SCALPEL OF CHAOS or With Elizabeth

 

(Note: End of August thought of what has not been done, what is to be done or... this book was finished many years ago and I waited and waited, but could never think of who might read it or who might publish it... (the Elizabeth of this book is now happily married and they have their first child, Augustus)

        WITH ELIZABETH.  For want of a better title or maybe this is the best title or it could be called THE STORY OF A DEAD TIME a journey with my daughter.

Begin with what happened after Elizabeth and I came back from Europe during the winter.

      Beginning at the beginning. The best way to go about talking, no, writing, since that is what...

     Now, at this moment in the year 2---, no place where the story or our story could be told: no room, porch, campfire, ocean voyage, rail journey. No setting where such a story could be teased out and then the effort to see this conversation redundantly and artfully fixed to the page, arranged by the Scalpel of Chaos, though we hadn't gone to Zagreb where such an instrument is available in a cafe near the cathedral.

        Neither Elizabeth nor I could suspend our disbelief in order to hear me talking with a stranger on the flight back from London: to hear me retelling what appeared to us as we moved about the English countryside and then to Paris and in one of the near villages painted by Monet: no, not that famous garden, for this was in January, seemingly so long ago as I write in July and soon to be August then September and...

         Or, in Vienna in a taverna near the train station where the Balkans are said to begin, where we were to hear about what Nuala had taken us to see from the hill in Dalkey: the light to be made visible rising up out of the Irish Sea revealing the colour of the winding sheet for the corpse of our dreams as it was sent back into the earth.

          All through the Spring I would take notes of what had happened much as I did even on the flight back when I had been reading Front de 1'est, 1941-1945 from which I copied out what Leon Degrelle writes, "Shaking my hand firmly in his two hands at the moment of my departure. Hitler told me with stirring affection: "If I had a son I would want him to be like you."

          Aware to be sure of the folly of the taking for granted what had happened as being ordinary yet with the possibility it was of interest that a father and his daughter might travel to Europe looking for something that was not there in the still New World.

          But nothing could be as simple as that because life is never so easy as anyone knows who has ever tried to describe even the brief moment of a hand about to reach out to be shaken by... though if what had happened did not happen I would have been complaining in reply: no, nothing much had happened while we were away--- no building fell down as we walked by, no man held a gun to the head of a child demanding the President of the United States get on the line and talk to him, right now, motherfucker, hear me!

         No, nothing had happened to us, I guess, like any of that, but... though taken speechless and afraid of what had happened as I sat in the aisle seat while Elizabeth looked down to the mountains of Greenland, already that far along in the flight back to New York: the mountains of Greenland across which no one has ever walked, I think, or wanted to walk and of waking in the middle of the night trapped on the side of one of those mountains while the plane flies overhead with a girl leaning to see more clearly the figure waving helplessly up to the plane.

FORGET THE FUTURE

          for many years, since 1990 in Oxford, I have been trying to shape the life of James Thomson BV into ...  

               a piece of this prose was published a long time ago in BOMB and had been edited by David Rattray... I discovered James Thomson many year s before that in the title of John Rechy's CITY OF NIGHT.  

                Thomson had gone out to the west in the United States and now he is in Manhattan waiting to sail back to England.  

                It is known that Herman Melville, also adrift at this moment in Manhattan, had read and liked Thomson's work. (another piece appeared in the Crab Orchard Review)

                the shade of Thomson stalks Eliot's The Waste Land

                and upon a time, I had come to describe a moment in your life in London--- you, James Thomson--- in his death’s week you went to visit the poet, Philip Bourke Marston, whose poetry gagged you.  

     Once leaped my heart, then dumb, stood still again— that had been the  room to which she came that day and there came another moment: when you were staying in Manhattan, New York and while I did imagine those days long  after your time in New York City, Manhattan to be exact--- though  is there any difference between my experience and your experience--- though who is the self who is imaging the self who I am finding... if only I knew---   as you are again really in Manhattan if words can be said to be real though what else have I? and your adventures as one of the dead, really forever dead or not as in this moment, no longer three rows over in Highgate Cemetery from where we used to keep Karl Marx--- a borrowed grave: how you enjoyed the humor of that... the original owner of the grave had no use for it as he was still as is said, alive, unlike myself: if I am able to ventriloquize his agreeing to my residence... a residence as comfortable as I have ever been used to but then in the present moment here in a room in East First Street--- the most delicious of all fictions: the present moment which has disappeared as these words were typed.     

      A pause and already this sentence is not much different from Akkadian being looked at by a visitor from so long ago or it could be right now ...the past and the future are always dripping with blood, these moments always consumed by a need for revenge yet here shall we go walking in which country, in which museum... is there any difference between these seconds and 2500 years ago...

      The walls of the Merchant's Hotel will not leak. There is nothing hidden under the floorboards or lurking under the bed.  He does not hear voices and he will not see a face in the window glass even though it is smeared with grey winter grime.  He is waiting.  His mind is no longer in the city and certainly it is not in this room though he can vision the man’s arm as it raises the knife up and up to gain momentum so when, as it plunges down, the blade will be sure to strike home and end the torment of the life that insinuated itself, without invitation, into his biography.

Of course, it can be said, the newspaper has done a better job of inching itself into his mind and he will not argue with those words since they are carefully stated and show no expectation of a reply.

He is also uninterested in these men who rub up against him in public expecting some sort of reply to their fevered observations.  What is it that he is expected to know?  He has accomplished nothing.  His hands do not drip with idleness.  He has not allowed his ship to sail anywhere near the predictable shores of either success or flamboyant failure.

He has tried to get on as best he could.  He had allowed himself to be seized with the proper degrees of enthusiasm: carefully calibrated so as not to frighten off his future employer and he was sent out, in due course, to The West in America and it will happen again, he is sure of that: if he can distill the necessary words.

After all is said and done to death: he is a man of words at the beck and call of the masters with large sheets of paper needing to be full up every week, every day, every month.

At their command, he is by the pence, for the inches that sluggishly spread up and down the columns.  But has not the knack for the saleable anecdote.  He can get cloud, the trees, the stone down on to the paper.

Human beings!!!: that’s another bag of muck he can’t bring himself to turn inside out,

Yet, people want it and he is unable to supply it.  No good calling round next year, things will not have changed.  He has his plate in front of him and there are just some who…

A sort of sun in the sky.  He should get a move on and see some more of this Manhattan place.  He will be asked to... and he will have to fill up the hours with his impressions of foreign places.

As long as they don’t expect words to be knitted into columns of type, he can lie with the best of them or with shrug of shoulder: why must he get things right?  The stories will come out and as long as the cup is refilled:  the evening will not stare him down into silence.  He knows what he must do.  He is not that cut off from the companions who stand about the room, not having gone forth.

However, he must decide or not... whether to talk of his reading or just allow that he saw some interesting sites and was seen by exotic eyes.  People are interested in turns of phrase not too far removed from the effusions gracing greeting cards called up by the passing holidays.  Though, who will actually be interested in his reading or the names of streets he has walked in.

Well, pass the bottle and make sure the glasses are full and the interest will be as intense as any man can bear.

But Thomson is not held by this consideration.  He has been listing the years of his life.  He is making sure he has been alive and it is no mistake his now being in New York City.  He has walked up a staircase, depending on his mood, or he has walked down a staircase or as is more the case he is walking along a long corridor which might also serve to frame his thought or the only truth:  one year follows another until they don't.