IF YOU WERE TO ASK ME WHOM I WRITE FOR, HONESTLY

IF YOU WERE TO ASK ME WHOM I WRITE FOR, HONESTLY

If you were to ask me whom I write for, honestly, I really wouldn’t be able to say. One day it’s this. The next it’s that, depending on my mood I suppose. Sometimes I think I ingested so much negativity when I was young, and hadn’t even learned to get my hands up in front of my face yet to block the blows, when I found myself going toe to toe with a meteor shower that had already done the dinosaurs. I think I’ve lived with a battered self-image like the pitted moon ever since. A pariah or a voodoo doll no one’s ever clung to for long. They could put the pins in, but they weren’t much good at taking them out. Go ask any butterfly. So maybe in a twisted, subliminal kind of way that makes something good come of something bad, I write for people, to make up for having been born as I am among them. It’s gesture of sorts, the parting gift of an exile, if you like. Art for art’s sake has always struck me as sure sign of impotence, aesthetic masturbation, and about as productive. Not my style. By their fruits ye shall know them. So, yes, people, why not? No people. No music. No art. No poetry. Simple enough. First come, first served whether it’s deserved or not. I’m so at home in the darkness, my eyes have evolved to the point I can see it shining in an abysmal aura of ferocious clarity that would humble diamonds, and I know the black mirror’s brighter than the white one, so I make a virtue of a vice, a strength of a debility, and write on the walls to humanize the dark spaces I explore as if my fingers were spiders crawling along the dank stones, someone was here before so as brutally isolated and inexplicable as it seems to be in this space, it’s habitable. And I can say things in such a way, I can stitch up a hemorrhaging rose with its own thorns. I can rage like a wounded dragon at atrocities that would make even a phoenix grow hoarse and lose its voice. Or scream in silent agony. And born on a Wednesday, under Hermes, I am a Vas Hermeticum of metaphors and occult sciences, an understudy of the eloquence of night. A black mystic standing in the shadows Venus casts on a moonless winter night. The nightwatchman of the new moon. A guide of the dead who couldn’t afford the astrolabe of a pyramid to aim them at the stargates in Orion. Cloven hoofs with winged heels, well before Pythagoras, the Persians, or the Ojibway, I knew all the lyrics of the songs of the birds that carry the souls of the dead in the urns and amphorae of their bodies like the angel of death does in the modern version of the myth. I’m an ancient asmatographer. And I use my pain as an antidote for others. One fang kills you and the other heals you just like the horns of the moon, or the tits of Medusa. I extract a cure for others from the heart of my disease. I dip the other wing of the fly that fell into the Milky Way so you can keep on drinking from it uncontaminated. Out of a surrealistic twist of karma, I write for people like an evil that was condemned to do good, and I’ve seen hell, and I’ve seen paradise, and I’ve got two eyes open on both which is something the one-eyed angels can’t say. And as I’m fond of telling them, just because the doctor’s got the disease doesn’t mean he can’t cure it. So would you bless or would you curse a creature like this? And do you think either way, it would make a difference, or matter in the least?

But sometimes there are no people around, and late at night, after the drunks have gone back underground, sitting here at my desk, watching my fish swim around, I’m just another nightbird longing for a companion out in the woods where every ear is attuned to the sound of their solitude. And I can hear my own mindstream making its hidden way through the darkness of the birch grove whose albino limbs glowing in moonlight all look like Corinthian pillars bent and knotted by arthritis. And I don’t think I’m writing for anyone but myself just to add my sad noise to the estranged voices of those talking to themselves in the universe as if no one were listening to what you had to say before you offered your head to the ax of the executioner’s moon like the period of an exclamation mark that had just transcended its many-splendoured wonder with its own extinction in the unmanifest unity of it all. So I don’t always know for whom or what I’m writing for, then. Maybe I’m writing for the stars who’ve never failed to write back to me, or I’m just feeling the approach of autumn, and shedding leaves. Lament draws near, without the sting of sorrow, memories I haven’t relived in light years, and out of the stoic air, the ghosts of old muses who’ve still got beauty on their side, and fires that never age behind their veils of distant smoke dancing on the hillside to the picture-music of the aspen snake charmers to defy their own exorcisms.

PATRICK WHITE