Rewriting Aeneid #8 1982
… I always wanted to achieve … a new understanding of Virgil regarding Western morality … These writings …
[He takes a long drag from his cigarette.]
… have impressed themselves, not merely upon my memory, but … on the very marrow of my being … They have rooted themselves deeply in the innermost recesses of my mind, my addled brain, the grey matter of my being … so much so that I have forgotten who wrote them in the first place, it seems … which rings true, I didn’t write that, you see, I wish I did, he did … all of this, everything I am trying to do, is a mere appropriation of it, nothing is original. It can’t be … He wrote the words for me, old Petrarch, who himself rewrote Virgil and Homer. Old Petrarch, king of the poets, lover … not lover, ha! … of Laura … Heavenly Laura … He wrote that, not me …
[He shuffles from his seat. He leans forward to adjust the focus on the camera, the screen blurs for a second before correcting itself. He glances at the TV to his right, smiles, stubs out his cigarette, wipes himself down and resumes his conversation.]
It’s like I have taken possession of them … Petrarch and Virgil … like them, my work is left open-ended. This book I cannot write, this book I try to finish, to construct each day, this fucking book which is killing me because I can’t reach the truth … I can’t write it without their words … it haunts me each day … I am ill-equipped to deal with this sorry situation without them by my side … And even then, it’s too much for me …
I hit the pause button. His large face is frozen, flickering a little, contorted on the screen mid-sentence, his mouth ajar like he is about to scream. His voice, his voice is so real, like sitting beside me, talking to me. Only he isn’t, he’s dead and these words are from 1982, another time, another existence. It’s a strange feeling, one that sends prickles of electricity through my skin. I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself, I look around the caravan, at his things, his voice has brought life to them. I’m surrounded by his stuff, by him. His words have brought everything to life.
How long have I been planning this book, this work of beautiful fiction that will reach closer to the truth than any work of autobiography? Good question … to appropriate Virgil’s words, to bring them back into the light of day, to revalue them in my own formation, just to give them a crumbling sense of my own being, from the depth, from deep within, shedding light onto the blackness … bringing the mystery back into the light of day, each ink mark on the white page my struggle …
[He lights another cigarette.]
This book will be the death of me, that’s for sure. That’s all I know, the rest is for you to fathom. All I know is that it won’t be a beautiful book, it’ll be ugly, it’ll cut the heart wide open … that will be its beauty … How many words have I written? How many hours have I slaved away over each page? The rest I’ve burned, the stuff I hate, all of it … I start all over, again and again and again … I will start again at a later date, after I’ve lived, when I have absorbed more anguish, when the time is right.
[He gets up out of his armchair and roots about for things in the room off-camera. His voice fades, but is still just about audible.]
Where is it? Where is it? I put it here. I put it here fucking yesterday. Where the fuck is it? Fuck. Where the fuck … Ah … Fuck, here it is. Fuck … Fuck it …
[He reappears in front of the camera, sitting back down in his armchair.]
So … this is all I retrieved, what a fucking mess, saved from the flames. What did I burn it for, a good two hundred pages of this shit? This is all I have left …
[He waves a manuscript at the camera.]
I don’t need it. I’m going to tear it all up now for you and start all over again … Every word will be different from this, this attempt is useless, nothing will be the same …
[He tears up as many of the pages as he can in front of the camera, throwing it over his head like confetti.]
See! See! … See! … The nuclear fallout … a nuclear fallout of my own creation … destroyer of worlds … I am become death, destroyer of words hahah! Ha! … My wishes fluctuate, and my desires conflict, they tear me apart … The outer man struggles with the inner … There he is again, old Petrarch talking for me, I can’t help myself … maybe he’s my inner man? It’s definitely not Virgil, as much as I love him, I just cannot get to grips with him … he wrote for an audience … I don’t know who mine is … Who are you? Who the fuck are you? Ah, the watchful eye of the moralist watching his own, his every move … move … move … fucking flies, fucking things … get to fuck …
[He tries to swat a fly.]
One side of Petrarch, it seems to me, which found classical culture more engaging than that of … the age, yes the age … in which he was born, was as we have seen, articulated in his first eclogue where … what’s his fucking name? … Fuck, yes, Silvis, he declares the poetry of Homer and Virgil superior to that of the psalms … that’d be a serious thing to say back in his day … a new morality drawn up in these men. Who wrote these words? … I didn’t … I sure as fuck didn’t. I’m just a riff man, like Wilko Johnson … I’m the conduit … I move shapes in time, I create the vibrations, I alter them, to make sounds … I repeat, repeat, repeat … Ha! …
[He cracks up into laughter.]
I stop the tape right there. It’s too much to take, he’d obviously been drinking and it’s difficult to watch. All I know is that, before I do anything with his belongings, I will have to watch more of these recordings.
vulgar things
I walk across to the Lobster Smack to see Mr Buchanan about the key he mentioned over breakfast at the Labworth. I feel quite apprehensive, like he’d made some kind of mistake and the keys were meant for someone else and not me. Maybe Cal? I put this down to having just viewed the tape. I’m rattled by it, that’s for sure, Uncle Rey’s words, and his face, younger but still ravaged. His piercing eyes, grey, like the sky, and that strong, forceful voice of his. It rattles through me in bursts and fragments: ‘I can’t write it without their words’. It strikes me as odd that he was trying to write a book, he’d never mentioned it, and I don’t think of him as a literary man. It must have been his secret, one of his many secrets, something he battled with all his life, something personal to him and no one else. ‘My desires conflict, they tear me apart …’. What on earth does he mean? Desires? The night sky? The island? Sitting alone in the Lobster Smack? Living in that wretched caravan for the majority of his life? It doesn’t make sense to me, he didn’t seem like the type of man who might have battled with his own desires. He just seemed like a man who endured life alone, and all that it threw his way. Then I remember how he ended it, his life. Some form of desire must have caused him to do that. I can’t explain it to myself any other way. There’s no other way around it.
Mr Buchanan is standing behind the bar when I enter the pub. He greets me, like it’s the first time he’s set eyes on me today, with a broad smile. I walk over to him.
‘The key, young Jon …’
‘Yes, Mr Buchanan, the key … Is that all right?’