It should have been burned to the ground and left to the wind. The town, too, should have been given over to the dark ink of time. No memorial, no ceremonies, just the salted earth forever. Because we have no right to remember.
Thereafter the night turns, and it is empty. And when we take leave the next day to return to our respective cities of time and of rhythm, Andrej Bitow and I, as writers from nowhere at the end of one century and the beginning of another, exchange the empty bound books that we had been given by the organizers. He writes in the copy which he hands me:
“I would like to present you something. But we, in our monastery, have nothing. .” Underneath he jots: “For writing nothings.”
And in my copy to him I note: “1. Thou shalt not kill. 2. Thou shalt laugh with thy whole face and thy whole belly. 3. Thou shalt study the expressions on the faces of ants.”
FRÈRE KHÈRE1
exile
memories terribly leaked away
(Sappho)
will you stay with me as far as I go
brother stone still throb with the stillness
of a spoilt moon rotting and rending
the sea of stars
era la negra
negra solitud de las islas
there was
the black aloneness of islands the hard
cold hour deserted like the wharves at dawn
when cold stars and whales heave up
black
birds migrate as free goddesses leaving port
y solo la sombra trémula se retuerce en mis manos
(and only the tremulous shadows twist in my hands)
what were you before I found you
Neruda what
who was I before you made
yourself known and how will I know you
brother stone petrified eye of time
fearless and lidless or tongue
and if so what word was stilled
as vowel of eternal becoming
qué dolor no exprimiste qué olas no te ahogaron
say
what sorrows did you not express
what waves did not drown you
say
I was told
that with you to put on top of the head
I would stop growing to darkness and wings
because you would be my moon mind made visible
to trace and confine the shadowy earth
I was told
that with you as word in the mouth
I would never again tire of flying
in place
as tiredness itself would be pronounced
a grave pebble under the tongue
and when
and then
and now
es la hora de partir oh abandonado
when it will be the hour of departure
will you stay my hand
brother
stone
be the marker of my absence
KNOWING IS ALWAYS A FUNCTION OF GRAMMAR
Mind is an insatiable gormandizer. You, as toilsome writer, will lay down a page, perceptibly mind will devour it and ask for more without giving so much as a passing thought to the time and the pain of composition. One never knows when one has had enough. To become conscious is to be alienated. Perhaps the price of survival or the penitence for alienation is to never reach satisfaction. Does one experience this feeding frenzy because Reality cannot be hunted down or recovered?
Mind slurps up the surroundings and presents as justification that the about-mind can only take on shape through the process of swallowing-and-integration. A partisan and parasite argument, if I ever heard one! This may be true if one accepts that it is impossible to know anything except through the subjective point of being. And that no other shape of knowledge can exist. For something doesn’t exist until I have taken cognition of it. (But this taking-notice-of or getting-acquainted-with may be unexpectedly sudden and brutal, as with a lamppost in the dark, or with death.)
Now this happens: the gorging and digestion of consciousness is the creation of unawareness. And also a replacement. There is neither ‘environment’ nor ‘world,’ only the waxing and chiming of consciousness. But equally true: without surroundings there can be no coming to consciousness. I cannot be without becoming, and only become in reference to that which stimulates me to understanding or reflection. Mind is but a growing awareness of the existing environment. Mind is but a tiny reflex action of an unborn and immortal and all-pervasive rhythm. Mind opens up, opens up, and doesn’t exist. The most pure being is to stop being, is nonbeing. It is also the Buddha nature. Mind is movement.
And it is in writing that we put down the dullness: both the cooled residue of pure consciousness and the seed of new awareness. Writing is the mediating line spelling out the paradox. Writing is the ongoing imagination and invention of that which has existed since all darkness and absence. It is our way of visibly trying to breathe rhythm.
THE RETURNS
So what did I bring back from my trip to Berlin? First, a lake of black tiredness like a liquid mirror just below the horizon of wakefulness, threatening to rise at any moment and engulf me in dark oblivion. The Afrikaans word for jet lag is vlugvoos — to have been made spongy, perished or rotten by flight. Then, a jumble of impressions.
Airports have become irksome and dangerous places. The illusion has been punctured. It was probably never going to be ‘normal’ for the human to fly, but these entry zones were intended to lull you into thinking you were in some shopping mall piping soothing music, with service people, polite and efficient, processing you painlessly through the various stations of embarkation, and your fellow-departees interestingly attractive. It was to be painless, though dull. Now it is chaos in there. To get on board is like going into combat: sullen but ill-trained functionaries body-search you and dig into your luggage repeatedly, irritated clerks ask silly questions over and over, waiting lines snake for miles down the corridors, fellow-travelers are disheveled and grumpy, flights are retarded beyond decent delays. In Frankfurt, on the way back, rushing for a connection, I made my way to the head of the line by telling people they should not be fooled by my beard, that I’m actually seven months pregnant. You wouldn’t want me to have a messy miscarriage right here, would you now? An angry woman with glasses spat at me. At the screening posts little old ladies of eighty or more, clutching forms and passports and tentatively tottering on spindly ankles, were ordered to return to the check-in counters and book their umbrellas. One had visions of madly yelling grandmothers spearing pilots and transfixing them to the walls of the cockpit. And once you surmounted these obstacles, were you finally to feel more secure? Of course not. The only slight distraction was to try and spot the air marshal. As the aircraft growled and shuddered to get into the air one was painfully aware of the howling emptiness below.