DYING IN THE LIGHT
or
- The Death of Tragedy in the Spirit of Muzak
by
Jonathan Afrad
--I--
To
him unhappiness was a rumour
Puzzling
by its ubiquity
but
never actually threatening
because,
after all,
His
people, it was very generally acknowledged,
though
perfectly presentable
nonetheless
were the sort
who
always, almost mystically,
are
in the know
of
the thing, which is not to say
You'd
have picked up anything at their table
more
substantial than a bon mot - topical but fraught
with
cultured allusions. You see, they liked to talk of Art
but
Art without the Passion
even
of Interior Decoration
instead
something Abstract
Tangential
never
lacking in Judgement
nor
ideas - though, don't misunderstand me, not
Vulgarly
Intellectual
The
mind itself merely an adjunct
of
Taste - Etherealised, all pervasive
The
Logos
Fugitively
incarnated in some slim
Volume
barely
translated from the Czech
or
better yet
a
privately circulated monograph
penned
by
an ex-Cabinet Minister
Known
chiefly for his Grammar School antecedents
his
good natured sloth
And
he who had thought these thoughts
and
thinking them recoiled
from
so paltry, so provincial,
a
view of the thing
such
patent lower middle-class censoriousness
He
took refuge
Where?
in
those shameful dreams
dreamt
wide eyed, fixed gaz'd
in
front of his Mother's dressing table mirror
in
Golder's Green
or
Where
he would confront
Like
Nina Foch
Mother,
Father
"but,
how could you?
"Don't you see?
"All
these years I have been living a lie!
"Father,
I trusted you
"Mother
... You I can't forgive…
"That
I was adopted!"
"Heaven,
pluck out my eyes!
"They
have gazed upon what they should not...
"Pass
me down the cloth cap, hand me the Racing Times
"Some
time still
"Must
I wander the straying Earth
"
"Who
living, had no where to rest my weary head !"
-----II-----
But
that was just a phase
As
he'd be the first to acknowledge
If
such things can be acknowledged
By
that Science's student that disposing of objects disposes
of
objections to the given dispensation
Or
an Art
Concerned
always with the underside of things
the
world de-natured , nude
Hinting
at some yet more definitive coition
by
which to legitimate concrete possession
than
the usual Congress of Use.
Or in a more abstract mode
to
personalise the impersonal
Powers
of new types of Property. To paint
the
dwarf crowned with his new cap of invisibility
Pausing
his primping to pose
Against
the backdrop of his new fangled Principality.
But,
of Art, of Science - what did he really know?
except
that the one can be bought, the other
more
dearly bought - the buying
itself
all needful Art, all necessary Science.
Love
- he dreamt of , not
as
Bedouins dream of rivers in
but
as bored City children in sullen reverie
Picture
still silent warriors silver silhouetted
against
sombre skies. Simultaneous their startling
at
each other's presence. Setting spur
to
mount, they drop down
from
dune's dry eminence
to
charge across darkling desert flats
And
the thicket of Crescent Moons
shimmering
scimitars set up
are
both bride and bower
Anticipation
and Consummation
Perfect
Tryst and primal Trauma
for
souls who are nonetheless love-sick
for
being sick of Love.
But,
Love when it came, was not something apart
form
the skeins of which his World was woven
the
girl was not a dream, nor a waking from a dream
Rather
a subtle enrichment of the fabric
A
ripening of colours whose threads
had
always been there. Nothing
Startling,
no sudden edge
to
the known world, no rent
in
the nimbus shift, no fierce
Sudden
flash of flesh.
The
masks not growing more otiose, more bizarre
Rather
the reverse, a freer flow
of
expression, each distinct, unambiguous
All
the more unsettling then
for
one who had, after all, hoped
for
an eventual unmasking
Not
in the manner of the Lover or the Mystic
but
as one weary from long reading
the
effort of decipherment who, half against himself, hopes
for
a quickening of the pace, a sudden ceasing
even
though that would violate a favourite genre's canon
Rob
reading of its pleasures. Unsettle, disturb
the
circadian rhythms of that grazing animal
Stabled
by Night in dreams.
But,
Love, he knew, is different. It cannot
Be
bought. What then can it be? But
an
Advertisement.
An
Advertisement for a product that doesn’t exist
The
film starred Rock Hudson, Doris Day.
It's
something
in
the late '50's seemed always about to say
but
stopped, self censored, short.
As
also Narcissus
(No
one does not know this)
drew
back from the Pool
the
soul slaking stream
"I'm
not ready"
Echo,
more purely, gives back the plaintive note
"for
that kind of commitment."
An
experience each of us has had
That
"Afternoon on the Phone"
a
Voice haunted by a face
Time
so timidly tenanted
by
timid Space
The
twilight sleep, the dulled
dolorous
parturition
of
words monstrously twinned
miraculously
tripled
quad-
quintupled
Agape
the unseen mouth
labouring
still
Far
outside Pain, Shame or any connection
with
its Past as Pleasure
Pander,
Escutcheon
While
at the other end
Everything
is being re-connected
Everything
amplified, felt
Paean
and Panic, unvoiced, alternating
As,
at Dusk, two Gods oft times dispute
Possession
of a too-tame tree
and
vividly
it
flickers between Hag and Hymn.
-------III--------
"But
that was in the Past- the Season
"Most
favourable to Death." There has been
something
kin
Words
dissolve
back into language
Voices
de-vivify. Vats
filled
by kenosis
Look
not
for Engagement here.
More
typical is the engaged tone
that
special cacophony that names
the modern silence
not Love without
dialogic
But
messages re-routed, derailed
connections
fail by reason of other connections
or,
if the phone is off the hook,
there's
the intenser dialogue
the Self whose implied existence
Lets,
leaves,
Everyone
off the hook.
What's
Love any more, any way? It's a strange
heirloom
more
fit for the Attic than the living room
in
these Executive Estates
Ranch
style dwellings, Colonial
Mansions,
un petite, the lofts are crammed
with
relicts of hobbies that more
than
unhonoured Ancestors shaped and framed
the
Homo Aequalis underneath the roof
and
it is when disaster strikes
that
Love like the lustreless Holbein
the
chapped commode
in
another age, amongst another class
is
suddenly rediscovered in Act - the last
Briefly
paraded, it Provenance purveyed
to
the knowing stranger, then thankfully traded
for
brief solvency
the Sanity
of
a febrile age.
----IV----
But
this was unworthy
he would have
to think
More
carefully. Thought itself is fragile
Concepts
are brittle when all
Concepts
end at last inscribed
on
or
Plaster
Reproductions
in feverishly fertile
Conjugal
nests. No harsh
wind
is needed here. The Young
disperse
too soon. The old flap their wings
Only
by way of courtesy
Crane
their necks
shuffle
sidelong in slow hopping dance
An
Ethology without an Ecology
A code remembered
from
a forgotten War
and,
yet , while the code exists
Victory
is still possible. Defeat
inevitable.
Consciousness, this small
shallow
stream in which soldiers dip their cups
their
hands palsied, their lips
convulsed
by Life's bitter rictus
this
legible liquid dribbled rather than drunk
What
else can save us?
There
is nothing else
The
demonic Pool Yudhistra exorcised
by
returning always the normal answer
Parrying Paradox
with
Prose. Taking his stand
always
on the Human. An odd
Posture
for a Warrior we may think
Until
the cohorts advance. The Mass
in
us all. Education,
Canetti,
a cordon sanitaire, Mass
Education,
Canetti, simply another
way
to have the order obeyed unopened
Unregistered.
Plausible deniability
the
hand
freed
from the eye's grasp
the
eye - an optional accessory in a Video game
the
Mind
Alternatively
informed. Absolved.
Lethe
washes the banks of the Pentagon Computer
and
one hand washes the other
one
eye
watches
the other
There
is only one Mind
Divined
in Mirrors
Divided by Mirrors
And
that myriad mirrored Mind
"It's mine!"
He
cries recoiling
Hurrying
out to plunge
in
to the pre-fab, kin-aesthetic, sensorium
retailed
at the usual Emporium
the
take-away, the Video, the Dubonnet
each
of which, individually, would make you puke
As
Trinity are the kerygma of a more Catholic Luke
And
if still you fret, if still by some fluke
Hype
haemorrhages, thoughts bleed back in
Toy
ever so timidly with slivers of Sin
Try
a third finger to probe that crack
Two
fingers to roll the smack.
-------V-------
And
thus passed several years
Mara
Has
an easier time with the Bodhisattva
raised
in the age of the ubiquitous image
where
Selection replaces Criticism
Reduction,
Analysis
And
the Sorbonne produces Baudrillard
And
the
On
a Summers' Night svelte
with
tactile Sirens sweat
he
returned home early, his ears still waxed
by
the dubious insistence of the double Bass
His
eyes tight shut till the Taxi paused
for
a shambling drunk who took ages to cross
"Shame,"
said the cabby, "to see him so shabby
"Time
was 'e was the likeliest bloke
"You'd
'ave thought 'im a Toff - till he spoke
"Still
- if yer think - 'e must 'ave been odd
"or
he wouldn't 'ave started 'mbibing on his Todd
"But
then I suppose it could happen to any poor sod
"We
all end up drinkin' ’nour own Todd."
The
Taxi moved on. His mind alighted
No
longer able to stand the fare
Deep
sunk in his Mind's pockets
His
grasp eluded itself
Thought
to thought is food and drink
Now
he cursed the day he was thought to think
Why
the questions questions questions
And
why the hammering in his head?
Why
sits he to a meal who rather grazes and flees?
or
gobbles and grabs rather than dines at his ease?
unless
to evoke, invoke or provoke
or
God, or Family, or if neither of these
then
at least the Hieros that is Hierarchy
the same stately movement whether preluded by
Mou Tai, Martini or Arkhi
from
clear soup, thin and highly bred
to
malodorous Cheese too lowly to be wed
to
honest bread, while standing in the middle Mutton
Pitifully
transparent in all things but in
being
true to herself . Dying
or,
to keep to the metaphor, putrefying
only
when the roaring Baronet
is
seduced by something more vulgar yet
or
if this seems obscure perhaps you forget
when
Strudel did service for honeyed marmoset.
Why
drink? When there is no third
where
any two are gathered
And
no I and Thou where stand more than two
and
even alone ( Basho tells Li Po )
No
Flowers, No
Moon
tho'
that satellite swarms
in
the only dreams it now spawns
with
the colonists of the new Imperium
for
Mephisto in Faust-Ford's delirium
drives
back with dykes Ariosto's sea
of
lost things, a pleasing fantasy
of
wandered wits fetched back privily
And
so Selene be not untenanted utterly
Let
this be clear - of manifest Destiny
She
still stands supreme as Symbol
But,
look at it boys. Think ! Use your head !
Strategically
sited, resource rich and - Dead
No
Native problem. Below
The
Natives look up and see their Mahdi's face
who
himself mindful of his God's covenant
cannot
with propriety pray
for
another deluge and so schemes instead
for a tide not of water but blood
to
wipe clean the Land
of
all guilty of even Memory's transubstantiations
the
Alchemy on which the drunkard places his faith
for
the Faith is contaminated by the Faith
of
all those not of the Faith
and
that Faith too
is
dangerous. Make it hard
Plant
the Way with thorns
Let
there be no Faith unless it be Faith in you
for
the rest
let
it be false to be True
The
Grabber becomes the one winning with...
and
his posterity numerous as the stars
deluded
such
Fathers have no sons
nor
was there a son
despite
all the dubious genealogies
Until
God becomes a duteous father too
to
God
Verus
Tu
est
deus absconditus !
but
you won't get far
Mother
Thatcher will track you down
No
matter where you are set for
that's
what you’ll get for
Makin' Whoopee
-----VI-----
The
Taxi stopped. His body straggled
For
the fare was not small
He
was helped to stand.
"You
awright Guv?
"You're sure? You're
sure?"
"It
will be awright Guv
"For sure. For sure."
"A
wot?"
"Naw
mate, not in your state
"You've
a nice little house what ju want an 'Otel for?
"Garn!
Get in there son! Your's innit? That's wot its there for
"Listen
mate
"I'd
tell her straight
"Don't
'esitate
"It's
like a Man's got to do wot a man's got to do
"Don't
like it then lump it - fuck you!
"It
will give her a fright Guv
"She'll
be awright Guv
"See
if I am not right Guv
"Aw!
Don't thank me ... thank you!"
Even
so
leaving
him propped against the door
And
all metaphysic Physic
merely
the chaff of a chirpy charioteer
exempt
from the usual draft
the
battle
that
begins when the door opens
And
everything that has been known
of
human happiness huddles
the
Beidermeier bed, the
As
much as the variorum editions of Thomas Mann
defeating
by their cowardice
what
can only war with courage
And
so the man stands framed in the reeling Hall
Stairs
stagger and slip beneath his step
Ghosts
gibber and flee his sheeted bed
The
pillow is stone and samite in turn
Nothing
is constant
Furniture
is as fluid as fashions in furnishings
What
we build with as brittle as that which we are built
Our
Credit only as good as our Credit of the Good
Query
a Note and your own Mortgage falls due
Refuse
what you're bid, fail to take your cue
Suddenly
you have no Home to return to
You've
been sold up old cock! Lock, stock and barrel
Get
on with what you've got on
Ya
rags! ya lok en kopf ! Ya stinkin' apparel!
---VII---
And
so it happens
Komono
Chomei
He
say
"In
Spring a mislaid Oceans's waves of wisteria"
what
are they now?
The
sodden colours of a young wife's Hysteria
So
Siddharta steals from sweet Yashoda's side
Not
in the moonlit glamour of an occluded Grace
But
in mere drunkenness
"Summer
woods have cuckoo voices
"To
draw one down the paths to Death"
Sweltering
in Solitude - he too will seek
In
Vain. Know
the
weeds overflowing your own back garden
have
choked the forest. Ego
is
the cuckoo nestling. The song bird
best
left unsought
But
this is to get ahead
There
are still some semblances of Stability
some
certitudes
Like
rotten teeth to be probed by two tongues
until
the demon dentist comes
Great
Crippen! Our Christ! You who never reached
Stand
tall, for we who have seized the communion Cup fear not to own ya.
For
ours is the kingdom which was your Crucifixion
&
the Churches compete for our benediction
It
is safer this way
We
no longer have revolutions
we
have divorces
yet
"Love"
they kept crying, "Love! Love!"
It's
that season
more
bewildering than the wind is this sudden wilding of wings
Tho'
we too are birds of Passage
"In
Autumn there are cicadas to lament this cracked husk of a World"
Well
- perhaps. He heard
the
crackling of conversation in the heaped
Hearths
of Commercial humanity - in
and
Bayswater. Nothing ill
Bitter
by the pint. Eking
Out
an essenceless existence
by
drawing upon the metamorphic horde
plundered
by purposeless Nights
unreplenished
by impenitent days..
And
so slowly to starvation.
---VIII---
To
fall in Love is to seek to create a World
A
World where nothing would exist
save
your lover and yourself
Too
late you find
it's
intolerable
for
both
but
for only you
Inescapable.
So
Francesca sprays herself with Galleotto
Herakles
poses in a T-shirt by Nessus
Sukhara
Madhava is Pali for Truffles
Lachrimae
Christi is a cloying liqueur
What
is happening here?
George
Steiner announces the death of Tragedy
Ariadne
at the Daedaelean disco
treads
a measure with the brute stranger
then
returns to Dionysus
not
to go into labour without ever giving birth
but
to become the sterile Sybil of a more Eugenic Earth
Tolstoy
reading King Lear
fells
no thrill of prescient fear
instead
fulmines at - "the senselessness of it...
"the
lack of Art."
and
Wilde who wept for Rubempre
yet
walks untaught the
while
Joyce, already ill
crowded
in the shadows of a cankered Light
for
some mysterious reason
Turns
against, of all things, Ibsen
's
Ghosts. Was ever a man more haunted?
by
the Erinyes of the Victorian Polis
more
self aware, more self taunted
yet
steeled against that same saving self knowledge
for
Light is not a Lucia lost
in
the nitid labyrinth of a poisoned blood
To
that two fold beast - both Mater and Priest
Nor
is sin Individuation, nor scorn Salvation
Rather
these
Are
but stages in the disease
Light
is but a brand - nor bright, nor bravely borne
by
a battered band, smoke blinded, thrown
At
your feet, while with stealth and steel you seek to ease
The
coils of that net which All are and from which All seek release
And
the two or three images sparked in that Attrition
All
of your individuality - Ritual, Mystery and Initiation
These
are not the masks of God
But
effigies of ourselves as a God might see us
Who
to gaze at Water must look on Rock
or
to visualise the infant feeding at its Mother's breast
Must
see the Man's side speared, the Blood's spurt and rest.
Ours
is not an essence
Acquired
by some travail of Volition
nor
yet
that
slow stain - Adversity's increment
nor
can any sudden
effect
of Revelation or Obliteration
Affect
us other than as Dissonance
which
tho', for others, may have a Resonance
Yet
it is wordy Inflation to gaud as Destiny
And
Blasphemy to the Eucharist and false Soteriology
to
laud the spectacle as Redemptive tragedy.
----IX----
Symbols
cannot save us
Yet
at best
Symbols
are all we are
who
knows it not
Or
know it but not what to signify
We
come together like chords struck in Agony
Staves
seeking a Symphony
Words
seeking a Language
but,
rudely jostling, crudely jangling
Till
from the Rood we learn a Rhetoric
from
Light's lament a Lexicon.
All
other Poetry is but Poltroonery
Where
only the Charlatan is genuine
the
pusillanimous, puissant
as
witness Rosetti rooting in Lizzie's grave
or
Laura hag riding Robert Graves
for
the rest, Language
their
being-for-others
only
allowed them to be
Their
own Autistic infants
And
they remained idiot savants of an Art
from
which they themselves remain untaught
Unsolaced
but
of
possible interest
To
that great slime shod It
Evolution's
Anthologist
The
great bulbous brain - that ultimate Socialist
Happy
to squeeze what would only wither away
And
so speed the Dawn of a drear disembodied Day
for
if Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny
in
the Soul's body- that is Culturally-
Then
in each generation all of the Ordinary
bear
and rear up not their own progeny
but
mutant hybrids of an abhorred prodigy
Who,
lacking that saving Spiritual Androgyny,
Throw
up barricades, storm the Brain's Bastille
Outrage
all order in a fitful fury to feel
the
incarnate touch of that by which they burn
the
fled flame, livid pyro-pestle, womb water's churn
Thus
in the ant hill of words
there are Orgies without Orgasm
Till
the termites invade
fearsome Auguries- the
terrible chasm
Threatening
the Senate and its Gods
As now when Humanism is assailed
A
Curtius is called for
Pure, young, principled,
unafraid
for
still it glares- the North South rift
No Curtius came. Brandt
offerings
as
ineffectual as the erstwhile policy of drift
So soon being born human will
become a crime
Somewhere,
therefore everywhere, the plea
Of impossible attempt failing for,
you see,
That was ever the essence of
Humanity
And
no Hope of Appeal. We are Guilty
The
God Marie Stopes heard
in
the dark Yew Wood
Counselled
Contraception, not Caution
There
are causes where Courage is all of Compassion
and
Compassion cannot couch with Cowardice
Flaubert
called Art the Soul's condom
Love
purchased not at the price of Death
but
more cheaply
Cheapness
too
Characterises
the creed of these Moral Economists
whose
wooing we greet with demure demurrals
Not
that their words do not win us, their persons please us
but,
their fear enfeebles the consent to which they bring us
Till
they pass on perplexed, bulls butcher be-wotting, impotent, afeared
They
mount their mounds murmuring against the lowing of the herd
----X---
But
this is not to say there was no Hope for the World
for
tho' the child was dim
all
promise was in
the
zone of proximal development
and
all embraced a progressive envelopment
till
the Tutor played truant
and
like Perrin taking a later train
or
Seeta stepping out of Laxman's Rekha
or
he
became for the Universe both
Outcaste
and caster out of kilter
For
storms have been borne on butterfly wings
and
stars scotched by comet stings
and
a frivolous Bulimic's foolish starvation
imperilled
all sentient Beings' hope of Salvation.
For
there have always been inside out men
In
them Public and Private are relentlessly reversed
Nourished
in Secret, their evacuations are open
Living
without laughter, their lessons a Joke
Having
no history, they wear History as a Watch
Skimming
the Surface, yet signifying the depths
Untouched
by Sorrow, yet symbols of Suffering
so
touching !
Not
True
All
lives which have, for some, or one, a significance
and
fail to fit their slated tomb of Thought
By
reason of some rasping lapse in Reason
not
eked out by gestures of Magic or Emotion
nor
filled up by over yeasting Madness
have
this type of Resurrection
that
when our minds turn back towards them
(Procrustean
undertakers cursed with a conscience)
we
find the stone rolled back
the
Tomb bone bare
And
then begins the effortful embroidery
The
hollow Stupa echoing with incantations
its
sides peopled with perfervid imagery
filched
from the common store house of Myth - Inventions
of
ludicrously overstrained originality
Distract
from the scandal of a heteroclite singularity
---XI---
As
with him whose Rood am I
Not
the riddle of his life
but
to ravel his Death in Light
strains
the Truth I write
breeding
a different sort of lie
not
yet a really Original Sin
divorcing
me from our common kin
giving
me the right to name things anew
so,
with clipped coins, my best I'll do
---XII---
"Quod
est Veritas ?"
"Bis
repetita placent "
"Feala ic on tham beorge gebiden"
I,
on that Hill, enduring
"wratha
wyrda "
many
terrible wierds.
It
is time to gather in my harvest of unmeaning
"In the next Century, everyone will
be neurotic"
Time
to read the Schizophrenic's love letter
"And then, in
Time
to give Gassire
his lute
a Heart.
---O---
Heart's
deep cave - Wisdom's womb
Suffering
seeded - despairing, alone
As
within so without as
Flesh
on the limb withers
Eyes,
in their sockets, sink
brackish
water at well's bottom
Ribs
- rafters of a storm stripped shed
Buttocks
like a buffalo's hoof
but,
stomach's shaming curve
the
man is pregnant
with
a Truth it is Death not to deliver
into
a World where innocents are massacred
routinely
"Come
Cunda! Serve
"Only
me from this dish"
The
Doctrine is ductile
I
leave it for your ornament
For
even from Darkness you deduce
Olber,
an evolving Universe
I
quit
Desire's
starry Night
I
die
In
the quotidian. The even plains of Light.
© Jonathan Afrad