Falling hour, p.22
Falling Hour, page 22
25.
Breezes came in through the shooting slits in the public toilet, humming like jug tops and harmonizing with the frogs outside. An aeolian harp. My eyes caught motion in my lower peripherals, down in the left-hand corner closest to the cubicle door. Something stirring. A dead dry willow leaf, curved like a blade or a jai alai xistera, the same basket-woven colour of the latter, honey-tawny, straw-brown, lying on its side and trying to turn over. A tiny click sound as it tried and failed, as the breezes humming in through the shooting-slit jug tops faded in the concrete chamber and could not turn it. A sensitive leaf. I remembered again the contemptuous words of the man who had haunted me, John Keats in his letter from Scotland, from the Gàidhealtachd of Mull, a letter to a brother, Tom, who would soon die of tuberculosis, and I remembered again as well that other letter, the one about the fibres of his brain, the letter whose journey across the world to his brother and sister-in-law I said I would not talk about until later, later, and I see that it is late now, very late, and that I must, it is my obligation, I will do it if I can do nothing else. George and Georgiana were their names. Did anyone warn them how odd their names would look together on a piece of paper, a wedding invitation? But that is beside the point. I have not yet mentioned that at the same time Keats was hit in the eye with a cricket ball, George and Georgiana were in of all places in the world the impossible place of Kentucky in impossible America. George had inherited a thousand pounds, an amount he felt to be too small to start a business in London, and the couple had come to America with the idea that they would farm at the English abolitionist Morris Birkbeck’s utopian community in southern Illinois. But they changed their minds, and by degrees we see them become Americans, melt into America, fold into America, leaving whatever commitments they may have had to abolitionism and human freedom aside. By the 1830s George and Georgiana would live in a mansion and own three enslaved people. The couple’s initial reluctance to stay with the utopians and live by their own labour, their first turning away down the path of melting into America, has been attributed to their discomfort at the lack of ‘near neighbours’ at Birkbeck’s village, and to George not being prepared for the hard work involved. Some evidence for the latter comes from a new neighbour the Keatses would make in Kentucky, a man who would watch George attempting to chop wood and say, ‘I am sure you will do well in this country, Keats. A man who will persist, as you have been doing, in chopping that log, though it has taken you an hour to do what I could do in ten minutes, will certainly get along here.’ This neighbour was in fact French, and the son of a plantation owner in Haiti, the country which by 1819 was incredibly, miraculously free – the miracle wrought after so many years of false starts and betrayals and confusions, the miracle of Toussaint and Dessalines – and had no French plantation owners any longer. And so the Frenchman had come to America to make money in another unfree country. He would make it and lose it. He would buy enslaved people and land, go into debt, and sell everything. He would buy a steamboat. He would convince George Keats to invest his inheritance in this steamboat, which would then almost immediately sink. In his letters to America, John Keats excoriated the Frenchman as a swindler: ‘I cannot help thinking Mr. Audubon a dishonest man. Why did he make you believe that he was a man of property? How is it that his circumstances have altered so suddenly? In truth, I do not believe you fit to deal with the world, or at least the American world.’ Oh yes, I forgot to say. The Frenchman was John James Audubon, later worldfamous as the author and illustrator of Birds of America. He professed from childhood to have felt for birds an ‘intimacy’ that was ‘bordering on frenzy.’
At some point in the years after I sat in the red leather chair and learned the true name of the bird that had sung to me, I decided to read what the famous Mr. Audubon had said about the red-winged blackbird. In his book he called it the Marsh Blackbird. I read the following:
The Marsh Blackbird is so well known as being a bird of the most nefarious propensities, that in the United States one can hardly mention its name, without hearing such an account of its pilferings as might induce the young student of nature to conceive that it had been created for the purpose of annoying the farmer. That it destroys an astonishing quantity of corn, rice, and other kinds of grain, cannot be denied; but that before it commences its ravages, it has proved highly serviceable to the crops, is equally certain.
I was unhappy to see the bird slandered like that, but I wanted to know if Audubon had at least found something kind to say about the song that had been so important to me. I read on:
They frequently alight on trees of moderate size, spread their tail, swell out their plumage, and utter their clear and not unmusical notes, particularly in the early morning, before their departure from the neighbourhood of the places in which they have roosted; for their migrations, you must know, are performed entirely during the day.
He had not found something kind, as far as I was concerned; ‘clear and not unmusical notes,’ he wrote, and it seemed to me a sentiment not unlike ‘clean and not unintelligent’ as applied to a poor child by an aristocrat passing in a luxury phaeton. A grudging concession. I felt Audubon obliterating my bird with each new sentence, stealing my bird further and further away from the memory I had nurtured for so long, changing things worse, far worse, than the bird itself had changed things when I saw its singing. I did not believe Audubon when he said my bird was ‘nefarious,’ you understand. But I knew that generations of adulatory readers around the world had. And then I read further:
The havoc made amongst them is scarcely credible. I have heard that upwards of fifty have been killed at a shot, and am the more inclined to believe such accounts as I have myself shot hundreds in the course of an afternoon, killing from ten to fifteen at every discharge. Whilst travelling in different parts of the Southern States, during the latter part of autumn, I have often seen the fences, trees and fields so strewed with these birds, as to make me believe their number fully equal to that of the falling leaves of the trees in the places traversed by me.
How did he kill so many of what he professed to love? Was this the only possible end for an intimacy bordering on frenzy?
Leaves on the ground; dying, as-yet living leaves, plugged with buckshot and bleeding and coveting breath, raising one or both red-tipped wings in a final spasm of lucid effort, flashing red protest, red banners, the field of the murdered as the steps of the city of Odessa, 1905 red banners dropped in fright or by hands no longer getting any instructions that made sense from nervous systems no longer system, the cruel hooves of the Cossacks’ horses, the gun smoke floating out into the harbour and over the mystic waters of the Black Sea, the causeway of the Argonauts, but now only mute uncaring water with no golden fleece at the end of it, one more great basin of salt tears attendant at the demonic ceremonies of the massacrelands, 1905 Odessa and Audubon’s Kentucky pasturelands and as a matter of public record all America and Canada disasterlands flying false flags. And I as a child came here from the concrete flats and terraces of the housing schemes across the sea to live with Auntie and Uncle, who had already done the same, all so Uncle could drive a truck until it destroyed him in his mind and body and for Auntie to help in a shop as she had done before, different shop only but otherwise all the same, and for me to acquire an exquisite and perfect consciousness of all this with the language and the frames none of us had ever had before and to truly see everything and for sight itself to destroy me in my mind and body also. People like us were meant to be used up and to die and for God’s sake to do it quietly. I never did intend to gae tae a foreign land. Ireland, she meant, in the song. Fennario. The rodeo. Insofar as she was the song, she did go, and was changed. The song became a flayed book of blood, red dressings on a ruined face. Destroy all the people in the airy-o. And as I sat in the thinking room of my concrete cottage, or rather yours, mine, and everyone’s, and watched the single wing of the dead dry leaf try to turn over in the scraps of the wind and fail, over and over, and the croaks of the frogs echoed among the dark branches I could just see through the shooting slits, I knew a desolation that I felt in that moment could be soothed by no faith, no credo, no special and deliberated meditative sitting, no drug expedited parcel-post across the chilly frontier of the blood-brain barrier, no spirit whose vapours were stoked for a decade in the vaulted silence of oaken bones, no words of love on a scroll from Omar Khayyam, no words of divine assignment from an angel. The frogs were calling in the water and they knew something I didn’t and the wind was lapping at the shooting slits and the captain’s name was Ned and under the flag that still persisted in the corner of the flag of the province in which I now lived, and which was even more blatant a feature of the flag of the province I had lived in before, a world had groaned in agony and the louche administrators of India and Ireland and the Northwest Territory had known and done nothing as the numbers of the famine and the pestilence dead had risen and risen, it was all by design, they could teach the CIA a thing or two about the murderous stewardship of global empire and as a matter of fact they had, when the Americans were at their most sophisticated they merely aped the devil Britain in its double century of blood. The wings and the leaves. The dying, as-yet living in the desolation. They would keep going but so would the desolation. Until the dance was ended, under false flag or true.
I had leaned the frame against the door of the thinking room. The bottom of the frame bit into the grout of the floor tiles. But the grout was damp and the frame slid down with a crash that echoed weakly in the small concrete chamber, that flat quacking echo small chambers make. I sighed. Now I was very tired. Now I was very hungry. My left kidney was even hurting again. And I saw at last how the frame had been – there was no mistaking it – an incredible burden to me all day. And the one I would have given it to was gone. Perhaps I was stuck with it forever. Perhaps anyone I wished to give it to would die. And as a matter of fact my old theory, practically antediluvian now, at the start of the day, that some tough kids from my lower-middle-class neighbourhood had found it in a rich neighbourhood and taken it, a trophy, a triumph, slung it around the neck of the red hydrant, ring toss, kids playing it, you know the drill by now, anyway this theory that had pleased me so much at the start of the day I now felt compelled to reconsider as I looked at the frame lying ziggurat-side-up on the floor of the thinking room. Perhaps it had been abandoned on the hydrant by someone else to whom it had been a burden. Perhaps it was cursed. Yes, I entertained the idea – the snail ascending the ziggurat stairs in its cold grey robe no benign astronomer come to track the nightly incremental progress of the planets and stars but rather a death-dealing hierophant with a mouth full of curses to mumble out onto the winds far and wide, the coiled wisdom of the shell in fact a trap-laden maze with oblivion at its centre, and the greatest store of malignity inhering always in the heavy and grey and dead yet living wood. I wondered if any of this was remotely reversible. Was that what the frogs were trying to tell me? That it was? I thought again of the pond and its dark upward stare at airplanes or transmigrating souls. Yes, there was a kind of Arthurian symmetry to it, to end my vigil more or less as it had begun, to throw the frame into the dark pond and hope for a hand to reach out of the waters and catch it. Arthur the Welsh king who the English had claimed as their own with help from Geoffrey of Monmouth, a washe-or-wasn’t-he – maybe Welsh, maybe just another Norman franchisee. I thought of Bedivere in Le Morte d’Arthur, the last man alive and unharmed after the great battle, the day of destiny, bidden by the dying Arthur to throw Excalibur into a lake, just as Arthur had received it from the Lady of the Lake at the start. Bedivere goes to the edge of the water but considers it a shame to throw the beautiful and famous sword away, and he comes back to Arthur a liar, claiming he did as he was told but giving the game away by reporting that the sword merely sank into the water without incident. Arthur knows it is a lie, that throwing Excalibur back into the water is an act with magical consequences. He demands that Bedivere go back and do it again, and he does, and the hand of a woman reaches out to catch Excalibur and in time an ethereal ship appears upon the shore – not of the lake but the sea this time – with otherworldly ladies attendant, the true source of Arthur’s power summoned by the return of their gift to him, and the dying Arthur sails with them to Avalon. But it is Bedivere’s fate that interests me. He no longer has a king to serve. He enters a hermitage and lives out his days in solitude and prayer and the transmission of the parts of the story of Arthur that, as sole survivor, only he could know. A prisoner, in a sense, of memory, a graft from the active and unreflective world of Arthur and his knights to the literate and contemplative one of the monastic orders. It is as though he is put into a computer, into a motherboard, into the great stream of information and its strange dissemination in the texts and the minds of learned women and men. From myth to history. I thought of indebted Monsieur Jacquard and his looms, Ada Lovelace (her name itself a stitched-together thing) and her studies of the brain, the self-taught Alexander Bain with both his looms and his studies of the brain. The huge wash of recorded time, graphed space, plotted action. Such heaviness and such sorrow. I breathed out slowly in the thinking room. No, I could not bring the frame to the pond and place it in the water. If I told you that a hand came out to grasp it I would be lying, the truth would be Bedivere’s lie, nothing would happen, it would splash and either float or sink like a strange dust mote on the skin of the staring eye, a frame in a lens, and the wood would rot but perhaps still hold the shape of a frame for decades, dying and living wood, and I would have done a strange thing too late, I was in history, under it, I did not live in mythic time. No, I knew what I needed to do. I looked at the sigils and semiots on the door of the thinking room – crude, hopeful, hateful, illegible, derivative, original, all the sacred and profane writings of the bored, the bitter, the witty, the stimming, the set-tripping, hundreds of hands and eyes, fearful, no symmetry. No symmetry. I looked at the coat hook on the door. I looked at the frame. I placed the frame upon the coat hook – gently, like I was placing a delicate sash around the neck of someone who while infinitely deserving of the honour was nervous to receive it. In the moment I did so, the frogs stopped croaking – not all at once, like a video on pause, but rather as though a signal had flashed through every amphibian brain to tell them the next croak they made was their last one for tonight. So the sound died out in a stagger, a syncopation. But it stopped. I raised the frame from the hook for a moment, idly, to discover if the act would set them to croaking again. It did not. There was no going back. Our work together was finished. I returned the frame to the hook. I looked now at the frame on the door, framing the portion of the writings on the door that it could frame. It brought me no peace. Why should it do that? But I liked it there. I liked that the next person who came to think in this place that was everyone’s would be staring right at a grey frame with steplike borders surrounding an array of signets, sigils, signs, and semiots of all imaginable origins in no discernible order, and that the longer they stared at the pictograms and rebuses, the more a kind of order would cohere before them, the more a grammar would knit together the symbols according to the grammar of their own lives, the secret grammar of history and time and word and sound and place and space, ideal and material, mythos and logos tumbling together in the darkness, jigging to the rhythms on the folklorist’s board, the knowledge of how things do or do not come together formed by a life of trying to make them do so, trying and perhaps never succeeding, the chaos grammars of my brothers and sisters and siblings in broken-brainitude, in madness, in prisons of childhood memory, in endless re-enactments of the first original knowledge of the lack, lack of money, of safety, of a place on which to stand, I swear to you I always thought I could tell these people from across a room, my co-combatants in the unwinnable or perhaps just possibly winnable war. I lied before. It brought me some peace. By looking for long enough it brought me some. I touched the frame again for the last time. The tack of the grey paint was frictionful on the pads of my fingers. I opened the thinking-room door, slowly, and closed it again as though on my child who was sleeping at the end of a story I’d told. I opened the door of the concrete cottage, stepped out into the cool clarity of the night, and closed that door behind me too. I was light now, buoyant. My tenancy was finished. I compare it to a feeling I had felt only once in my life before, when in a fit of misguided ambition I had decided to try out for fifth-grade eight-hundred-metre. I pushed myself so hard to stay close to the much more athletic boy I ran heats against, the boy whose mother had died and who my guardians had always told me to be kind to but who in my estimation did not need anybody’s pity, or at least not any more than anybody else, and whose life and happiness I wonder about now. And I pushed so hard to stay close to him that suddenly I lost sensation in my legs. They still moved beneath me, still appeared in contact with the ground. But I felt nothing there, I was half as heavy as normal, I was flying, and it frightened me. I stopped trying to keep up with my opponent. At the finish line I informed the coach that I was quitting track. I had no one to talk to about my body, which I feared, no way of learning about endorphins. But I know now that is what they were. So that outside in the now-silent park the fact that I was flying did not immediately frighten me this time. It was just the endorphins. And as the concrete cubes below me now truly began to look more and more like the shadowy forms of dice, just barely visible in the mingled lights of the street lamps, the windows, and what must certainly be the moon, rising or risen or invisible but sending light anyway somehow like a myth in secret, and as the same commingled lights broke incompletely through the broadleaf trees and left at their feet their shadows, and as the green table sea of the grass was now darkened and velveteen, I saw that at last I could leave, that when I felt something solid underfoot again it would be the moebius-stripped causeway of the invisible bridge of brass, and that walking this bridge to its chief and unmistakable end I would have arrived finally at wherever it is I am now.
