THE NIGHT COMES ON

THE NIGHT COMES ON

The night comes on like a bayonet in the eye of a baby. The mirror shatters. Shards of shining try to get their act together like small Balkan countries practicing their traditional viciousness. And yes, the world is dark, brutal, treacherous and you’re walking skinless through a field of nettles, your heart exposed like an igneous stone to the dead nun weeping in the acid rain. Buried alive in your own avalanche of judgment and delusion, do you hope to send down roots? Poor baby, you think I’m cruel, that when I tell you the diamond is mud, I’m trying to transplant you into some mythic crystal clarity you have not yet attained. Wrong where there is no wrong, because you’re there already. Isn’t it obvious your roots are in the sky; isn’t it perfectly clear that everything is perfectly clear. Don’t talk to me about confusion and chaos and the seven crossroads to nowhere that lie before you like a crippled starfish. I’ve pushed deathcarts in the morning through the back-alleys of Calcutta and evicted squatters from the satin slums of the cemetery. There is no sin or virtue in my seeing, no little coffin of concept waiting at the end of the boat-tour for a corpse.

You’re not innocent; you’re not corrupt. You drink the purple blood of night like everyone else and think it’s a secret. You love the criminal because you think it’s more sublime than intelligence, but you don’t see that you’re only a butterfly in the dragon’s mouth; you don’t understand that ritualizing heresy is not a bridge to the other side, not the crossing of any real taboo. Be absolutely certain, you’re the only firefly in this man’s dark vastness, but you’ve cranked your own ambivalence too long not to go through withdrawal into the deep assurance of the unseen light that wants to befriend you like a small green planet glowing with life. And screw the man who thinks he’s a guru when he says this; burn the mask he wears to his own funeral along with the rest of his tainted marrow. Why cavil?

If the thorns think they’re the crown of the rose, should the rose care, disposing of itself petal by petal, sky by sky, like the pages of an over-read book about the dangers of reading? Do you see? The wind shimmers like waves through the tall summer grass; and at night, the stars shine down on everyone alike, ignorant of their own burning legends. Deep within you, there is a hidden moon, a blind pearl, one of the lost ruby eyes of the phoenix who put himself out like a torch in the darkness of your holy waters. Why do you look outside yourself for the world you already are? Hate me if you must, but don’t curse the absence of someone who loves you outside of the net. If I’m cruel, if I’m mean, if I risk the obscenity of human lovelessness to love you; don’t ask me to forgive your hive of killer bees because it’s so painful to get near the honey. I’m not the Titanic and you’re not an ice-berg and the worst of tragedies are those that never happen. Live, if you can, beyond the billboards you call yourself; walk out into the fields of being beyond and see, truly see, what the rest of your life’s been doing while you posed like a freak in a circus tent for three grams a day. Or persist in your shadows like some third generation Nazi who can’t get it up enough to hate with any authority, but, likewise, is too fond of his designer straitjacket to love. What’s the point of using your head for a doorstop when you’re afraid to cross your own thresholds? Why lick the paper-plates for morsels of thought at a garabage-dump and call it a feast of sages? I might be stupid, I might be wrong, I might be the willing dupe of your most cherished delusion, but at least I can see you in a clear heart, your depth and beauty and agony, three flowers growing in a crevice of your well-wall. Haven’t the fish already learned to walk; the birds to swim. Don’t the stars drown, drunk, in you every night, and not one in the morning with a hangover? Go ahead, tattoo hell on your eyelids and pretend you’re awake to the world that’s hanging from the end of your nose. I love your tears when they fall; you’re a steep mountain in spring, the end of an ice-age, a fountain that’s learningto crawl.

But I’m not looking for your tears, and I’m almost as sorry as you that I am who I am under this gravestone in this six-storey cemetery of your fears. Do I die well or do I disappoint your witching wands when you come looking for me like a personalized parking space in the city of the dead? And don’t tell me you’re fragile, you’re young, you’re smudged across your own reflection like lipstick on a junkie’s bathroom mirror. I think too much of you to believe you. Here, here’s a new dagger, a clean knife, stronger metal and a more acute blade than any you’ve got in that soft copper arsenal of yours. I’ll even provide the forge and a blacksmith and the knowledge to fashion your own. Love isn’t love that doesn’t offer its artery to the beloved or complains when it’s being killed. O you who think the world is such a bad place, an ugly face, go ahead and try with your space-razor to separate the moonlight from the water. You want the flower and the fruit but you despise the root. You set fire to your own nerves like fuses and try to convince me it’s the work of mystic terrorists. Who knows; maybe you’re trying to overthrow yourself like a repressive regime and there’s no place in your politics for a firing squad still loyal to the wishes of a raving queen?

PATRICK WHITE