AND THE VOICES COME
And the voices come. Some with
bouquets of razorblades. And some with white Russian irises. They gather like
smoke and Milky Ways and
born again pilgrims on the Road of Ghosts. Water snakes in the moonlight. They
come the way my last lover’s voice would sound now. And I can hear the thunder
of the blue stones and the sarsens walking all the way from southwest Wales
to Stonehenge just to make a new religion out of the way
farmers look at the sky. Sad voices like dolorous iron bells swaying like women
heavy with child. And those incomprehensible voices that are still looking for
their Rosetta Stone that just stare at you blankly and say more about the
meaning of loss with their eyes than they do with their mouths. Like children
starving to death in East Africa .
I
listen without judgment or distinction for the living word or the dead. I
listen as if I were listening to a grove of nightbirds on the outskirts of Babylon .
I hear the turkey vultures shuffling like undertakers at the sky burials of
random road kill. And I hear the nightingales. I hear the anthracite crow on
the dead branch of featherless sumac mocking my diamond insights like a chunk
of coal. A great nebula of voices ingathering out of the void. And I wait. I
wait to see which of all these in this cloud of unknowing will be the first to
precipitate into stars. Rain. Myths of
shining. Alcyone in the Pleiades. And I never know whether I’m going to be
dancing on water with fireflies or waltzing with despair under a chandelier of
black holes. Or wheeling up and down the stairwells of helical thermals under
my wings like a red-tailed hawk until the sun goes down on a long lazy August
afternoon with the moon coming up in the west. And it doesn’t matter if the
mirror on the wall is white or black or pthalo blue. White and light or dark
and deep. Weeping or giddy with delight when I tell her that she’s obviously a
more beautiful similitude than I am. I listen to what the rich pleonast appeals
for like more and more and more of the same thing. Kingfishers and halcyon
seas. And I hear the poor man pleading for a lifeboat like an echo drowned out
by the sound of one hand clapping in a thunderstorm. I hear the voices of the
dead trying to unsay things through me. Things they said and did not mean. Or
should have said in tears. I try to undo the silence as much as I can for them
and set them free. But whose seance I answer isn’t up to me. Out of the
polyglot chaos of insights and words I let spontaneity emerge into a choir of
picture-music like schools of excitable fish in the moonlight turning all the
same way at once or flocks of Canada geese colliding with one another as they
rise from the autumn cornfield and slowly begin to string themselves together
into a flying necklace. And I’m wholly possessed at the first advance of the
mermaids who’ve come to sing to me. I place myself in their hands like the
scratched guitar they learned to play on and for all the time it was treated
like luggage on tour has kept its voice like karaoke night and stayed in tune
for years.
It’s
easier to raise a corpse from its grave like a potato or a tuber than it is to
raise a fire brigade or an air-raid siren in Atlantis. But some voices sound
like that. Boys who cry wolf and Mayan chicken-littles trying to decipher their
own calendars in a multiverse of worlds within worlds one no worse than another
breaking like bubbles in their ears at all times of the year. In this matrix of
interdependent origination when has one moment of life here and now not been
the sum of all the death in the infinite permutations and combinations of
worlds thriving like a phoenix in the ashes of their own extinction? Cosmic
calamities breed comical mammals anticipating apocalypse like karma and blood
guilt. If catastrophe can happen in favour of you at the expense of another
species like a woman you seduced away from your best friend. You know how it’s
done. You grow paranoid thinking it could happen to you. And thus the voices
that try to possess the whole of your soul but never find it enough though no
part’s left out like water on the moon to bind it to their own. Water in a
state of grace flows. But water in a state of vice turns to ice and doesn’t
listen to anyone’s advice that isn’t at least as cold and brittle as it is. The
mirror never thaws. Eyes frozen in time. Three pounds of starmud. The brain.
Five million years in the making. One hundred billion neurons with fifty
thousand neuronic connections each to other brain cells just so it can conceive
of its disconnection to the multiverse as if it were just a plug with a spinal
cord. As they have been from the very beginning the intelligentsia of today are
the lab rats space monkeys and guinea pigs of tomorrow. Evolution is a
screening myth for murder. And we all advance in sorrow for the end of things
every step of the way. Yesterday’s achievement is the hurdle in the way of
today. Get over it. War is twice the genius that peace ever was. Medicine’s
learned more from body parts than it ever did the whole ones. Just as there
seems to be more love in a broken heart than there is in a full one without
cracks. One voice suggests I imagine a baby tortoise in the Galapagos descended
from the one that is supposed to be holding up the world mountain on its back
pecking its way out of its cosmic egg suddenly start to cry out as it breaks
open the sky is falling the sky is
falling! Everybody into their tortoise shells! And another spreads its
wings like a water bird and takes a run at flying. But the one I like the best
crawls out of its chrysalis in the morning like a butterfly that can’t tell
whether it dreamed it was a wise word of wisdom in a fortune-cookie or a
replica of the Cutty Sark under full sail that someone folded up and slipped
like a love note into a bottle pleading for help like the ghost of a
shipwrecked anachronism.
I
listen to a Friday night voice on the sidewalk below my second-storey window. I’m a bad ass muthafucka. Expressive but
not too cogent. And the drunk
girlfriend with a peal of laughter to put him in his place without taste or
subtlety like a lower caste of sexual society. You wish. And then a voice says as if it were panning for gold
nuggets of meaning. There’s no significance in this. And another that counters
this is the triviality that history and archaeology will come looking for like
the intimate jubilation of their own profound inebriation with the mystery of
the dead that trembles over our bones like a divining rod over a watershed. The
mystery of what we’re doing here on Foster Street on a Friday night in Perth as
if it were a stage with streetlamps whether we’re drunk on whiskey drunk on
stars drunk on the prospect of getting laid drunk on rage and humiliation drunk
on our solitude or cooking up moon rocks in a tinfoil lily drunk on meanings
colours words or what grows along the banks of the Tay River like teenagers and
wildflowers along the meandering mind. Our life here on earth is expressive not
definitive. The function of meaning is just the easel. The provisional
scaffolding. Not the paint. The function of picture-music in the empty shrines
of the mind is the singing not the saint. They’re both free. As I am. As anyone
is. Of delusion and reality. And what’s absurd and what’s profound in the
spirit’s lost and found is of no relevance whatsoever in a world where
everything seems so brutally playful or playfully brutal while up above in the
radiant expansiveness of time and space the stars are putting as much distance
between themselves and us as they can as if they didn’t like what they see when
they look at themselves through our eyes. And then a voice of assent that comes
like the soft syllable yes of a
blessing in disguise. This is the way it is. The way it expresses itself with
nothing intervening. But the moment you set out to seek the meaning of it all
you will see how ever long you search is not what it was meant to be. You won’t
hear the drunken voices of the bad muthafuckas
and their tougher girlfriends trying to shoot the stars out like road signs
and mail boxes on a Friday night. You won’t hear the unvoiced watersheds of
despair in the noisy fountains of their joy.
PATRICK WHITE