INSTRANSITIVE MORNING

Intransitive morning, early spring, nothing much pops up. I’m a dullard. Crumbs of dreams in the corner of my eyes, and night still clinging to my brain like tar. Reality check: Fifty-nine this year. Getting old. Or at least trying it on for size, an era or two, here and there, coming undone at the seams. I’m beginning to sign truces with my body where I used to rule. Flashes of myself as the king of quicksand with a turtle for a throne. I’ve got to be one of the last flags of the sixties to come down. What were we saying back then: things about love and truth, justice, freedom, revolution, compassion, the creative lucidity of unconditioned play? Amazing how the idealistic spontaneity of those years has degenerated into the violent protocols of a sanctimonious purity, frightened people reaching for God and a rifle, reflexively. I think I’m looping; living again backwards what I advanced through. Maybe it’s the way I’ve been wired to the planet to inform on myself, but I swear I jumped from the stage of the sixties into the mosh pit of the same old crusades that tore down Byzantium and slaughtered Jerusalem in l099, Jesus and Muhammad having it out in the desert, while Lucifer-Iblis thrives on the bets he’s taking, playing both sides against the refugee camp in the middle. Shades of Vietnam. But remember when we killed to steal a weapon, a woman, a cow? We took it and left. Woe unto you Sargon of Agade. Now we kill for an idea; now we occupy; now we reform things in the nucleus, now our virtues seep into the crevices of the boundary stones of the brain, the imperializing minerals of our ideological pseudomorphoses, death everywhere pre-emptively imposing its solitary sanction on the innocent and evil just the same, being the one, true, democratic, egalitarian that it is. Coffee. Cigarette. Power. Lights. Computer screen. I’ve got a god’s-eye view of the ongoing autopsy in the global abbatoir of a self-destructive teaching hospital. And the words are trying to arrange the marriage of the silence to the disgrace, but the bride’s been decapitated before her brother could throw the first stone. No wonder God doesn’t wear a human face and had to create space to find somewhere within himself commodious enough to hide in, having clicked on to the demonic icons of our features and futures. One body, the planet, breaking into thought. Volcanoes of pain. And the great sky, from looking, half-insane; its stars, smeared with weeping, muddled as fireflies, as the weather turns around like a wounded animal to confront its priestly redactor. Millenarian apocalypse now, astronomic catastrophe, or the black rapture of total extinction, the same; who would have guessed there would be so many days of judgment that the clock has been converted into a war crimes tribunal as its hands come down like swords on the nape of every moment? Once it was attended by recording angels, one, to the left, one, to the right, the cherubs and epaulets on our shoulders, but now the human heart is bugged. Strangers in unindictable rooms gag it with its own blood. And the children; let’s not mention the children whose deaths by the millions have done more to advance the rage and the rhetoric of the impotent like a verbal aphrodisiac than all the bloodlust of the colisseums of the Roman empire ever could, high on the opiate of another festive holy day. How do I expiate the self-loathing I feel when I don’t forget to remember the children, and there before me arrayed in objective exactitude beside a shovel at the edge of a grave, is the singular futility of the life I have squandered on chasing the literary simulacra of the living features I could have been saving? How do you live inexcusably trying to ameliorate your own indefensible humanity by cultivating the eloquence of a caravan on the perfume trail to Solomon, all frankincense and dung? I live homelessly in the slums of myself to avoid being enrobed judiciously in the guilty night velvets of my blood-caked interiors. And I am appalled at the rabid affliction of my species sprawling across the planet like a deranged virus adapting ingeniously to its own extinction. How do you celebrate the rose that poisons your breath without corrupting the truth? Glad I asked, but my voice isn’t conveying anything it wants leaked to the press, for fear of incriminating itself like a judas-goat in a cover up engineered by its mould-hearted superiors. We forgive the lies we won’t admit are true. The ruse of the left hand washing the right. Even with the most seasoned intentions, to live here, even below the salt and under the table with anxious dogs avoiding the swat to vy for a morsel, where one can grow fat on the garbage, is to dress up like a float and parade down streets that are packed with roadkill. And literary immortality? What’s that if there’s no blood in the stone, but a way of trying to squeeze a textbook out of an epitaph? There’s an overworked doctor in a tent in Nigeria I should have been.

PATRICK WHITE