WHO AM I WRITING TO?

Who am I writing to? Is it you in your busy day, who have forgotten me, or is it the literati who will exhume my remains after a scourging of worms? All a matter of taste, I suppose, though it doesn’t much matter now in this collusive bottle of mind, if the wine get drunk on itself. If the target is not precise enough to earn the arrow, I’d rather burn like a sign in the heavens than pour myself into the dirty cup of a slovenly ear. Cataracts in the eye; flowers in the sky, perhaps, but it takes a lot of feathers to make a bird or even a pillow to dream on, and how many skies had to o.d. on their stars when the moon railed them like a razor before a single word could divine the darkness, and raise them up from their watershed? Or maybe I write for the dead; elaborating epitaphs on the invigilating boundary stones of the gaping incohesions I have jumped into again and again to save Faustus from Rome. A sound magician is a demi-god, but that’s an old rod that keeps turning into a snake every time it’s thrown down at pharoah’s feet. Snake eat snake. Why, Faustus, this is hell, nor are we out of it. Spells I cast on myself like voices to people the silence. It’s not the money, not the broken windows of fame, not even the women anymore that urges me to map the lightning with a name. And before anyone else says it, I’ll say it. I’m the mystic effusion of an elemental confusion that has siderealized the visions that burn like rivers in my head. But now that I’ve said it, and you’ve read it, let’s put a match to it like a flag at a protest rally with a third eye. When I’m not starbread, I’m kind of crumby. And even that’s just a half-moon of self-effacement, one foot in the attic, one in the basement. So maybe my tongue’s just French-kissing its own ear, and there’s never been anyone here to listen to the wind without grass or leaves, no one who could hear. But there are times when I can hear my enzymes turning like keys and chords to unlock new sequences of exponential metaphors. And I am all doors, swinging open, to cross the old thresholds into a vastness that even my windows hadn’t detected. And the grammar of the saying changes like the laws of physics warping Euclid in deep space, a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest. Time stops and the light of the stars arrives before their future, and what I had thought was history, lives pendulously in the mystery like a bell. It’s one thing to move like matter; it’s another to bend like space, and still another to pull yourself out of the stovepipe of the Mad Hatter like a halo around a black hole. Of course, there are ways I would like to be regarded, but the dark won’t shine for the seeing, until they’re derisively discarded. Just regard the extreme chaos of conditioned conciousness. And there’s more being in the world than notoriety wants to confess, though the pundits of the great rehearsal would have it, more is less. So the play goes on without me just for a lark most of the time, and I’ve blown more than one lightbulb in the marquee of an entrancing line to comply with the intrusive suggestion of a sign that lit up like an opening night off Broadway, one of the hits of peripheral vision that couldn’t find a director. Now who’s a creator if there’s no audience to divine me through my works, and is it faith or face that heeds me more? Among the unborn, I am especially fond of a nineteen year old, as arrogantly pure as I was in the heat of my aspirations, whose ferocious approval at best will be a truce, not with the truth, but with the rigorous quality of a lack of lies, an absence of eyes in the dark. And no return address on the ark when it puts to sea, and only one of every kind to reanimate the peaks for posterity that the seeking might find the one who seeks, and the seeing not draw the blind.

PATRICK WHITE