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The Prodigal

Posted in fiction, poetic prose on December 3, 2012| Leave a Comment »

FROM far away, from the other end of the inverted telescope of slow forgetting, her native place begins to take on a ritual, hieratic choreography. There, in the place she has left, she sees people moving towards hanging things on the far, parched horizon. Something is sought out there, with open eyes, then with closed. Are they sideshow trifles, condemned collaborators, strange fruits of the earth that hover above the line beyond which things lose all definition?

Yet things unseen, undreamt can always be imagined, we are told by the bus-stop prophets, talk-show hosts, the weekend newspapers. There is a soundtrack to every revolution, to send it on its way, which can be ordered on request. The people move, again, two steps forward, then one back. A cautious, but steady progress. It is possible to venture into the unknown, dip the toes in the waters to be found there, before returning to the safety-zone of home territory. In her telescope-view, though, the hanging things (of Babylon? the charnel-house? the Gates of Eden? she still can’t tell) beckon them onward, and no-one blocks their nose or shields their eyes out of fear or disgust of what might be there. There have been wars before, and massacres, even the occasional desert kidnapping, and young bodies found slashed to pieces in a dry gully, or not found at all, in all the thousands of dry river-beds of the wild country.

Her oneiry though suggests a modest redemption: taste of these fruits and you shall receive knowledge, in these strung-up angel wings hides the wisdom of the ages. They might be wings, she sees, thickly feathered, growing mouldy and foul under the rain and the sun. When the historians and anthropologists come to claim them it won’t be an easy thing to ready them for the museum or the government-sponsored cultural exposition. These large and ludicrous relics of an unearthly visitation will be full of ants and maggots, new live things breeding in the irrelevance of the old.

Such things are redundant, that much is clear, even in the economy of her daydream. The country she sees now only in these images of doubt (the people still walk across the ground, aching with questions) has spent its whole life in a dogged pilgrimage toward its own vast horizons, without being sure of what it has found there. Walking past the most rare of its treasures in the half-light of centuries of dusk. That is what a destiny is: to pursue a journey without knowing what has been lost and gained on the way, and to not know the destination at which you arrive.

She sees them, the pilgrims of doubt, hears the tracklist as they move: an old-time waltz in three-four time, the Internationale, accordion confections, folk-rock anthems, house-music beats that twang and thud into ventureless aeons of the sky where they are transformed into sub-acoustic skeins of delirium, of delight. If they are wings strung up there, they must belong to emus or vultures, or they’re versions of Mussolini and his mistress, her make-up kit slipping out of her handbag hanging upside down. They are enormous wasp hives, one labyrinth built onto another like post-apocalyptic cities, insect Metropoli, whose inhabitants think in five dimensions but dream outside them. They are apostle lovers who twirl and plunge in mid-air, hanging in space, hanging onto eachothers’ robes in that well-known Renaissance defiance of gravity.

As they move, she sees some of the people drop out of the race. They stumble to their knees, gasp in the dust and fall by the wayside. For many it is too much to keep moving toward whimsical uncertainties. If it is necessary to entertain hope, it is reasonable to ask what hope would hope for. These people are considerately collected by governmental health-workers and led to waiting mobile health-units, put inside sterile interiors and never seen again. They might die in there, or simply be taken away to subsist in a more or less dependent state. Those who keep walking are growing hungry, their bones beginning to show. It is still a long way to walk, though loudspeakers punctuate the air with general directions, but it is up to the ones gifted with a radar-like sense, those small-bodied female pilgrims with desert-fox ears, to know which is the right way to go. There are no signs in the ground, and the paths are vanished by wind, rain and rare floodwater. Even the animals have resisted this particular search, and stay in the shade, for rest.

The more she witnesses this vision of the ages, the more the prodigal realises she has seen it before. The procession has always been moving; with distance she is able to pay more attention to it. She would like to reverse the telescope of her inner-eye and focus on the clusters of mystery beyond it. Astronomers will in a similar way recognise galaxies within nebulae that suggest still more fractal diminutions of rediscovery, though the end point of rest is never quite reached. As a child she only grew impatient with the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, after testing it out a number of times: it was only another mythology, like so many discoveries as the age of reason dawns. Is this just another? But she watches, closer, zooms further in to the tribe of her own people, some now clutching their own arms, their faces falling in an abysmal recognition, some openly collapsing as something grows inexorably clear to them. She can’t see what it is – the telescope is still reversed, she is still caught in an archaic technology. The further they move from her the smaller grow their objects of revelation. What do they see there? What are the hanging goods that meet them at this crossroads?

She sees their impersonal sky splintering a shower of inorganic circuitry, the surface of its habitual yawning blue fragmented into a disinvestiture of space under which the last of the wanderers look up and open their eyes, granted a view into something she cannot see. They move still, doggedly, almost automata, into the horizon of hanging things, and she can see no separation, there is a failure of distance between the horizontal and vertical planes, each figure walks into its dreams, and its horror, the submerged, the resurrected, the extinct, the half-alive, all infinitesimally crowding into her view.

She sees them, the explorers and the black children leading them, the massacred and the massacrers, the outlaw and his nemesis laughing in trees, the reconaissance parties camped under stringybarks, dying of starvation, the gold and the blood that drains out of sifting pans and back into the blood-red and brown indifference of the landscape. There is an epochal wind, opening and shutting the flaps of the sky, a transparent curtain of lazy time, beaches and sea-coasts echoing with lies and night-songs under its casual aspirations, whole vowels and syllables of history swallowed in an azure gaze of retreat and approach, random comings and goings of ant-colonies, cattle-trains, motorcades of transport-trucks and military convoys blistering at metallic seams under a peristaltic, heaving sun, satellite and space-stations absorbed into its sheer magnesium glow, and the expanding chorus of hanging things, of half-beings, bardo realms of ghosts and aborted genealogies moving into and through the rift of sky and space, outside of time but deep inside the place of dreaming, the place of return, the place of no-returning.

The prodigal knows she both goes with them, into their history, and flies far beyond it. Their perseverence train trails still further away, like all human trajectories, into terrains and projection-screens of imagining she will never know. As she watches them move into the unknown, she only wants to follow, and not let them go – the sympathetic resonance still vibrates in her inner-ear, as she tries to decipher the path before her.

They are already gone, and the hanging things in front of them. The dead, the forgotten, unseen and forsaken. She will go with them into a new pursuit, speaking a language none of them have heard before. The epidermis of the earth still hangs there, golden and crusting as it seeps through the entrance in the sky, the abysm of time swinging and shutting, opening and closing the moveable door of memory, absently moving back and forth in the wind that is her own breath, the canopy and portal to the country of her mind, past which new denizens emerge, waltz, drop, fade away into dunes and long nights of spinifex. There is a shift in her view, the light in abeyance, the rent sky closing before motion begins, the miniature nomad colony moving once again. A faint sound of the sea or desert, held still in amniosis. There is no separation, no arrival, in the going, in those who move, and those who have never departed.

Paris, 2006

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The Gods of Levinas (an extract)

Posted in memoir, poetic prose on October 31, 2012| Leave a Comment »

IN Paris the Arab tea-houses and corner-store dervishes debating uncommon theologies, the sad-eyed students and Malian street enthusiasts, are doubtless still on the street where they have been left in imagination, there yet not there – there was an abstract argument implied in the act of removal: to be is to be perceived, yet to be perceived is to exist as a value, and what value do things lost, abandoned or unremembered still possess?

You would go into the Turkish place for sweet mint tea that it was impossible to pay for. Had you wanted or intended it, it would still be impossible to offer money for the tea. It was a gift, out of nowhere. After the tea, a nargileh of cinnamon or apple-flavoured tobacco or both together. The people, men with neat hair, women moving behind them, secret stage-directors, would happily talk – French, Arabic, little English. What language is spoken in your country? We would not know, we have never been there, we have never thought of it. It was the most limpid kind of communication, tiny glasses balanced on our knees, strangers come out of the grit of streets, the traffic and constant street-cleaning machines spraying down man, dog and tree alike, Catholic cleanliness an echo of all the pure pilgrimages, how they spoke of Mecca and the purity of white cloth, the white heart of renunciation, the white light of illumination.

You never wore white.

They were illuminated, as all things were, by the twilight emergence of the café-lights, the more lurid reddish glows from regular bars and the glaring fluoro of West African hairdressers, a heightened bustling with the starlings in the plane-trees at the coming of the night. One of the men there said his name was Hassan and he had sought refuge in Paris from old war and old disintegration: uncles, family house, sisters, sisters’ children, disintegrated in Beirut, Jerusalem, Tehran – which birds of Paris were flying there now? You both could see starlings erupting over the twilights of rubbled walls, minarets saintly pink in the fading, foggy sky, fumes of holiness and disintegration from mosque and car-yard, a million two-stroke engines beetling under the swoop of the birds, which still carried Paris in their hidden bird’s ears…

It didn’t matter that you had never been to those places, though you had been to others. Hassan showed you his hand, the missing joint of the fourth finger, a street-bomb when he was twelve – but what’s different now? he yelled, there in the tea-house, five miles away in the suburbs there are a thousand burning cars tonight, Molotov cocktails, bonfires, celebration, sacrificial joy, you destroy and smash it down so it can grow and be built again. The creator-destroyer – you know him? Him? you asked. Yes, Him! Him! Hassan was excitable, then he could laugh as easily, replenish your glass and speak again, of his own relocations and removals, his fiancée who he had never seen again, the sound of his brother’s oud in the courtyard in the warm evenings – my friend, Hassan said, you were never there but you know already how it sounds, the strings in the light air of memory, how she came to me with a serious face and her textbooks in her hand – she always wanted to go to Australia, become immunologist, immune from what? I would ask her. You can’t be protected from anything, it all comes in, there is no escape, no reason to be safe – she called me fool, me, Hassan, a fool! Maybe she’s there now, strange place Australia. I cut my chances, come to Paris, you see the lights, coming on all over the city, everywhere, this is why I love it here, there is always light, somewhere in the city, my friend, please remember this, I would not lie…

It was true, the city was seduced by lights of fruit-sellers, Metro corridors, ambulances and police-cars regularly sheering through light-filled people, nicotine or hashish-lights, cinematic lights, Jean Renoir and Edith Piaf glowing lanterns and blitzkrieg halogens blaring in the memory of the others who passed them on in prismatic reflection to all the unknowns, milled there under the nuclear Tour Eiffel daring the night every night with the lights of a million sacrificed fireflies, the insect-world summoned and thrown into that extravagance of illumination, enough to roll cigarettes by down by the lit-up slow water, the faint lights of hunger under the bridges, walkways, shadowed space between candle-lit boats. Hassan had said, every time, what do you see today my friend? Always a light in his far-travelled eyes and he knew the question was a metaphor and a koan because if it could be easily answered, as easily as he himself had asked it, it might be merely something glimpsed or supposed, in the light of reason, or happenstance, not seen as you see – he would point her out – the small girl on the pavement who went by singing at the top of her lungs and blowing kisses to all the passersby, or the old woman with the wheeled crate of groceries who passed by at exactly that moment every night, 7.04pm, as often in the rain as in the balmy late-summer, the imam or the intellectual in his robes touching his moustache, adjusting his glasses, coming from a meeting where he has been plotting total world illumination. Do you see, Hassan asked always at those end-of-days. Do you see?

You saw and you didn’t see. You saw that you and Hassan might have been brothers, along with the Bulgarian or Ukraine illegals, that tomorrow he might not be in the tea-house at dusk, sent back into the dusty places, or you yourself snatched in the night by ancient ghosts or unforeseen fears and kept to your own unquiet dark, the unlighted room, the blindness to light. So many were there for a week, a month, always there at a corner table, over a Turkish coffee and a cigarette, and then one day gone. Where was the henna-hair woman with the Marseille tarot-pack? In Marseille? Hospital? Council-house in the dark banlieu? She would be sure to reappear, surely. In the passing of days, though, she she never did. You looked out for her, la rouge, hard to miss…

You saw the Chinese toy-seller moving from café to restaurant always trying out the same wares on an unlikely clientele, dragging plastic gewgaws out of the same huge laundry bag, frayed at the handles, his suit never changed, silver nylon, tie wound too tight around a chafed neck. You never bought anything, though you wanted to. You had no use for anything he could offer – plastic machine-guns, talking poodles, flimsy sunglasses, made in Shanghai, Shanghai, Shanghai. He would never give up, all the way back to Shanghai, had learnt the hard way, good bosses like Mao or Deng, hard worker, no sweat, no problem, cigarette behind greasy ear, whipped out in one of many idle moments, snapped between big white teeth. He would stay long after the invitation, even Hassan snarled at his approach. Refuses my tea – can you believe it? Too much sugar, too sweet for him. Bonne courage, seller of useless toys.

You didn’t want to feel sorry for the Chinese man but you did, and every time you thought to offer money for something, it didn’t matter what it was, the hard sting in his eyes stopped you, you thanked him before he moved on, but he was alone, slipping into the little India flashing restaurant-lights with the laundry-bag over his shoulder. It was always full, always pregnant with unspent abundance, potential, an excess of life.

Everywhere the same abundance. Untested, untasted, very often. It was a fullness that wouldn’t be exhausted by use. By day’s end the streets were again occupied with a guerilla army of dancing men, moving from foot to foot, exchanging hand-slaps and Euro bills, confidence, radical doubt. Not long before it was AK-47s in their hands, long black arms, khaki drab dulling the eyes. For some it had started even earlier, as ten, twelve year-olds in the Congo, the Sudan, Uganda. Where there have been craters of loss, life floods back in. Large tracts of emptiness assaulted with sudden rainfalls. A flip of the cards, a visa, a passport to unseen worlds.

Fullness, freedom at hand – so why untested? You could hold potential in cupped hands, but it needed something more. You were luckier, not a refugee, nor black, nor illiterate, you could move through all things like a chameleon. They had the widest smiles but the least to choose from. They could pull brooms through the streets, pick up garbage-bins at dawn, hanging on the back of the trucks, still laughing in bright green and yellow fluorescent clothes. You laughed as well, the same jokes, the same loneliness, and caught the Metro to work in an office at a blackboard with black ink on your fingers. In the courtyard the black children always playing with plastic balls – large families, a lone mother, the fathers never nearby, never showing face. They had less choice than you, though their French was native, their songs at play so loud they ran into the classroom, upended tables, sent distracted students out for cigarette breaks, standing apart, the children at one side, the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie at another.

You stood in the middle and waited. In the abundance, the Paris drizzle, a mild rainfall, nothing too spectacular, your potential, and theirs, still held in the hand. The Parisian youth, sharp tousled hair, Cocteau clones ambisex cool, looked out for the same thing – in America, land of plenty, full with towers of milk and honey. The anthrax was a thing of the already-forgotten past. You could offer them the language, they promised continued hegemony. Paris would have culture bleeding like haemmorhoids from its pores til the end of time. So much fullness there was always too much to see, too much art made the retina go slack, too much mental sex and things began to droop. Such rich ideas with such negligible effect. The children would start yelling again, singing songs from Abidjan, listen to us, they yelled, crying now too, listen to this song, you’ve never heard it before.

You hadn’t, it was true, but the traffic was loud and constant, and there were people singing on almost every Paris street-corner. Accordions, steel-drums from Senegal, balalaikas from Belorus, punksters from Iowa in front of a reassuring Starbucks with Uncle Sam berets. When it was time for lunch, cigarettes still smouldering, the students went to Burger King. It was good practice, they thought, to learn how to speak as the locals would, if they were here.

At the Archipel Cinéma on Sebastopol she would be there, reading the reviews, though you never went inside with her. She was too critical of all the films, nothing ever satisfied. Levinas in the no-name wine-bar was better. Levinas was always there, would live forever. Totality and Infinity was her bible – her M.A. thesis, parachuted into the Congo Civil War, how does the Other pass muster now? her father from Strasbourg staying there only so long for her to be born there. She never saw him now, only the mother, divorced, in the country house in Aix. The cultural strain, she said, it couldn’t be sustained. And she was the filet in the middle. She would never see any movie with you – none of them were serious enough, and you were, after so much talk still an unknown quantity. A passenger in space, moving through. You will be gone soon, she said. Another white man with a plane to catch.

The fruit-seller was always there, at Chateau d’Eau, even at near-midnight. He knew it by heart after a couple of weeks: five Euro of red grapes. Thank you Sir, in his Sri Lankan English, and you wondered if he would ever open his own fruit store, in a fixed place, or was his visa truncated as well. You didn’t even have one. The white man with a plane to catch didn’t need one, and no-one asked questions. The French, you already knew, would never talk about money, though they gauged its absence or abundance at first glance. You didn’t want to deceive them, and it’s not easy for nothing to pretend to something.

The nothing, the emptiness, could only fill so quickly, and the rain didn’t always fall, despite the elegant drizzle over melancholy cornices. Everyone went to Paris to suck on its beauty like oysters, but sometimes even beauty took off its mask and a blank, bare face, hard to place, was left there, only something negligible left underneath – a park after dusk, the torn pages of a diary left in the street. Les Invalides, les Tuileries, le Grand Palais, sometimes, when the facade fell after the long, rapturous season – an aging lady wiping off the greasepaint and lying down for a rest and soon she was asleep and nothing was there but the future anterior tense.

When Paris took off its beauty you would repair to the back streets – the back-backstreets. A bar, wholly nothing, on the rue des Favorites, what was there? Nothing there, not even “no symbol where none intended.” It was a jaunty show, not a sign of a tourist, not even a half-decent coffee. It was nothing  coffee so nothing it wasn’t even bad. Afterwards you could pass through Denfert-Rochereau and make for the Salpetrière and present yourself to the newest specialist in le néant and show him your wild, empty palms. Look doctor – nothing there! It wasn’t merely being condemned to be free, it was the way they gave your stolen goods back to you after you’d stayed the sentence, full again, fed well on solitude, and you were to go out and lose it all over again. Tant pis!

Sooner or later she was sure to succumb, to the cinema and the dream, and surrender to a story she’d never yet heard. You wouldn’t leave Paris, and she’d understand it before long. No-one would ever leave again. Where was there for you to go now? Istanbul? Sydney? Madras? The boss wanted to send you to Moscow: the zero kingdom. You thought of the snow, the ice, the vast, flat horizons, the Siberian future laid out like a denuded chess-board, everything become two-dimensional in the cracking air. The flat earth won out, you stayed earthbound, you caught the Vincennes line, you unlocked the house of fidelity and made your bed there. You would marry the city and pay court to the gods of Levinas, blind men with agile feet who would bring village singers to your door. They would come from everywhere – from Dakar, Cotonou, Minsk and Des Moines. Let the plenty rain down, let the traffic stop in its tracks, the Metro shut down, the Seine run between our sheets.

You would taste that love, its salt on the tongue. All of them, all the gods of Levinas, would be there, Hassan, his sister, the noisy children trailing after. Even after you had gone, and lost their names on small pieces of paper, they would still be there, passing light from hand to hand.

 Copyright © 2006

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The Visitor

Posted in poetic prose on July 14, 2010| Leave a Comment »

You don’t know who you are anymore. There was rumour of someone who’d passed through before you, perhaps after. You try to recall the one case, imagine the other, but neither are very clear.

Cities arriving and departing, to no particular schedule. They leach in through your window, elaborate, high-toned, submissive, their thousand and one things held out for your consideration. The prospects are inexhaustible.

Every morning the same girls hanging out for your business. They come to you and take hold of your hand, as if you would walk them to the other side of town, into the sea, out of life. You are their guide, without any map showing the way. The girls stole it from you, long before you arrived. You’ve been looking for it ever since. These days you are map-blind, and you play things by ear.

Someone was yelling to you from the other side of the street. You looked that way, they could be yelling your name, the one you’ve forgotten. You heard them yelling something, but you couldn’t catch what it was. When you go over there whoever they are is gone. Even the echo of your name is gone. The name that might have referred to you, that might not.

Who you are is not who you are. This you have heard uncountable times. Who you are not is who you are. This you’ve heard almost as often. The word ‘are’ leaves something to be desired – it lacks substance, it might be unfinished, it requires a definitive consonant to put some kind of an end to it. ARE-D, ARE-K, ARE-X.

Arid, a wreck, an ark, a rex. Barren, ruined king, sitting in his ark. This is who you will be, until next time: even if only for pretend.

Fortunately someone reserves a place for you. A chair in the theatre, a folding-contraption in the front rows. A director’s chair, no less – you will sit there and order life around. You go to take your place, watch the show, and start making quiet suggestions. Perhaps a prop there, a slight adjustment of the mise-en-scène. Nothing too dramatic. But there are silent censors in the theatre, and the more confident you become, the more they question your direction. When you ask for more transparency, a more honest play-acting, you seal your demise – the folding-chair wobbles a little before swallowing you whole. A flytrap chair, in a flea-bitten theatre, in a fishbowl city you barely know. They should have some compassion. You are only a visitor, after all.

She wanted to come with you, and you wanted to leave. Neither of you knowing why, nor the end in sight.

The musician on the corner has a kazoo, as well as an electric guitar. He comes out of the 1960s. Everybody seems to come out of the 60s, even those who already come from somewhere else. But if you were to ask them, none would be able to confirm the fact. To come out of somewhere is to not know you do: this is its only guarantee.

The tourist pockets her change. She has too many pockets and not enough change. This is frustrating, and requires her to buy another item in order to fill her multiple pockets properly with change. But she must also use this change to buy new items, which affords her another amount of change. Such is the change of the change of change. The tourist doesn’t know this last fact, but she is very, very sure of where she comes from. In order, naturally, to return. To able to leave again, and return (etc.).

Idly they pass by: days, songs, lovers, histories, traces of civilization. You stay there, see them pass. Even though you too, finally, are only a visitor. You want to ask: who watches me go?

The woman in the café brings you your change. A remarkable old café in a remarkable old city of the world. A wonderful world, the man sings. The woman watches you go. Later, she too will leave (the song will still be playing).

Everyone will leave, passing transparently through this space. You will be able to see them go. But you will see them through another’s eyes. Not knowing, for certain, if they are still your own.

Barcelona, July 2010

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From the novice Servetus to the Sixth Great Patriarch in the Year of Burning

Posted in fiction, poetic prose on October 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »

[Uncovered in the year 2061, engraved schist dated c. 311 CE. Former South Aral Sea.]

Not to know, not to have heard […] Already time, then, bleeding from the eye/mechanism [not human]. Not a text religious – but, not to know, shaken like a twig in the last breath of wind. We have known, havn’t we, together, on the sea-edge? Havn’t we gone out there together, to see? Hydras and sea-wrecks. Hanging gardens under those swells. Deep fathoms…places of rest.

[The following reconstructed:]

You waited, Saviour, for the burning first to end. Came and plucked us out of boiling depressions in earth, insects and reptiles caught in our hair. You saw the nudity and the waste, the excrement dribbling down. Don’t tell me how your eyes too, didn’t burn and drop from their sockets. Perhaps, like others, you see not from eyes but from the fierce fire of truth that, they say, lights up all before it. (You are that, Lord, are you not? In such as you has trust been placed).

     They had forgotten your crime, if crime it was. No-one came to look there anymore, for the proof, the remnant signs, the footprints left in the ground. The ground itself had shifted, after all, and after all this time. You had worshippers and detractors both; they had all gone also. Who was left? (Not I…). Inestimable friends, who all were swept far by the tide. We come back to the sea, you tell us, to the edge of a vast tract of space, and I believe you because I have seen it is not in you to lead me astray, that all your false paths are still destinations without peer.

It was said you were both a woman and a man, Seer, in the beginning, and at your first arrival with us here. I have not seen it with my own eyes, but I have seen it in dreams, the forest of genitals I had been abandoned to, woken in me and sent on one mission following another […] No fruit on the vine, no fruit grows in that sea. Left there – they later told me – in a rush basket, an Orphan as you are Sire – so not surprising I should come to follow so many paths into jungle […] thickets growing thick in my veins, iridescent teeth flashing in the soup of blood and brine that rose over my head in a bath of foetid rapture. For I loved the blood, Master, of virgin and crone, though neither could still the noisome [dragonfly?] lodged in my innards, a tiny freak born in the wrong organism, the wrong climate, the wrong time […]

You starved it out of me, Deliverer, as you had so many others. In the time of invasion, when all my brothers went through desert in high-summer to hold the borders, you sent me, Lord, back the other way, away from mortal fight, to wage my own war with sickly enemies not outside myself. Alone, with only that old despised chimaera to keep me company during the worst of the cold nights. Scorpions, the rock held in my hand, the penis hard in its rope-sheath, for a thousand nights on end. Yet I was not deserted. You thought nothing of it, while a thousand miles away the city [self-destructed? imploded?], the dogs howled and they took the heads off peacocks, pregnant women, the old and raving with an equal disdain. You thought nothing of all that, Unbeliever, though it was my mother and yours that they raped. Vanquish the mother of illusion, you sent word, sooner than all the mothers of Christendom, the heathen lands and unknown worlds combined. Sever her grasp on your entrails, cut through her bonds and tear free. GAUNT [GALLED?] FREEDOM. Lord, I ate the asp and the antelope, the adder and the grape, and still there was provender left. Neither abundance nor riches were denied me. Yet I grew jaundiced and hollow, groveling under your palm of mercy, all those paradise fronds singed with sulphur. The interminable sun […] How you knew it would tame us, and bring us back to you, Great One, and your gilded road. Still scurvy and rackets of pain struck on bone and […]

[…] back to us, back to man and woman, ambigentile [?], suppurant wound, lie with the disease, the sign on the eye that dispels unwanted auguries – you have told grace on us. The wounded returned, on bandaged feet, no hands, or ears, or eyes, as you said they would, and came for our succour. I did my duty by you and lay down by them and drank blessed pus of their [ignorance?] but so imbuing their misdeeds with truth. For they know not what they do. You spoke of the Sun, of its burning, and we knew not what you spoke. You spoke of the Starvation, and we had hungered though never imagined of this eternal fast you have prophecied. You spoke of the cruel humour of Usury and we too laughed because we never supposed such riches and wealth not nourish and serve men but destroy them completely. Yet you were always right Lord though we had not listened to you […] as you were called in every land Unbeliever. ‘What power do you call on’, you asked us, ‘when no other power survives you? What believe?’ you asked, and in the long hiatus between times of life (it was a species of death, a pretend-life, you called it ‘practise time’ – but for what, our true demise, the end of things?) we tried to answer. But left with nothing, these scratches on stone, and hence we too Unbelievers. The scourge was waiting, with spear and haft, weapons raised in waiting […]. Back into cities we went, hemp rags hanging from our backs, no answer and none to be found, for they were ailing, so much stench, the fruits of their worldly endeavour strewn about, palaces fallen, carnage, piles of waste, flyblown, breeding in dull water, uneaten foetid edibles left aside, all the vast of that labour and long industry, and their hands now empty. Asking. Can you help? (Can you help us, now, Master?) And we could not, they had sown such seeds of their own will […]

Yet they thought us dying, as they were. Never saw in us the ember of life eternal, still lit […] Blessed untruth [?] of yours, Great One, the Sixth of your lineage […] bastard god, being of no Father.

[Entries in square brackets interpellations of the editor/translator, December, 2062]

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Near Mumbai, November 2008

Posted in memoir, poetic prose, reportage on October 8, 2009| 1 Comment »

 

 

Jalgaon, 25.XI.08

 

Grit that seems to come from under the door. As if self-willed, stolen in by night. In the morning, before I turn on the TV, there is a small ritual of gathering this fine sand, come in from the street, from different travellers’ shoes, from the largely arid wastes of the plains beyond the small town. A minor ordering against general encroachments.

In the mid-morning, the TV doesn’t work. The general power is disconnected, though this is only meant to last for three hours: a struggle with a minor addiction to the World Movies channel. There is a disturbance, outside, down the corridor, a brief verbal skirmish between a Spanish woman and one of the Indian workers: she is impatient and he is repeatedly apologetic, both it seems in a familiar mode, a small scene of disorder they have played out many times before this one. The woman wins the minor contest – even in India. ( In bed reading early Bellow by torchlight, this room immured from light, the adventures of the prose exploit this one, a youth again, in hiding, picaresque fugitive between walls. I never know what will come next.)

Later, with the power returned, there’s more sense in going out to eat. The Mumbai ticket needs confirming, down at the local station, an obscure, stray satellite of one of Dante’s purgatorial suburbs. And always far more people than the existing system seems able to accommodate. A thousand men materializing always at the head of the queue. If I were not a self with a self-project to enact in the world I could stay there indefinitely, eternally, relegated to the end of the line a martyr a saint of patience and waiting except that I have by this time gone beyond suffering it seems, suffering is what real people do and I am a cipher a circle a zero or orobouros not merely chasing its own tail because this tail and all its imaginary outgrowths have been digested, self-fellated so many aeons before there is no more of that fictional shambolic passage to show for it has been told a million times what more another Cervantes Sterne Rushdie or Foster Wallace to repeat the tale of misbegotten quests? Please, steal this cheap plastic pen, the cheap imitation watch from this same wrist that itself imitates how many yesteryears of DNA? In this queue in this queue in this queue I am nobody nada to wait to be waited upon by others to wait for the enaction the event the happening I believe it has become a truism to suggest that the à venir never arrives or does it or does it or does it.

I leave, I can’t wait, I abandon the confirmation side of the process, the ticket is in my hand, this is enough, this will be my way out of here, I will leave, I will be delivered in Mumbai, three hours away, tomorrow, my birthday, of all days.

 

Five more hours of powerlessness. It is good, it is better, to read, cut toenails, wash a dusty shirt, prepare cups of electric black tea and biscuits in my small escape-hatch, Bellow to hand. The town itself bellows, aches and roars dimly, beyond the single, barred window. The Spanish infanta departed. The Indian peon (archaic word, strangely permissible) – chastened. He eats his unlit lunches on the cool floor right in the corridor. In the early evening the TV appears to work. I seek ‘the world news’: but there is no English broadcasting. Hindi, Marathi, some Tamil, apparently. Perhaps Gujerati, even Malayalam. (Listed here only for phonetic pleasure.) But only brief skirmishes into English, occasional morses of escaped worlds: bandits, world summit, cholera, one-day test. Field day for a collagiste. (Be my guest, while I am yours.) Soon the transmission buzzes out, exhausted in the swinging temperatures. I sleep early, Bellow patient, near-silent (there are still echoes) by my ear. And it slips into the decision-making apparatus that I’ll go to the caves enter the grotto Buddha place, what wombs still there simple sublime, but here here but what I know but sublime but this desiccated wasteland outskirts of town, dried heart, small pitted dried fruit they sell like shrunken labia in the streets on a cart, to the caves on a cart thus have I heard Lord Buddha once saw lying beyond the palace gates a cripple an old man a corpse on a cart on a cart on a cart a corpse on a cart a corpse

and saw a robed giver-upper in the muddy street and did the same did the same did the same did the did he did he did did di di di didididididi…

*

There’s no entry for the real-life journal, unlike this simulacrum. Strange European companion for the day, I never knew her name. Children, impeccably poor. Touts, scammers and shysters. Big thick horde-groups of French and German burghers. (Where’s my bacon, where’s my beef?) Not charitable, on my birthday, can’t afford to be, when so much is lost. Already gone. Gate gate parasamgate. Many of the finest wall-paintings ruined by vandals. But the echoing vaults there still. Buddhist sutta bled clean and transparent into the walls. Schist and basalt. Centuries of industry. Centuries passed now, only these marks here, nameless workers, unknown bhikkhus, bhikkhunis, carving into the empty vast of earth: full weight of elephant ear, chariot, flank of deva girl, so many breasts limpid fruit hung from the boughs of mango trees, how many sweat monsoons slipped away but for these austere dripping fruits of time. Before the body became an item, commodified by an unreal market value, gave supply a demand. Gave need, a craving. Tanha, or the Noble Truth, re-told by Cervantes and Co.

I pay the guide vastly inflated sums merely to regain my solitude. The beggars demand spiritual succour in the form not of mangoes but of Euros. Even the children disdain the bunches of bananas I offer them. While I am there I’m accosted by three local children, near-violent in their demands. I teach them to teach themselves how to make an offering – a Marathi folk song for paid lunch, a Bollywood shimmy for the schoolbooks they say they need. They are nervous at first, outside the regular routine, tentative as young horses drinking at strange water. Then satiric, parodic of themselves without ever knowing of punk or post-New Wave or postmodernism. They understand the disguises of irony, its self-protection, not yet ten years old, never gone to school. After their debut concert, shambolic but brave, leave them most of my last rupees. By then their song has been sung true. They can join the greats.

End of day dusk, before the bus is leaving, a poor farmer with splintering crystals gathered from his fields. Another I had had was stolen, weeks before. So I buy, just one, to replace it, the lucky charm from the Womb of wombs, the Door of all doors, the Cave of all possible recesses, refuges, and places of eternal safety. I buy, and will buy again, to pay penance, to placate the demons, to make feeble mark on my slate of credit out in the unreachable sky, I pay, I pay because in this world here below it is the only way we now know the only sacrifice we now make the only intermediary between the gods and ourselves we still trust in. So we will pay. And pay, and pay again. On the bus ride back I’m the only one standing, no-one offers me a seat. The ticket for Mumbai somehow between my fingers, November 26 ill-printed, foregone now, let slip through the window into the darkening night. The sunset is supernal. An ache of surrender.

Next morning the TV doesn’t work. I go for late breakfast, a year to add to those that have gone before. Back at the hotel the Jain proprietor offers me the front-page Times of India, shakes his head, little more. Then the TV is working, as if self-willed, I can’t follow the Hindi, but we watch, we watch, craning old survivors’ necks, lizards in the largely arid zones. Still alive, yes. Hell three hours down the line, the line that divides. But we know we have paid, as they have.

As they have but not as they have.

*
Published in Percutio 2009, No. 3, Paris: http://alpha.books.online.fr/Percutio/html/PastContents.html

 April, 2009 Paris

 

 

 

 

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