Living in the city (apocryphal city), you come to feel the weariness of the spirit, which should, perhaps, arrive only much later in life, not in middle age. You walk out the door, look over your shoulder for any unsavoury characters, quickly sense down the sidewalk where all at once glass cubes pop in the sunlight, and quickly hop over it, noticing someone’s window is broken, a smash and grab. Each day begins similarly, with perceived instances of what might seem a general downward trend to all existing things, which, like candle flames before finally extinguishing, lift their little flame hands balled into fists, and silently shrieking before their time, make a last violent go of it. –‘I know how to maneuver through life’, you overhear a boy on a motor-powered scooter say, and while it’s an apt metaphor it’s more interesting how spontaneously it arose; he is swaying wide in the street past cars and pedestrians who walk the street to avoid sidewalk glass, at one moment, at the next ‘maneuver’ is extended beyond him and the scooter, to life itself, such spontaneous generation of metaphor that he, too, becomes an instance of the downward trend, verging upon belief (in pessimism), that even without such custodians of literary craft as you’ve become—one among many of the voices whose darkness mists over unknown eyes like those of the slain characters in the Iliad—expressive language would, after a fashion, invent itself. That elevated modernist words should become the fought-over armor of the deceased by a future that willingly throws itself headlong into exacerbated metaphysical conflicts seems a worse alternative to the unaided seedling of a new language taking roots, forming groves, desiccating or thriving under the aegis of its own blistering sun, which concentrates all the heat of the city in the enclosed and sometimes overstuffed trash bins, feeding an air already noxious from drifting urine stains, littered piss-filled bottles, sewage pipes below the newest slipshod high-rise construction, so that even more humans may be invited here, and contained.
*****
The only perspective is the flat perspective, the roach’s perspective skittering across the marble floor. It awakens from its million-year nightmare, the moment the light switch catches it. It knows confinement, it knows the shadows’ cover as you only wish you knew the sea’s underskirt deepening blue, the salt scent as you lie flat on your back, the screech and legs flailing as you are crushed under the weight of impossible hopes, misplaced aspirations.
Earlier that day, we had hoped fervently to see what the tourist brochure called the ‘translation’ of bones from burial site to church (turns out that is the proper term), the final resting place of the fragile relic, weighed in the hearts of the people. Translation seems apt, when the bones you carry within yourself from one language to another feel light yet bear the burden, that a socket out of place or twisted geography might not be minded as the end of the world to one who sees the point; languages, after all, were the places where their bones resided, and as masterful a writer and revered as Pappadiamandis, who I affectionately called Pappa D. could tell you from beyond the grave the order of his speakers mouths and how to fit his bones back together. More than that, he could tell you from any perspective, momentarily entered into in a given sentence, whether a shoe whose sole was worn out by the lagoon, a piece of luggage, or a silver biscuit tray. I wondered if his skull would seem small—as small as the bed in his house where he drew his last breath, or small like a hometown where, after years, you return grey-haired, a stranger. Is that what I hoped to see—an image of my future in another’s past? How puerile. As though my own future past were set before me to know as I have known the kicking impulses of words till finally they are lifeless. As I have seen the single haired leg left behind on the bristles of a comb used to stroking a well-kept beard. And myself, if it is myself, I may have known as well, before it hit the wall where the bureau just happened to be flush against the wall, and there was no dark corner to manoeuvre its life to, a pedestrian sort of knowledge but a hop and a skip away from death. Would there be a reason to go back? Aside from the screaming, I want to live.
In the photo he looks contemplative, head turned down at a slight incline, reverent, his hands folded, fingers braided, offering a cautious stability. As though it were one, whether you come or go, or wait too long to climb the winding stone steps, the back way as scooters roll past by the dozens, and the lagoon lay swamped with seagrass, seaflowers surrounded by the picturesque harbor, wading by the outskirts of the airport famous for its low-flying planes, the thunderous sounds as the sun beats down on a half-submerged rowboat in his lagoon, amplifying your own insidious voices, dizzying, dormant corridors terminating in what for lack of a better terms you call an outer bearing, an interior husk, or carapace—a way of being—or being no longer. The rebuke at the end of Around the Lagoon rings in my ears: And you? Like me, you waste your time philosophising, and do nothing. [i]
At night, a persistent knocking as Pappadiamandis slams shot after shot of raki on the small table of the hotel room.
Compare:
A simple mantle: bowl, candle, cooking pot, table low to the floor, stoker, pitcher, ladle.
The sound of water boiling, and from the adjacent room, his priest-father’s wheezing breath.
A place for the ordinary, not for paradox, not for cleverness.
Rooms: blocks of prose above the storage space in the cellar.
Sunken, stridulating screams.
*****
Iconography
White-washed houses in the hills
facing outward, toward the harbour,
looking upon a future not yours.
His shack by the lagoon, boarded.
In the cool of St. George’s Church
witness the wicked fight in scrum:
silver breastplate, lance plunged
down the dragon’s throat, flames
quenched before being amplified
turning rhythms of exhalation—
holding it there, wetted against
the tongue, held in a prayer-fast,
like thick prose, ink well-dipped,
a candle pulled down in holy water
a knuckle deep, lit for the better
part of the night. Whatever it was
crawled into the undergrowth,
there to revive itself. Vigilantly.
Even as the knight: it is finished.
*****
I wondered if this downward trend, which seems so tangible, wasn’t a main reason people calf out, so they might see the open-eyed wonder of a different world in their fresh-cheeked loved one, equally a reminder of hope for future humanity rising on one hand like a golden stalk of wheat, and a dismissive gesture to the past, left-hand anguish to the tossing brow, a cautious admission of what one failed to become. The fever that subsides after the vigil, post hoc ergo proper hoc. I thought of these matters as I walked what I believed to be P’s lagoon, site of his own childhood reminiscences which he detailed in ‘Around the Lagoon’, long before Skiathos had become a city, not that it is a city in the disgusting sense of the word. It felt more like a marsh, seagrass (the edible kind?) grown up around a few hundred square feet not far from St. George Cathedral, where he would have conceived his Christmas vigil story. On the grounds, a white horse belonging to no one. Perhaps trampling another spot prophesied by old Yorgos Kopsidakis and found to have Venetian florins buried beneath. Cars drove by staring, airport-bound. In the shallow waters of the lagoon, I saw the half-submerged rowboat swamped with algae and painted in the traditional blue-white motif. It lay perfectly still in the water. Someone no doubt could have hauled it out, but why bother? That was more effort than it was worth, and it seemed fitting for a boat to have the water as its final resting place. I remembered the years when I’d sit and play my sea-faring tunes, when I needed a rest, and I’d trot out the violin near the bank of the river that flows through East Rock. Well, someone decided one day that it wasn’t good enough just to write graffiti about human body parts and stick gum on that bench and sometimes cut and carve into it like a failed tattoo artist. No, when they had run out of ideas, the last illumination had been simply to torch it. As I saw when I walked down on a summer’s day and all that was left were the two metal pieces of the frame bolted to a concrete base (someone has since put a plank there). The logical extent of the downward trend of the universe they must have foreseen: conflagration consummate with every creative impulse having been exhausted, every intensity of feeling having long-since subsided, dragged through the dust and mold of the steps, like a black thread come undone from a priest’s robe whose days of sweeping through trails of incense in hopes of a longing glimpse at the mystery of the trinity, or any mystery humans are uniquely privy to, have long-since passed. The boy on the scooter, the boat owner, the bench torcher, they dance in earnest like the Hours, divide time into its smidgens, these recollected nonsenses, that pass as shadows while we wait by the harbor at a café across from the museum of shipbuilding in Skiathos (I had one suggestion for them, to blow up some of the great descriptions in P. of shipbuilding; that way English speakers could see some of his work aside from the name of the street, in translation). Because I suppose we are waiting for our ship even while part of me hovers over the charred metal, armed with my violin and hoping some dreamsong lament with wings will spring out of the back of my head. Maybe later tonight P. will come to me in a dream, will say with utmost severity—‘You know, I’m not the thread dragging from my father’s robe, you are <throws it at me in a big heap at my feet it lands>. But you shouldn’t have killed that roach. Before you are released from the Life of this life, you’ll experience every perspective there is to experience. I saw it enter after you, dragging your luggage and violin case. Had you not drunk so much raki, you wouldn’t have noticed it, since you wouldn’t have been up to use the bathroom. It’s alive just as you are. It struggles, it plans. It tastes the cool air and likes moist, dark places. I saw you flush it out with a squirt of contact solution before you crushed it with the bottle, not once but twice. I heard how you excused yourself by imagining that your own skin crawled, that it gave you ‘creepy-crawlies’ as though you were still a boy. Then you slept soundly anyway. It’s the same to kill anything—but to give life, to grow, that’s not something you can easily know, who are part of the whirling downward trend you miserably attempt to describe.’ I hoped he might visit me, his hands folded, his smile knowing more than I am capable, about the shrinking yet limitless soul.
*****
Endnotes
[i] We want to understand the tone of the artist’s self-rebuke; in hopes that when it is internalized we might use its instrument to better listen ourselves, when we were so confident of having stumbled through our language upon some truth we deemed worth sharing, but were wrong.
For rebuke has its tie to being—is a sort of field or containment for contradiction, those multitudes we each search to tease out, if only by means of argument; for the rebuke is a sign of its own denial coming from without, as if without as characterizes necessity’s voice—the actual being of the creator and created, unified by its display. That when, and because, the spirit responsible for the work had rusted over, like an old plow with an arm falling off that when it hit the ground was heard.
The rebuke, felt in inward necessity, is a condemnation of the temporal, literary mimesis evidenced in some memoir where the creative but long-habituated will suddenly revives, and in an instance of truth obliterates the given, developed, elusive, pursued, literary ‘I’, the authorial self suddenly made other by the very act that originally made creation magical and exciting poesis. The break in time, the rip in narrative, suffice to bring the reader into the future (a future orthogonal to that of the narrative), the actual, as they no longer represent, are incapable of representing (after a sequence), the constructed consciousness that preceded it.
In other contexts when the self flees from itself or from what it believed it was, as on the battlefield in a moment of cowardice, or the pianist whose fingers freeze before the fugue’s first bar, are followed by silence, the quasi symphonic stridulations of cicadas freshly unburdened from their sleep in soil, or the pupating caterpillar wresting his silk, going about it visibly, Biblically lazy relative to the preceding leaf buffet—they all invite reflection—whether change of being is condemnable in the writer’s case, if so damningly accurate.
The rebuke as such cannot be reconciled with, or integrated into what came before, in the sense that it looms over, yet nor does it suggest removal. In the way from a wound scar tissue grows over even into the aural cavity of some fallen warrior, impeding function, the bunny tissue of a hardened boxer, the rebuke reaches back, through, it is a sign, to the past–, to the unknown actual world which created it and relative to which the fictional, constructed world, seems sublatable at best, or void of value. In this way it is like the intent of a flame to burn some unfinished work, to begin anew in imitation of God, but without the pretense, all knowing at least of creation’s impermanence.
Then you, and the work, then prose or poem which has eyes, see each other as yourselves. If you are an old man writing the tone may even come off as angry.
