SNOWSHOES ACROSS THE CLOUDS
11. SUCH A DISTANCE
Honeyed lights scan the bare trees. Push-button thermometers read the post-twilight, that famous hour when the blue of the sky reaches immorality. With such tools, I can arbitrate close calls and negotiate bejeweled medinas. Jazz might rev me into the wee hours, and coal dust sift over my papers, but the appointments will be kept. Merlot and zinfandel fill our glasses while we watch transmitted images of streetwise guys tangoing history into other people’s libraries. If only I had collected such comic books. Not that they would bring money now, now that they would bring money at all. More that they would turn brittle, the inks fade, the electric plots and heroes would turn to heroin or gold dust or cremains. Laughter now. That’s all. Sweetness seduces us into loving our houseplants and playgrounds. Children tumble out of trees and wave their halloween masks.
How playful these terraces seem. The murmurs of dappled debates tickle us into sidelong glances, willing to meet admirers’ eyes.
Beachcombers and blackbirds, within a stone’s throw of the cathedral, entering a visionary city, a landscape made by someone else.
These interested parties are deaf; and it is difficult to see why they are listening to the street musician. He has the strangest instrument I have seen, a mass of silver horns which produce polyphonic drones and staccato trumpet-like notes. His attendant partner is in charge of a rhythm machine which clumsily underpins the sounds he makes, elephant footsteps echoing under a butterfly dancing. Those watching flutter their hands at each other, as if to explain the music; their eyes and eyebrows contort with gesture. Something other than music is being shared, but it is only a fragmented tune I take down the main street with me. I am not painting pictures of the world but hoping to share some loveliness. Complexity is suddenly somewhere else; we are plugged directly into the present.
12. COAL DUST SIFT
Farewell to patterns of inheritance: drink, sex and smell are here mingled with territorial loyalties; you would not want to walk where I have just been. Down the street is a random sequence of ambient sound and image; devices of sensory overload, images of divine worlds. Sometimes feeling makes contact in tiny glittering flashes; otherwise demographic surveys show only consumption and desire. So the flight westward continues: we no longer know how to make ourselves at home, or even where to try. The future is a crescendo of nothing, the past is out of reach: they have no real purpose except that of discarded or impossible experience. The present is full of screams, a catchment area of dissent and possible disruption. I feel like only a distant memory of myself.
Successful idleness embellished and elaborated, people swarming in impossible numbers; walls in irregular formations: an odd new nothingness.
Guilt laughs and folds our nothingness into perfect handkerchiefs.
Return to the rules. They guarantee success in the naming of leaves. All irony and humor are compressed into the rules. Follow them. Who could take this seriously? Surveys show how readily people are led to the anechoic chambers. Letters found in basement boxes collect molds which will cure the saturnalian virus. Address books help. Heavy curtains work best. Exercises keep your mind from drifting. Biceps can be built in the shower, without weights or machines. The folded wooden rack stands ready for more wet laundry. It’s the tone of voice that opiates. They don’t want these revelations. No one does. No one could. Life is too short, too sweet, too sacred for more than meets the eye. If you use the term ‘range’, you will suggest too many distinct things. Never are we too tired for rules that whisper in the night: the waitress is not waiting for you.
13. DEMOGRAPHIC SURVEYS
Three speakers mumbled inefficiencies. In armchairs they could drape themselves artfully. They filled the auditorium with screams and moans stifled into words. Hollowed, the listeners searched their leaflets for directions to the brothels. Generosity ran through the house. Everyone was terrified. The walls on either side shifted. A cracked corner beckoned. The academics wanted more nonsense. The students looked straight ahead. Citizens, lovers, modern mature people, overlooked the typos. Some borrowed bodies from others. Some borrowed mythologies. ‘Jazz musicians say only the most adoring things about one another.’ Figs fell from trees in the courtyard. ‘That book helped me get through the experience, although I didn't explicitly let it scare me.’ One poet started to peel the orange on the table. Another threw hers into the crowd chanting ‘one art, one art.’ Hot chocolate and cookies descended from the spotlights on bedside trays. Fame, like innocence, followed the rules. So what’s wrong?
It must be that the gaps with which we scare ourselves are where we learn to like ourselves because while we cannot be we can belong entirely to.
Throw away these useless maps and resign your membership; we can desire many futures.
I can be contacted by phone, letter or on my mobile; faxes arrive day and night, e-mails flow into my computer. Books and music are becoming harder to experience, on the wall paintings are gathering dust. Fame is something we bestow on others, not something we can seek. I would rather time was my own. I no longer have a radio or TV; the stereo plays only fictitious music. Nothing is real except a non-specific dread and my yearning for a past I recently invented. If I had an orange I would share it with you, segment by segment. As it is the banana is past its best and neither the mango or nectarine are ripe enough to eat. Out back the quinces are safely stored in a cool dark place. One segment will flavour a dozen apples, one whole fruit perfume a room. I am innocent enough to follow the route you suggested when we met; know life will never be what I want it to be unless I learn to rebuild and transform.
14. BORROWED MYTHOLOGIES
The trees were torn down many years ago, the rest of the space then paved over. That corner has remained an anonymous and transient locale, with its own peculiar sense of desolation: a confusion of dead-ends and underpasses. The music you hear is a cluster of car horns, the drones of cars passing, conversations fading away into the night. I rely on the past to find my way around, the sounds of work and the hum of indecision, the web of quotation and allusion in which all texts are located. We need these mirrors to remind us of our personal history; time goes very slowly in the pavilion of dreams. In and out of dark doorways, havens of carelessness, we pretend to each other that we inhabit private worlds, that there are answers at the end of the mysterious tunnel. What a pleasure to be so deceived.
Look down at the river or up at the sky; we will never soar like angels.
Use an assumed name. Call us if you have any irregular or fast heartbeat, confusion, unusual tiredness or nightmares.
When the computer crashes, it may need repair at an authorized McGrath shop. Your life will go from viridian to flame, to blue, to gray or alabaster while you withdraw from web access. Loss impersonates itself as: nothing, autumn, mystic wind, veil, road, moonlight, rock, ash, dry leaves, solitude. Betrayal spans the cosmos from end to end. Some time by a waterfall or in front of an approved light box makes some feel that the neighborhood has become indeed a gateway, the sands where Persephone tried to trample Minthe, the nymph, to death. Without proper initiation our limbs can never know the mysteries. Of any thing: software, ancient tales, the visit of an old friend, a phone call in which the choked voice of the abducted hides the nicotine cough behind the soothing tones of laughter about how the novel is going. A work-in-progress always rewards our powers of disbelief.
15. TUNNEL
You talk of hand-made conversations, hand-blown glass, Irish weavings, wooden bowls, white paintings, books translated by your favorite author, countless airports, hotels, meetings in far-flung capitals, boring reports about finance, excursions into the woods and mountains, good meals and long walks, theology, memories to suit a hundred topics, the plan to live in Novgorod for six months and learn Russian, and after that to take six months off, rest, retreat, meditate, live in silence before taking up the thread of destiny once more. And then you go. The house listens to make sure. Suspended illusions return. What is presence? Today's letters bring news from others like you but unlike. Lattices, yes. One can only wonder what it adds up to. We know about subtraction too well. Rhomboids, rhizomes, many pattern words convey the weights we have in mind. Nets can hold anything and allow everything fluid through. Pretexts of transformation.
I look at the afternoon light, more clear as winter comes. Windows reflect, hold the light from the white houses.
The occupation of space is a real fact; perhaps the only one. But at any instant there is nothing.
It is pointless to plan silence, unforgivable to talk about it; silence must simply be experienced, embraced in the moment it arrives. Fireworks outside mean this is not the time; the hum and cough, static hiss of assembled music implies even quiet is not possible. The scent of finally ripe limes sharpens the air; I watch uneasily all evening as they sit in the fruit bowl. It is still not quiet: night is an interweaving of data, form and transition, the distant sound of traffic and people leaving the nearby pub. This experience claims a relevance my dreams never can. If I plan for fame and travel and wealth and happiness, I am bound to be disappointed. If I imagine I will not speak for six months, someone will interrupt my thought. If you love something why change it? Better to imagine plaster walls half-lit by the evening sun, overheard conversations, stairs to nowhere. If art has its heaven, perhaps this is it.
16. A HUNDRED TOPICS
The timbral structure of gesture. Eggs. Power. Pattern. Texture. Derivation. New York, Paris, or anywhere else. The interval content of each sound. Sorrow. Trance explorations. Pearls. The novelty of history, ordinary matter. Mating animals, performers and audience, mythical beasts or birds. Songs, television commercials, the sound of the ocean. Painters. Musicians. Scientists. Voicing. Instant Recognition. Cognition. Crippled symmetries, disabled drummers, bedroom bores. Previously unknown pasts and futures. The world in a grain of rice. Rice in the reign of Anne. The last hundred years. The last hundred words. The lost hundred words. The humming wards. Conceptual experience, the entertainment of alternatives. Process, activity and change.
Ask too many questions and you will never come to a conclusion. You cannot build a home with knowledge.
I would suspect what I mean, if I could say what I know. A hook in time saves rime.
A string of knots. A hurl of wings. Boxes without topses. Doors aflame over marble floors. Sunflowers that also stand and wait. When I went to visit the mansion I was looking for the secret of the towers. The green lawns rose up the hills around the house like a protective bowl. Large pumpkins were on the spires of the highest towers. I climbed up into the room which had five stairs leading to it. I scratched a cross in the oldest beam. I walked from window to window to realign the views. Five hundred years surrounded me in silence. The house was comfortable with that. And then I was at a loss. A string that can make a circle. Once I left the house, where could I now wander I wondered? I had the towers on my string. I had their secrets secreted within. I could tell no one.
17. TRANCE EXPLORATIONS
Architecture. Fences. Breakaway stage sets. Huge temporary buildings of poles and plastic sheeting. Nomadic enclosures, up quickly, down quickly. Air supporting the whole bubble. Hotter air making the house-balloon dance over the crowd. When we find a home, it rises into the atmosphere and when we tie it down with ropes and stakes, just like the circus, it deflates into a mess of pooled plastic. Home is where the hot air counter-balances the cooler. Delicately balances, as in diaphragm and lung tissue. The air held in a kiss. Back to the air transparency of skins once more. Membranes say it all. Inscribe these airy flights on membranes of dark, blood-slicked tissue. Breathe in, breathe out. Now. Home is no matter. Home holds itself up at the thresholds across which pass all manner of visitations. Lavender or lily, rose and tangerine. Aromas float through, accident and essence. Except for the sealed chambers.
Imagine where the teachings should take place. A grove, a garden, a city? There.
Beauty spots: church yards and burial grounds, suspension bridges, offices with large sunny windows.
We move proudly along the elevated railway, our senses heightened by the spark and crackle of the electrical propulsion unit. I cried when the train pulled in to the station, remembering my father’s love of certain locomotives. Memory is glass-enclosed, an igloo of stone and steel alone in the museum’s white room; a room few visit voluntarily. There is a practical as well as psychological reason for planning for the future: how else would we generate an atmosphere of carnival excitement or conjure up visions and vistas, the architecture we desire? The real problem is where to put it. The lopsided triangle has been changed into a rectangle, the little green converted into a sprawling park; a model shows a tall bronze and glass tower rising in the distance. In the event of war it will be used for signalling, meanwhile it allows fancy to take many wild and imaginative flights. I live on a purpose-built island in the middle of a round pond, to which you may not draw near. Nor may you moor your boat. You may have tears in your eyes and money in your hand but pleading is in vain. This is an area of proposed development, a graveyard of lost causes and you are forbidden to land.
18. SEALED CHAMBERS
We trespass where we are not wanted whilst five musclemen flex their enormous pecs. Everyone in the world is rushing out to take flying lessons as human experience begins to include apparitions of visiting spaceships. Mysticism is not a literary genre; all knowledge is open to us now if only we know where to look, if only we appear fluid and graceful whilst on the move. Take your place in the hyper-realist disco and encode your thoughts into appropriate conventional noise, let the non-stop parade of current hits jerk you around like a puppet in the flashing lights. Orienteering can be spiced up with percussion and uncharacteristic male voices; music remains with one even during very severe suffering. Our morality is historically evolved, improvised and untidy; we must invent the blockbuster poem if we are ever to succeed in proceeding beyond these locked doors or in finding our way home.
The world is an unexplored vacuum into which desire rushes. Pandora’s box still waits to be opened.
The genie always escapes the lamp and grants every possible wish forever.
Rain on the skylight glass. We know about how much water the world holds and how it cycles through wind and rain and bodily fluids. Even more we marvel at the historic spirals holding all molecules together in one marvelous wave of existence, and where we’re riding that crest to is even more marvelously held in question, unfathomed and endlessly re-imagined. We seem to get the basics rather often – ‘be kind’ every other jingle sings. Poems grapple loss into contortionists koans, haul in piles of locks and miles of chains. With each escape the crowds roar and we forget again and lose our way and have to try new tricks to bury, seal and lock down. And the opposite too! Do not the evil jinglers sell us into bondage and we write to break free of those? Plain sense, baffling questions, mirages and mists, holy smoke and lyrical chiaroscuro.
19. FLUID AND GRACEFUL
Secret labyrinth; labyrinth of secrets. Beyond this point we will wear these masks. Once through the next portal, the one smeared with titanium dust, saffron and axle grease, you will never tell anyone what you will be told, what you will see and hear. Nothing. Never. Such secrets might be re-assembled under the lights of the museum of initiations. The gasps of revelation, the stars seen through the milky glass, the machinery of piston and armature and gyroscope will send waves echoing through the caverns. Layers of human archaeology, an aggregation of voices, modes and moods. These will be discovered, uncovered. This month we’ve organized the makeshift seriously for really the first time – you know, putting the weights in final order – and man! is it a bitter landscape. At first it all seemed pretty buoyant in experimentalism and fractured, disjunctive weirdness, but now it feels kind of a frightening ride.
An emerald vortex in the trees, a residue of syllables. Theft realigns things; impatience is the only sin.
Sun-warmed woods, streams of deep, silent water, hundreds of flowering plants. A visitor wringing his hands whilst looking for what he has lost.
Inner coldness. A tunnel under the ocean, a railway alight in the mountains, wallpaper and paint that don’t match; a chronicle of disasters. I unexpectedly found myself anchored off a dreary beach, about to dive into the past. We have no evidence to show that the sky and the land meet, but what else would the horizon be if not a new space that has just been opened? All our own weirdness and randomness and blackness, the curious creature we cannot name or recall, comes from there. It is certain that the night lasts longer than the day; hence the inscriptions carved on tombstones, monuments and statues. I have just switched off the light in here; the scratching of a gramophone needle punctuates the quiet. The earth revolves around the sun; a new moon appears tonight.
20. BITTER LANDSCAPE
A united country run by amateurs is a thing of the past. We need a more social experience: communal crime, joyful ramraiding and collective stylised mugging. Road-building and maintenance programmes be damned, a raging battle is going on and the fallout is heavy. In our rush to dig down to the past the evidence we give to the future is being destroyed. Lost choirs sing in the breeze; my mother still hums the tunes she knew when I was a baby. If my father was alive he would still not like the poor finish I give to my DIY projects; I will never be a tuneful whistler or know how to get straight shelves. Rumour has it you have been looking to leave; in the meantime put your hands above your head and spread your legs wide whilst we look for hidden weapons. We must never let the unpredicted or unpredictable be squeezed out. I only wish I knew the rest of the tune or another word for ‘project management’.
A series of longitudes and a spinning compass. Constantly moving targets, venture capital and the sin of omission.
This review was helpful. Drugs are as much wish as fact. Sin turns the corner into walls, broken glasss underfoot, stairways into halls.
Song of the chrome glass bobbin. Shuttle back and forth, skirt ‘round, spin the small, tumble the tall, two twins, completely unanimous, visible to the eye, from whence we read something more than mirrorplay and mirage shimmer. Oscillate between dopamine and norepinephrine. Mediate with the monoamines. Initiate acesis with the serotonin uptake inhibitors. Suffer the neurological compulsion to lie. At least it wasn’t midbrain hypolthalmic glioma. Or was it? In the maximum pointlessness lies the maximum splendor. And the real never shines so brightly as when duplicated. The escapist’s arm finds the guard’s arm. Inside one scene dazzles another scene. Every joint is doubled. You want to journey to Uzbekistan, flee prestige abuse, before entropy tropes us up and downs all sound to dumb Om.
