses?”
For a while nothing more. On the first landing, catch sight of myself in the mirror – white clothes, violet brush-strokes – the eye that has never lost its childhood – it even begins to whisper in a discreet tone, my eye in the mirror – “I have something for you” – what it does not know it can find out in a matter of moments – Memory, the archives, two worlds – the ancient trade that begins with the phrase: “This time, you have got beyond everything – you will be delighted from every point of view.” You say this fantastically to yourself hoping to draw attention away from that loose stock of moments – each dense instant – committed to describing – sealed, surrendered, considered – only to reappear as the most casual passer-by – the crooked details too hastily, too smoothly trained – dim details become cheap and clean and direct in the mirror – the task we perform and are committed to – to touch the mirror “beyond everything” – the two worlds… lay down onto the ground, the end of the wall, the edge of the mirror, reaching up – I can see the top, a husk of meaning – if you should wish to know, “I have something for you” – a voice, a whisper, special speech where for awhile nothing more is said lest we infect one another by a smile.
Nothing more for the time – I cannot say – and yet always trying to find something – something groping across thin lips – something that should be something free – something which emanates not from us but from the landscape – a landscape centered somewhere out of reach – in a region where every glittering kiss is a clumsy desperate attempt to look correct, to receive those outward attentions immediately hardening into deadening concepts – the night sky burning in the mirror above our desiccated glass coffin – I am thinking now of the founders of the city – the narrow pride of comprehensive works in the green courtyards of artificial art and science. But what of natural curiosity – the summer air that can rouse the light play of sex over thought and action – riding down the silver river of metaphor reverberating, stirring with life – flows so quickly – metaphor impregnates things – in the spirit of pure play, poetry impregnates the mental air with distinctive flavors – her mouth and eyes – as one gentleman to another – insemination of the average inhabitant – intellectual preoccupations – where the flesh is stripped bare of its final reticences. She is difficult. She has recently come from the lunatic asylum. I have arranged for her to sit at the end of the table. If you wish her to accompany you, stare at yourself in the mirror staffed no doubt by a disoriented creature – nothing more.
One o’clock. Back at the table voluntarily turning everything into a number – painfully conscious I have become conscious – curiosity exhausted – forlorn apathy – a distorted smile – thoughts and actions over and over – too battered – too old – no feeling – chafed by the harsh winds blowing out of the deserts in which we live – the gaze of a sleeping face with an air of disinterestedness represented by another gaze into that dark mirror where we forced our thoughts to substitute loneliness for love and kindness – like exhausted birds confronted by a viper in the sands.
Ah, well. The ball has fallen into its temporary orbit in that ever-spinning wheel. Oh sightless, senseless Fortuna, speak or be silent!
“How is it you are so much one of us and yet… are you not?” she speaks as if God himself were in the mirror – a mental tenderness wiser but crueller.
This newness, this discovery-by-invention: did you send me out to find it or did I leave you to seek it?
Now the city had two centers.
The one, the true one, symbolized the forgotten spiritual center.
The other was no symbol but the manifestation of matter broken from the divine harmony and formed out of agony and remorse.
The tragic realms of matter, space and time – the whole universe a leaky travesty of freedom – the world, the city, the river-bank, the progress – the great conquests of man, its confused inhabitants, searching with such frightening singleness of mind, desiring to be united one magnetic night to that curious coffin of living limbo, that exemplar of self-abnegation: the beloved and harshly electric Godhead.
“But am I dying?”
The question was addressed as much to myself as to you.
You sent me word from the house:
“But I should think you will have to”.
I was in a sense already dead. I had lost all place in our history and an expenditure of emotional energy on migrating seemed to me useless.
And yet here I was trying to walk back into our lives at another point in the circumference, the little memory man insisting on his purpose, having no relation to the real man drifting among the tender fragments of identity – the maundering motions of life between death and death.
“Would you like me to go on?” I said.
Sadly: “I should think you will have to.”
Memory embraces the two worlds. The archives of the city are well briefed in the living as in the dead.
I mean this in the literal sense. In the mirror where my eye catches certain flights of poetry. Every morning we touch the unsightly and obscene only to reappear coolly in the mirror.
Another smile. For awhile nothing more is said.
From the nothing of the darkest depths, one selects a vein of relief from among many sorts of expressive failure (art, religion, people, etc.) each of which lets him down over and over again continuously and so fast that they give the illusion of the flicker of an old silent film. There is nothing of bravado in it.
The last refuge and, for me, the worst and most painful failure is there in the misty treasure between sentences where I realized with horror the part of myself absolutely possessed, doomed to try and capture what was forever beyond reach while becoming more and more deficient in love.
I was uncommitted, free to circulate in the world, but I lacked a belief in the true authenticity of it all. Underneath the iron chains, the detachment of spirit, and the stagnant compromises of sects, academies, and dry cell friendship – only a sad, dark laughter seemed to contain the faintest grain of self-instruction against fear.
How difficult it is to escape myself! Beleaguered, troubled, tender and wounded – nevertheless, this action – like a mariner steadily going down an anchor-chain, a cocked ear towards the heavily-breathing dark immortal wraith living just out of sight below – this is what nevertheless defined me most.
Will you answer me?
Now the scene changed again.
Slowly and thoughtfully, I drank the double whisky I had ordered to grow calm.
All these terrible transactions . . .
I could not help but see nothing, mindless and unmusical, beyond this ghastly joke so rotten and threadbare.
It was as if the whole message of this abandoned ship had been blurted out in one sentence – the exposed dead carcass pronounced in a sing-song accent as if in order to give its phrase its exactest meaning. In its place came the mockery of a laugh followed by that involuntary groan of recognition.
Directed by a deep reserve of unreason but not without considerable inner resistance, I took a taxi to the hospital.
the long anonymous corridors . . .
punctuated with harsh white bulbs
then the green gloom of the little ward
I wondered why I should come and see this unknown personage, this unrecognizable man who stared up from the mattress and looked like one of the beasts of the earliest Apocalypse.
I moved forward a few paces to the side of the bed. He kept his face turned away from me but nevertheless seemed to be whispering in my ear – pneumatic images that had so long ago dissolved in my memory sounded strangely from his lips carving upon me a vague atmosphere of dark buoyancy, a spirit which must belong to some great, pure bird of prey wanting to burst from the very air before us – innocent fear resting against the expectation of life.
I stood for a long minute in astonishment.
It was as if the dying flesh was being emptied of its poetic illusions. And I was visited by a thought that I am ashamed to write down.
I could see now what I had been unaware of: unwilling to lose the beauty and equally unwilling to commit myself.
All at once my eyes were flooded with the light of the hidden one.
He was a picture of good health. Model of abundant vitativeness.
Or was it bibativeness?
It is a city of aberrations. No form, a blackness in the center of things, simply a gaping hole into which the infinite slowly drains.
Fugitive memories walk these streets like prophecies. They return again and again yet explain nothing, illuminate nothing.
From time to time there is the flick of a restless eye of someone endlessly shuffling through the immense library. The one who sits strikingly remote from it all obscurely slips an almost invisible signal to the inattentive traveling these soiled memories that kindly attempt to perfect a model of the great ocean buried in the life-size night and lolling on and on, backwards and forwards, afterwards and beforewards, between monotony and its history of disturbance, the immaculate heart broken by the fire of passion and the unfeigned, half-mad laughter of pain.
We use each other like clumsy axes, each one tip-toeing to his own music. Only time can sustain us a little longer.
The history that crackles, that has been so often told, walking slowly home through the dark avenue of obediently laid down books, words, ideas – I walk here among these coveted imitations – the ones we really love – hunting for the meaning to its ever outstretched landscape at the very borders of sleep – hunting for meaning in that history of plenty – surrounded by history on all sides.
It is only here in this unburied city I am able to see the whole parish of the civilized mind, the patterns of its movements, here in the webs of metaphors that are the self-expression of the city itself. But perhaps this empty island alone is free from reference, sunburnt by neglect.
What then remains to be written?
A sudden wild slang? A perverted wood raised to flower into corrupt but fruitful ideas? As a poet once said, “It is very late. Amphitheaters of stars are burning up there in the untended planes of blind, unspecified, indifferent time.”
Strangely enough, it is only here that I am able to re-enter the city itself – or so I hope. Here at last I am able to see these investigations as one and the same phenomenon.
I am simply trying to depict the “inside face of facts”. I have no serious quarrel with waiting, but if the reader doesn’t yearn to get at the inside facts of anything, not too many people will get acquainted with themselves.
There’s a lot going on. There is a rehearsal going on in the last book he wrote before he died at a house a little farther down the street in Home Town. I know this, although I can’t know the facts – they are hard to get at.
The church at the corner tells me that there is a play: Waiting Time. Scientists are singing at their evening meeting. In front of another house, the quiet of the lighted windows is more amazing to me than any charged conflict of events.
There was scarcely even a night in the city. There was so much going on but some houses are dark – that is clear to me.
I can know all these things without snooping or without being unduly inquisitive. I know quite a number of men. They seem to be fearful. Aside from that, they seem to be a special bore.
They discover there will be little or nothing. They find themselves more occupied socially. They find their circle. They take a subway trip in small compass.
I like to believe that I know them, and I like to know them and that they believe where there’s a will there’s a way, and they are certainly getting their pleasure a lot.
In the hall over the library, a number of young innocent girls are apparently happily occupied. I catch glimpses of them and feel a pleasant interest.
The radio is an old friend of mine. I myself have spoken of the slowed-up tempo seclusion enforces upon us.
I can see it isn’t necessary. There’s a lot going on – but like the inside facts of anything, were they ever in the city?
I had come to the city to look upon the sacred darkness, patron saint of Palermo, her garment made of a great stillness seen by the light of enchanting illusion – a quiet holy choir of purity here in its original simplicity.
I had come to the city that consists of Being of the oldest formation:
imperfect splendid presence
and imperfect representation of it
ever impossible to convey in words
but generally known only by description,
by some not uninteresting account of its exquisite outline.
She lay, as if in a sort of ecstasy, her eyes half closed, her head resting carelessly on her right hand. I kneeled down before the beautiful sleeper and looked through the openings – in a wild cavern as it were, or possibly the nave of a church.
I need not be ashamed I was hardly able to tear myself from the place, the overhanging rocks, bare with the exception of a little turf and moss that grew. A pathway was built ascending between two cliffs without altering in the least its rough natural form. The consecrated spot is in keeping with the complete renunciation of the world.
When you have ascended the mountain zigzag, you find yourself in a porch which runs into the body of the church and opens into the nave. Here are the usual holy-water vessels. A little fountain stands near the center which is adorned and reverenced with so much innocence and feeling.
And perhaps in no other holy place do you turn round a corner and find your opposite. You open the door without expectation but are filled with astonishment when you enter. You find yourself: far back, in the darkness of the cave – whence it is drawn and used as a remedy for every kind of evil.
I had come to the city – the church, the cave, the choir – protected for now by a continuation of its first founders. I had come up the mountain to look about me with the humility of a saint shut in the scene of a deserted desert.
I sat down on a bench opposite the altar and listened for a while to the priests singing the vesper and gave myself up to the charming illusion of the figure of this place.
A little angel stands near the shimmer of hanging lamps.
What a lively impression is produced upon me by this image – this interior seen as through a veil. It seemed to have an altogether peculiar charm.
The song of the priests slowly died out in the cave like water trickling into a glass.
It was late in the night.
May I be quite frank? Sometimes I wonder whether these pages will interest you much. Is there something wordless and limitlessly deep here? Or is it simply a little hollow, a little empty?
I do not know why I offer my services to you – more than a few lines seems to have turned into more and more of late – the odious desire to chatter has become a real sort of problem in the idealess culprit mind – a clear fault in ourselves. Yet I sought and gained, perhaps, something deeper and self-sufficient in my own nature.
I see now that an artist does not live a personal life, he hides it in his books – life transformed into the enigmatic blueness of his death – a journey (the train that carried me down through these volumes back to myself) beyond, underneath, and somewhere before all understanding.
I speak – I have chosen to speak – but this is not simply the story of a man with a black patch dispossessed of a key. These throbbing pages record the faithful unreality of the word – its necessary conventions, curious abstractions, covenants, great lies, magnetic blurring, absurd drama, and above all: its unanswered silence.
And I shall be here. I have decided I shall always be here – somewhere beyond the tenuous line of the horizon – in memories maintaining themselves in forgetfulness. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make all the old, long-dusted staple promises – I leave that to the priests – and to the humorists.
I shall be here by the water with summer stars in the clear night sky of evening – to touch with tortured tenderness the unreality of the world – to leave here, dear friend, my personal interpretation of the silence around us.
Criminals all around! Penciling in the endless book of longing, possession, jealousy, self-pity, self-justification as though they had secret information above the roar of office conversation. Well, there it is – the unbeautiful work sent over from the stenographic pool.
There must be so many people . . . so many people arranging and rearranging the days and nights. There’s so many things . . . information to have – it breaks your heart with such sad little tragic tears. There must be so many people . . .
But in this room, I hardly know anybody. I think I talked to someone through the door. Of course, I talk to you across the room. I talk to you almost confidently, don’t you think so? Personally? And it’s not only that. Who do you think helped me rewrite this? When we work together, we think like one nameless mind.
You mustn’t feel I’m being possessive.
I’d like to ask you a question. Are you committed to nothing else for life? What I’m driving at is . . . if something – uh – something advantageous, something very advantageous – came up, would you shrug and go off with the throng?
You know what I’m going to do. You’ve read the book haven’t you? You’ve seen the pictures? It’s beautiful. Isn’t it beautiful?
Yes, beautiful.
It’s going to make all the difference, this one.
And you know what I’m going to do. I’m going to get out of here. I’ll just slip out. Don’t tell anybody I’m leaving. I’ll just go wandering around the wispy blue evening wondering about that thing we talked about in the room, relieved that there was a time.
I was sitting back in the room, against a white wall, facing a door. It was only at such times I would think: it may turn out that language has saved my life.
A noise – a door opening – leading to another deserted corridor, a whining little hissing sound.
And now I would like to tell you a thing or two.
You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. Honest. I haven’t got a knife. I just want to talk to you. Honest. I’ve been waiting for you. I insist on being free – but I’ve been waiting for you. And, well, I saw your performance, didn’t I?
There’s only one reason I’m here: I’m crazy about a rider that has never been heard of. I only like other people that nobody else has ever heard of either.
Staring boldly out into the corridor: three men were watching the woman pleasantly displayed, her hair swept back, her eyes shifting uneasily and falsely. She was wearing the same clothes that she had worn the day before. Conscious that the three men were watching, she experienced some of the same embarrassment she had felt last night in the hotel: the knife, the tears, the raving in the bedroom. Wherever she is, whatever she is doing, she is in constant communication with the only guests left – sitting over their coffee when they had finished their meal. She smiled at them, used the gift of common language, the overt brilliance of animal sex, that gratifying flavor of humanity, leaving out nothing.
What does that mean?
Many things all mixed up.
“If a man tried to kill you, waving a knife around, wouldn’t you like to know as much as possible about him?”
“Don’t joke. He is capable of it.” She looked down at her hands. The pretty, insensitive face took on a look of slyness, cunning, as she turned over the questions in her mind and decided whether or not to tell the truth.
“If you must know, that was the only way he would let me out of the house.”
I slid into the chair next to hers and touched her hand and said, “Have you any idea where I can find him? Have you any idea the name of the man, just the name of the man?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it, cutting off speech. By nightfall, it would rain.
Now the living are haunting me, too.
In the hotel bedroom, they lay there together in silence, listening to the rain – the noise of watery obscurity outside the walls muffled by curtains, shutters, and windows.
He looked at her shadowy face beside him, the face of a stranger. Slowly, he returned to himself, slowly I became the visitor in hotel room #654.
“I’m not the same man, now. Not the same man at all,” he said feeling cheated by the tricky durability of celluloid.
“I know,” she said. “When did you decide that I was the girl?”
She stood over him for a moment, her outlines vague in the dimness of the curtained room, the sound of the rain at the windows. I didn’t see anybody.
“I hadn’t met you. But I knew you existed. I knew very well you existed. I saw your film, you see, sitting alone in a movie house. You were so beautiful.”
“You thought I was the girl?”
“Yes. Aren’t you?”
“No. I am not the girl. I am your girl.”
He turned and lay on his back, a dark, warm blur against the dull, firm bed.
“When I was sitting there in the movie house, I guess I thought I knew what it would be like . . . I had it all figured out . . . “
“You were paying for something you didn’t get. You were paying for a twenty-two year old who vanished a long time ago.”
He turned his head, shutting out everything that was not that room, that moment, that bed, shutting out wounds, memories, omens, and premonitions. Unobserved, we all know that the actor could no longer work in Hollywood. He was aware of a knocking. He opened his eyes reluctantly. The room was dark and for a moment he was floating in time, not knowing where he was, what hour of the day or night it was, and not caring – happy in soft, clockless depths. Then the knocking came again, timidly, and he saw the door, and he knew he was in his bed in room #654 in the hotel, the placid secret rain marvelous and deliberate upon the roof – and he knew he was alone.
“No, I am not telling the whole truth. It is not exactly the same as I imagined in the movie house. It is better, much better.”
Like an axe falling: the man you have all been hunting for.
After all, he must be somewhere in the world. How long and how vainly I searched for some reverend gentleman with a feeling of self-importance fed by the fat flames of fantasy – but no, just a very ordinary man – nothing to distinguish him from the thousand other men of this horrible city – completely without orchestration, a forgotten ignorable pattern of ordinariness in the taxi next to us in the breathless heat of a midsummer night, that palpitant moist heat. He was wearing a grey summer suit and a black patch over one eye – which could mean everything or nothing.
I can describe him to you because he was here – still breathing, still alive – passing in the street as if in the act of levitation – and at times I felt convinced – at others I doubted.
“Don’t you see he is dead?”
A figment in the heart of imagination’s borders. Words suspended like so many coats of paint in loving detachment out of the mouth as if in a bad dream turning out into the road in an unmarked taxi too far away to give chase.
This was the man we hunted with great passion, suspense, and anguish. This was the man whose name no one would tell. Why this should be I cannot understand. We repeated over and over again:
“Tell me his name; you must tell me his name.”
And from some perverted power of the will that did not wish to conquer memory, the voice repeated like an oracle of the machine-age:
“I cannot remember. I cannot remember.”
This was the man who had until then been missing, aching and apart, somewhere behind the borders of the world – away from the warped and seedy business worries or excesses.
Perhaps we did wrong in speaking of it openly, of investing it with expression – and perhaps to even imagine that we wish to be cured of it.
But something dense and fantastic drew my gaze in its direction like being stung by a serpent – the promise of release from this suffocating self-enclosure.
The freshness of morning – the air was filled with the smell of stables and newly-mown hay – but things did not stop there. I decided to follow and taste the much vaunted pleasures. I was seeing again the little villages and fantastic forests of my childhood. I thought that all that happiness will endure, but a great silence now reigns over the whole country.
I rushed towards the bridge from nowhere with all the speed of indispensable life. I find the gentleman sitting beside me. This man was nothing but he was speaking – and the meaning of his words terrified me.
“I don’t have to tell you – let it be quite clear: that man has lost the secret of life. I don’t do anything more than state facts.” Pointing to the houses of the sleeping peasants he said, “You will see, they’ll all go, they’ll abandon this way of life, they will all leave the soil, all of them will make machinery which will slowly replace them. And these that remain, to what sort of simple mysticism are they prey?”
My head was on fire.
The most unexpected and strange assortment of odds and ends had been used to build those ephemeral constructions: luxury hotels, apartments, huts, bus depots, state schooling and military service, the cinema, short skirts, increased movement of the motor-car . . . the cost of true stories from the newspaper under the guise of ‘ideals’. But let us thank the pure sense of the word – the necessity – the word that stretches to surround the entire city and will end by stifling you and your aversion to progress. Go back to the Stone Age! Perhaps even the instinct of self-preservation!
The completely illiterate don’t despair of achieving their end – they sleep in a little apartment on the sixth floor beaten by new difficulties. The war succeeded in infiltrating into the city itself. And with what purpose?
To exchange a word with us – it has given us a proper sense of realities – the simple and credulous masses have learnt a lot – to climb one on top of each other until the whole pile topples over. Look! They are advancing . . .
This man was a gasbag but he was opening my eyes to things I did not wish to see.
“D’you know where we’re going?” he asked me suddenly with an abstracted air. “Not that I’ve worried about it.”
And then: ” . . . into Eternity. Into Eternity!”
I get up my head aching, my hands tightened. I continue to utter mechanically the last words that are still on my lips: “Into Eternity! Into Eternity!”
The morning breeze made me feel more serene – some frogs croak in the pond – the trunks of the trees a soft delicate grey.
On leaving the bridge, I was determined not to open my mouth again because if the human species continues to exist, it is only thanks to the simplicity that man has lost the secret, has lost the original word and agreed to camouflage all this nothing with a sea of incredible symbolic production.
A deserted village – its inhabitants either dead or gone away. I go to sleep filled with anguish. Outside, the air is heavy, the wind has risen howling in the abandoned chimneys – a movement recounted into eternity.
After a certain disconcerting absence, my return home to the little house empty of occupants didn’t please me in the least. To my great surprise, it looked as though everything – the whole business – was going to quite simply start all over again. The end never seemed to be in sight. The night shift replaced the day shift. The machinery never stopped working. Tomorrow, one felt, the end must be in sight! What was the use of death if it didn’t bring peace to the dead?
With one foot in the grave, people were too tired to pay any attention to the future of the world and left everything in the fine hands of the rich.
Well, all right . . . but what are we going to do afterwards?
Some said that before the beginning back in that little village in the little house, there was an old man. He was filled with immense joy though he just couldn’t understand why he was happy. So at last the drafting of the division of the world was in the hands of this old man who had said: “I am a war-maker!”
No longer in a position to plead his innocence, Death finished his gigantic daily meal and looked forward to a well-earned rest.
Now we were definitely going to start all over again. And everybody went mad with joy.
You’ve come here a stranger to the house as a duty taken upon itself.
It’s murder to live here after all – a wonder you didn’t see the blood smeared on the gates.
But how quiet it is – so quiet you can hear the stillness. You push open the double doors into the drawing-room – the long mirror silently surveying the far end of this vast, shapeless, old room – now dead – the mute symbol of something departed – something that wasn’t necessary left through the curtained windows like ghosts of memories.
Even the night appeared to have gone away.
I suppose it will never be opened again.
No, I suppose it is closed for good.
Just the dust. Cobwebs reverently hung from the crystal chandeliers and wall sconces. Just silence after the ball was over – abandoned shadows humming long forgotten old ballads with an air of hopefulness.
The beautiful stranger climbed up the long stairway languidly as if time had simply been an illusion – her dark eyes were shining with tears.
And at the turn of the stair, the figure moved away and the spectacle thoroughly disappeared.
Terror arrived before me at a place in which he had never set foot. He was fat and stocky. He had a broad face. He was master and lord. His dual qualities of bravado and boastfulness had already formed a friendship with suffering and death. He was a swaggering fellow who had seduced life with the gentle caress of words of encouragement.
And he had taken a liking to me.
“I’ll invite you to dinner,” he said.
He led me into the private courtyard of the house. As he whistled an especially hideous hell underneath a window, a small door opened, the soft feel of lacerated flesh more tragic than the ambulance on its way to the hospital, the hard and cruel fact of all that aching silence so long forgotten.
“I brought a pal along,” he said to me, my eyes filled with tears.
“The hero-wound of burnt glory.”
All this was done for me – back alive to be killed by these faraway mistresses: hope and rest.
A thin drizzle was falling.
It enveloped everybody and everything in a grey sadness which made the memory of this melancholy winter morning even more so.
Winter – and the weather as I look outside from the window is fresh and dry, the sun gleams on the frosty branches.
I am in a hurry to hear the melancholy and mysterious words of the songs heard from the house at the end of each open road. I do not understand the meaning of them. I prefer it that way. What opportunities for adventure were there for me!!
Only yesterday, I was climbing on the scaffolding of all the same words piled up to the skies in all the same gestures impossible to forget, impossible to leap around. This slow rhythm of sentimental moral conventions holds no memories for me.
Keeping to the production of my work, I hear the funeral march and think of what will be when I am dead and gone.
No sooner had the words arrived at the steps leading up to the front door of the house, then they were emptied into the earthy garden, covered with a fine gravel which was carefully raked over by the gardener each week of each year. With a touch on my finger, a new music is set in motion . . . the needle scratches a little . . . the first and only performance of this unique tune – but I have always listened to you – you with the same voice today as ever – I will have always listened to you!
One morning the builders will arrive with their ladders propped against the walls and all sorts of new building materials in a heap to make some alterations.
Opportunities for adventure – new paths in the garden leading to the very borders of meaning.
Railway carriages clatter over the rails – the melancholy sound of departure.
Was the world truly, and for the first time, beginning?
What if I chose, despite various failures and inhibitions, to walk with an air of individual import and completely desert the words here laid out before me that I had hitherto been riding as though canoeing along in the silence of the moonlight, intrigued by the beauty of its unusual and exceedingly delightful tributaries, picturing her – the seducer – not without a sense of evil – picturing her sense of movement and life and, even more vigorously than before, desirous of yielding to the wild convulsive pleasure motivating both, remaining deeply connected to her sunshiny sweetness at least as much as the unendurable, almost overwhelming fear she represented and which he, the other, might still hope to express in that great symbol and shrine to her – the house, closed and silent, the pleasures of honeymoon days passed.
Where women were concerned, he was plainly an adulterer – he who preys outside the precincts of the proper order of life – even firmly and painfully convinced that this was sin – deadly, mortal – protesting not thoughtlessly, not recklessly, not wildly – but, in any case, peering nervously, obsequiously into the blank future – approaching with wonder and delight a new and more intimate form of contact!
The one thing that did trouble him at times was the thought that possibly – in connection with the original fear – she was now his and his only, to do with as he wished – although even then there was no thought in his mind of marriage. He would not do that. He was content to devote himself to her without thinking much of the future – her future that was really dependent on his will and whim but which he had obviously never possessed. If now she was willing to sacrifice herself for him, must there not be others? Flirting young girls strutting all about, looking forward with an eagerness to the seduction of the approaching night.
Still, he looked at himself in his mirror from time to time, not without an assurance and admiration – wishing from day to veering night that the long day might end, dreaming from day to night returning, concealing the day to day at hand, yielding to day hurrying only later to meet somewhere the rewarding night and he, so completely overcome and swayed, yielding to the other thereafter.
If I chose to simply abandon the words which connected all these comings and goings to the city, to the house, to the symbol, to the gardener, to the other, to her in the hotel room of every unheralded resort – and the ecstatic pleasures of these relations – would fortune perhaps favor him a little or was this to be the end of all his dreams?
Who was compelled to work for a living?
Might we ever meet again in that unrecapturable Paradise of that silent unlighted room? Slip away somewhere into some place not of this station – as in a dream, really – abandoned to that which he knew not.
For after all, who was she?
Might he never know again the fever of riding so wild and not trouble to speculate too deeply?
Behold, I am no longer the inexperienced, neglected simpleton, but someone who knows something about life – what I am – what I might do – canoeing in the silence of the moonlight in the middle of night returning me to the city, object of delight, its sense of movement and life so much in evidence from time past to time present, its dark secret he had never quite been able to expel from his mind and had drawn him to her now industrial tributaries laid out before him with the blank grandeur of a future waiting to be reported.
Oh, if he were but of it!
It seemed to me that I understood everything now. I could step into the place of the shadow where I thought I had penetrated to the heart of the disease, found the clue (or thought I did) to that rectangular meeting room which we longed to share and from which we somehow felt excluded. Some great impediment rose up between us like a passion – those immense journeys we nevertheless undertook together across the length and breadth of an imagination dying. Its necessary object was a man who no longer existed – perhaps never had – an impossible memory still sort of alive and decomposing. One cannot help smiling at the happiness of the thought – but everything is susceptible of more than one explanation and there is no mistaking they are worth consideration.
Even now as I write in this strangled voice struggling to remember who the man was and where he was, I thought: “What did I hope to do in this gaunt book-lined cell in which the light of the sun now fell upon a corpse?”
Nevertheless there he was – the true enemy – standing squarely between myself and an entirely novel me that I could truly possess, that I could break – a man detached who was no longer exactly living.
I understand everything now.
It was a heartbreaking predicament.
I felt I had confessed to an act of deliberate unfaithfulness. I recreated these incidents and re-enacted them. I struggled to hide in them accompanied by floods of tears and I could obtain from this time forward no satisfaction in all the colors of commonplaceness. We had become a sort of mental masturbation.
But here was something!
What was it? What!
Confronting one’s face in the mirror, I became aware of these substitutes for ourselves – that they do not explain but they do illuminate to a degree the instability of actions.
This explains, so to speak, the grand tour: the flickering of steel rails vaguely floating away across the mountains and valleys.
Backwards and forwards like a baby in a cradle until I began to disappear once and for all overcome by the shadow’s name: just I, né… Jean Bosh.
{ } VK Arkiv 