February 1, 1996
Life turns up in the morning, my bread and furtive destiny gathered around the window, a sense of eternity like sailors back from the new world. Back from the primeval, the black hollows with brick and damp earth. Pigeons beat the air in this tin box, they cross like a dangling wire, trees in a wild storm, flocks moving all together across streets with new clouds, now dividing the sweet milk on hard white beds, abandoning analysis altogether. To the mountains, no chance to resume something impenetrable, which increases, without pausing to wake. To the symptoms of pain everywhere. Endless paths across the fallen leaves, with bodies pursuing black plumes of sleep on this frail mattress, suspended among transparent crescents and stars of light and falling from all directions, navigating in agitation in the icy noisome fall of blood. Through cold, honor and death. Pale, muffled, mystic weakness for cemeteries. A long, complicated business, afraid of murderers and their mouths all the way down into the body at every heartbeat, throat cut, the obstacle itself having disappeared inside her. Intentions, appearances, no more. The house on fire with her obstinancy.
No escape from witnessing such horrors, except to become the rattle of the rails, the turn of a leaf at nightfall. All ceremonies are over. How empty the train. Her heavy suitcase in the corridor, at a loss, waiting. A strange sort of strength. Vindictive, compulsive, delirious. All the attributes of womanhood. The much greater intimacy of watching the spilt milk and flowers unnoticed while the storm begins. The rescuers themselves recovering, waiting tremulously around the table, intent on finishing. Together with all the old sorrows, brutalities, staring at the chalk figures, the stricken figures advancing, cadaverous, to something different, to death. To reach it in winter, after the last gas lamp, as we deserve.
Dancers and diners staring at the pauses between melodies, troubled by the element of prediction. London heaves and surges and would they care?
The same sort of life as most, falling to rot among Latin phrases on memorial brass. The dead deep down in cold storage. Some medieval light lying heavily among us. All one long day without divisions, fixed, pinioned among the diamonds of the imperial crown. Those grey arches and moaning pigeons united like lovers in water carried dimly across the lake. Men in black gowns rattle along the sea-front throwing down flowers in their own hunger, academic and meaningless. Walking and finding nothing. The frenzy for going forward, from hour to hour till the cemetery. A whole lifetime to decompose before giving in to the night.
Various attempts were made: thunderous songs at midnight, thinned out with blood and triumph. In a stumbling working-class voice, with little conviction and were soon silent. Broken chairs, dust, books and more. With scenes and tantrums and various objects in wild disorder. Passion for this hour only, before fading to silence. The end of novelty. With phrases, not the body. Sedentary occupation, always unwise. Sleep even worse. Night, and the whore of pleasure turned to give teeth to the outsides of words under the bitterest torture. Carried away irresistibly into woods and fields and steep railway cuttings, the edge of the world into nothingness, entered the black shell, bound as bodies to the horses of the phantom riders, through the vastly menacing silent night only seeemingly attached to the earth. Vacant, completed. Forged in a ring of steel, we rise, solemn, pale, soft like wax near the flame, almost broken but not quite, woken by the night bell in a small park, the remains of an old forest around the black edge of grief. A sense of something removed. The fearful pleasure that the whole earth is turning. The empty space it has left behind.
More resolute, less ambitious.
Life turns up in the morning, my bread and furtive destiny gathered around the window, a sense of eternity like sailors back from the new world. Back from the primeval, the black hollows with brick and damp earth. Pigeons beat the air in this tin box, they cross like a dangling wire, trees in a wild storm, flocks moving all together across streets with new clouds, now dividing the sweet milk on hard white beds, abandoning analysis altogether. To the mountains, no chance to resume something impenetrable, which increases, without pausing to wake. To the symptoms of pain everywhere. Endless paths across the fallen leaves, with bodies pursuing black plumes of sleep on this frail mattress, suspended among transparent crescents and stars of light and falling from all directions, navigating in agitation in the icy noisome fall of blood. Through cold, honor and death. Pale, muffled, mystic weakness for cemeteries. A long, complicated business, afraid of murderers and their mouths all the way down into the body at every heartbeat, throat cut, the obstacle itself having disappeared inside her. Intentions, appearances, no more. The house on fire with her obstinancy.
No escape from witnessing such horrors, except to become the rattle of the rails, the turn of a leaf at nightfall. All ceremonies are over. How empty the train. Her heavy suitcase in the corridor, at a loss, waiting. A strange sort of strength. Vindictive, compulsive, delirious. All the attributes of womanhood. The much greater intimacy of watching the spilt milk and flowers unnoticed while the storm begins. The rescuers themselves recovering, waiting tremulously around the table, intent on finishing. Together with all the old sorrows, brutalities, staring at the chalk figures, the stricken figures advancing, cadaverous, to something different, to death. To reach it in winter, after the last gas lamp, as we deserve.
Dancers and diners staring at the pauses between melodies, troubled by the element of prediction. London heaves and surges and would they care?
The same sort of life as most, falling to rot among Latin phrases on memorial brass. The dead deep down in cold storage. Some medieval light lying heavily among us. All one long day without divisions, fixed, pinioned among the diamonds of the imperial crown. Those grey arches and moaning pigeons united like lovers in water carried dimly across the lake. Men in black gowns rattle along the sea-front throwing down flowers in their own hunger, academic and meaningless. Walking and finding nothing. The frenzy for going forward, from hour to hour till the cemetery. A whole lifetime to decompose before giving in to the night.
Various attempts were made: thunderous songs at midnight, thinned out with blood and triumph. In a stumbling working-class voice, with little conviction and were soon silent. Broken chairs, dust, books and more. With scenes and tantrums and various objects in wild disorder. Passion for this hour only, before fading to silence. The end of novelty. With phrases, not the body. Sedentary occupation, always unwise. Sleep even worse. Night, and the whore of pleasure turned to give teeth to the outsides of words under the bitterest torture. Carried away irresistibly into woods and fields and steep railway cuttings, the edge of the world into nothingness, entered the black shell, bound as bodies to the horses of the phantom riders, through the vastly menacing silent night only seeemingly attached to the earth. Vacant, completed. Forged in a ring of steel, we rise, solemn, pale, soft like wax near the flame, almost broken but not quite, woken by the night bell in a small park, the remains of an old forest around the black edge of grief. A sense of something removed. The fearful pleasure that the whole earth is turning. The empty space it has left behind.
More resolute, less ambitious.
posted by Scott MacLeod at 5:44 PM
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