NO DOORWAYS, NO WINDOWS
No doorways, no windows,
I come to this white-washed wall on the glaring computer screen, not
knowing whether it’s an end or a beginning or a means to something
I’m not aware of. I almost go snowblind staring at it as if I were
waiting for someone on the other side to step through it like a
homeless man in a blizzard, or one snowflake with an identity unique
enough not to melt on your eyelid like a kiss that trickles down into
your tear ducts sooner or later. This is the great white light at the
end of the tunnel coming at you like a train that’s trying to bead
the mountains into an aboriginal rosary of bear teeth. And if it
could, it would bore a hole in the moon like some Neanderthal
drilling through a seashell to prove it wasn’t a brute. This is a
Saturnalian white night the day after the winter solstice in the void
bound doldrums of late December. This is the anti-nirvanic revelation
of someone who’s been illuminated on the dark side of the Via
Negativa, though he was hoping for butterflies that flapped their
wings like white sheets drying on the line in the sunshine. This is
that negative of a starmap where the dark is white and all the stars
look like constellations of cigarette-burns and black holes. As if
some Oedipus when he put out his eyes, put out theirs as well. And
you can see it as dove released by a Roman augur, or, as soon as I
type the first letter on it like a bird track in the snow with
ambitions of becoming an alphabet, a Martian meteor, billions of
years old, landing in Antarctica like the unabridged version of a
flood-myth. Land Ho! In the dense fog of this cloud of unknowing,
where the linearity of forms is absolved of itself like water, it’s
the crow on nightwatch in the masts of the leafless trees that first
spots a place to land on the moon as it appears in full sail on the
horizon like a waxing phase of the Sydney opera house.
And that’s when I
begin writing a long note on this white wall to someone I’ve never
met I imagine is on the other side of this, who wasn’t home when I
called to hear what I had to say, or was, but was preoccupied on the
other side of this one way mirror blinded by its own blazing like a
mediocre detective enthralled by a prime time confession to a sin of
omission that didn’t do anything at all. I waver like a mirage in a
desert at night between leaving a detailed suicide note, a loveletter
to the world from hell in terza rima, of writing a local recipe for
making home-made raspberry jam to explore the distractive potential
of dysfunctional domestic poetry by putting an apron on a butcher and
teaching him to make bread. But I’ve got too much of a surrealistic
temperament not the see the jam pouring out of the empty Mason jars
of starving children like a hemorrhaging rose from a bullet wound in
the stomach that felt like the first thing they had to eat all day.
And I begin to despise the triviality of the culinary poets who abuse
their domesticity by using it as a gateway drug to a cozy corner in
the kitchenin denial of the
mundanity of hell while their schoolhouse of homey horrors burns down
all around them. At least, sleep with your mother first, before you
put your eyes out. And your poems like obsolete pennies from a
child’s piggybank on the eyelids of those you were blind to, and
would not speak up on behalf of, because what you don’t see is
going to hurt everyone. And what you don’t say can make a liar out
of you just as fast as what you have said about how much pectin to
add to your poetry to keep it from being overwhelmed by the real
flavour of the raspberries that don’t give a damn about who picked
them. There must be a graveyard of cracked teapots somewhere that
like having the wool pulled over their eyes like a tea cosy, but that
doesn’t mean it’s any kind of place a real elephant would go to
die with all his memories intact. You can put all the local homegrown
you want to into a marijuana pie for a body stone that’s going to
last all afternoon, but that only makes it the quiche of a mediocre
high. Better to be Icarus and fall to your death out of the precincts
of the sun than poultry that’s lost the will to fly. Mechanical
Byzantine nightingales singing their hearts out like semi-precious
stones in a tree of lapis lazuli. The aesthetic tomfoolery of fatuous
objects replicating the symbolic orthodoxies of fraudulent zircon
jewellery. But you need to be born with the third of a fish to know
how to debone a diamond, and mine opens more like an enlightened
observatory at night that’s happy just to look at the stars like a
diamond in the rough that’s not inspired in the least to filet the
Circlet of the Western Fish in Pisces.
Cellphones of rage like
the larynx of a blasting cap in a beaver dam made up of the bones of
mass graves discovered after the fucked act of the fact deep in the
forests of Poland where everyone was either shocked or shot for what
they knew all along. Something evil in the air like the sickly-sweet
smell of corrupt lilies in the lapels of the slapstick politicians in
a vaudeville of Baudelarian flowers squirting acid in the eyes of
literate schoolgirls. But sight, to me, is a kind of love I read on a
poster giving a lecture on how to become enlightened in the student
union building of the nineteen sixties. So nix that shit like a black
angel in a plague year with a paintbrush at your front door that
isn’t trying to sell you anything or ask if it can come in. And I’m
tired of writing retroactive love-poems to all my girfriends and
ex-wives that are always missing the last word like the other shoe
that didn’t drop like an astronomical catastrophe out of the blue
into the biosphere. Or the meteoritic impact on the foodchain of an
oil spill by BP in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing personal, no offense
to dead Mayans talking about cosmic events they didn’t live to see
like a misinterpretation of what they actually meant about entire
civilizations being lost in translation like truths that keep their
mouths shut about the stone-faced lies that drive current events to
the brink of extinction. And I’m more interested in life outside
the theatre while the play’s going on than I am in rich Sophocles
telling me like North Carolina a black welfare mother that it’s
best not to have been born. The brave propositions of Nazis leading
politically to the cowardly conclusions of Auschwitz. Over and over
and over again like the estranged tears of a summer rain on the tin
roofs of a concentration camp emptier than the promises of regret
that were made not to forget what was done here was done to
overweight children with specific names and pudgy hands that felt
like comfortable armchairs full of loose change and lost keys to
doors no one could remember. Not the bloodless abstraction of some
Malthusian ideologue who preys upon statistics like a wasp upon the
eggs of an ant like an occult science. And yet, that’s not it
either; that’s more rage than this sword swallower can handle
without gouging the eyes out of the record like a needle in a long
playing thirty-three rpm eclipsed by an album the size of the moon
turning on the axis mundi of a drum major at a Nuremburg rally.
History repeats itself, the first time as the millenial tragedy of
Senecan Rome, the second, as the six black farcical years of the Nazi
demolition of Berlin. Which only goes to prove that arrogance makes
you stupid and stupid will get you killed faster than evil. Give a
blowjob to a cobra and you’ll end up washing your wedding vows out
of your mouth with gasoline. But right now I lack the physical
stamina to contain that kind of theme like a nuclear meltdown of my
Fukushima heart, tears of heavy water turning into the radioactive
steam of toxic outrage that makes you want to do unto others what’s
been done unto these. And I will not. Knowing hate hates the hater
first and worst. And the perpetrator always dies at the end of the
farce like a self-inflicted karmic curse on the clowns who would be
kings and ride in triumph through Persepolis as if the swarming of
flies were the same as the flight of eagles. But at the end of the
day, I don’t want to introduce birds of prey into the conversation
of the larks and nightingales trying to strike the right note on the
dead boughs in the aviary of my muse to harmonize this cacophony of
chaos with the delta blues of Robert Johnson. I just want to get out
of this cramped cosmic egg and add my wingspan to the vastness of
space like the flightplan of a horse that couldn’t care less
whether it stays the course or not. I want to graze like a planet in
the twilight pastures of the sun, and when night comes on like the
stars of the Milky Way by the open gate of the Great Square of
Pegasus, I want to run until my heart explodes with light, knowing
there’s no end in sight for a blind beginning that doesn’t trust
its eyes enough to look into the dark mirror of its inconsolable
eclipse to let what appears, appear, even if it be nothing for light
years, but tears in the night bright with the stars that nobody sees,
nobody points out like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider in
the handle of the Big Dipper, nobody stands among the brittle stubble
of cattle corn in an open field of snow and makes up new myths about
to adapt the life of meaning to the untapped watersheds of wonder.
PATRICK WHITE
