(1)

In our own country everything takes place without us. Diverse rivers mount the plateau of our days only to overcome them, and whole villages and counties, with a dark mud in which we find the evidence of fossils. The glistening arabesques of dried up seas, glazed shards of cobalt, petrified teeth and post holes. We look in vain for the treatise preserved in its jar of posthumous air, for the exordium we have been waiting a whole lifetime to read. The disquisition by Flebenius on the plant of immortal longing. The tireless aperture of the sky opens, instead, upon these roads upon which we are caught each day, impelled to repeat the same journey, through the suffocating heat of drawing rooms in summer, across the carpeted floors of which something has left damp spores as if it was leaving.

*

The tattered Royal Doulton blue of a scalloped awning draping dry red rivulets vertically down itself from the rusted iron frame on which it was stretched. In damp shadows at the end of a tunnel of flapping tarpaulin walls, in something like a vestibule, two armed security guards slouching, waiting to frisk anyone from the street who should wander in, drawn by the allure of the name Adonis. To come so far to seek what was so much, evidently, nearer home. Or, simply, that the signs are reinterpreted here, in this different place in this different time. And what lies, then, behind the facade of Penhurst two doors down, what mansion amid bucolic acres, festering in the fat of a wild boar, transposed to these endless sizzling margins of lechon. And what is it, anyway, that we are after?

*

We are only, all of us, an adjunct of, an interdict to the immense and inglorious history of longing. You must be tired after your long and difficult journey across the seas. Let me take you to your rooms so that you may bathe and rest. Afterwards, you may eat and we will arrange entertainments for you in this, your city, which we have merely been looking after for you, while you were gone. It comes round, again and again, in a full circle. Without a memory, let the stones guide you into a dark corner, and listen. You should regret nothing, apologise for nothing. It is not your own heartbeat that you hear echoing, but the jostling of all the continents through time, the voices of the oceans and the forests, and, in the air above them, the small droplet of blood that pre-dates and post-dates you, that is divided up into a million sacrifices, unnecessary, and all at once.

*

The fusillade toward the barricades at the entrance to the campus enveloped them in a slow and densely moving cloud of gas that drifted among the desks and chairs and upturned vehicles. Eyes blinked back the liquid of lacrimations. Nearby, in the botanical gardens, light, as sumptuous and fine as the beaten gold leaf on the pages of an old book, burnished the embankments. The libraries were ransacked. The ministries sandbagged. In the streets only abandoned dogs where we tread, now, lost in our illusions in shadows at noon as if we were among noctambular ghosts in stairwells, by quays where fetid holds disgorged their cargoes to the padding of bare feet on springy planks. Warehouses of reveries. Fragrant, but impotent, lucubrations circumnavigating the brain. On the thigh of a young girl, like a mouth gaping for air, a wound you could put a whole walnut into, exuded a staunchless, red tear.

*

They have ploughed up a cemetery for a plot of land to build on. Who issued the order? Who did not issue the one to countermand it? Bones dust in the hot entelechy of air. To the gates of the white walls of certain affluent subdivisions no tax demands are ever issued, and no beggars ever intrude in that cordon sanitaire that is purchased by them. The votes are all counted the wrong way. The committee on overseeing elections is easily distracted. The telephones ring all day but the circuits are always busy. Talk. Talk. Talk. And in the government offices it is merienda at every hour of the day. And newspapers brandished above desk tops. And the files, in multiple copies, of official forms, waiting to be processed or ‘expedited’, impede the corridors and every square inch of space, curling and softening in the humid air that only a few dispirited fans make tremble once in a while. And everyone smiles.

*

Having arrived at the precise point of the present, where does that leave us to go? We lack nothing, scorning sequence, scorning duration, even the ‘person’ and its percipient whole. Good deeds come easily to us, and we are not immune to misanthropy too. They have removed the great lidless eye behind the creepers on the wall of the hotel where we used to stay. The advertisement for an opticians. Box-ads for enticing lotions to improve a man’s amorous performance by enlarging what he is already endowed with fill the For Sale columns of the local newspapers. The Good Ship Venus glides, now, over the rooftops filling the terminals with a dissolute and unshaven crowd. We talk to one another in a language that lacks any form of protocol. In the equality of our desires, enshrined in the sign of the Duty Free store, everything is possible. At the exit, by the money changers, the official foliage bends in the air conditioned draught, extending a greeting that carries not even the faintest trace of remorse.

*

The abysmal flotsam of our days persists. Vocalic husks. The strimmed modalities of airwaves that have nothing to offer but the aromatics of love. The sonorous perorations of our rulers, back home, elude us. Hoarse croakings – a seminary of herons. Here, in a charmed half-circle of mushrooms someone lays his head, and asks to be anointed. On a roadside, banged out on old typewiters, on paper so thin you can hold it up and see whatever is behind it, a decree with an official stamp with the name of whomsoever you want – dignitary, Minister of State – on it. Behind the Bureau of Immigration a corpse floated in the river for five days, snagged in the chains of an anchor, before it was apprehended and, for ‘landing without a permit’, detained.

*

It is someone, and somewhere, else. It always was – another. So let us say goodbye to all those despedidas in dingy basements and in rooms of institutions where the drinks carbonate endlessly in orderly array under the predictability of the conversations. It is all a lie, it always has been. Only the naïf tourist believes that he will return to this same place and people at some time in the future, to these exact rudiments of smile and house front, of physical comportment and gesture. And yet what else does he have but memory on which to rely to establish again where he has been and would wish to come back to. Under the deep blue shade of the jacaranda tree, in the courtyard, the air wanders from one appearance to another. And in the hallways and corridors of each official building the duplicity of affirmations and ardours, and of rebuttals, reverberates in the fabric of the walls and floors. Perhaps someone should write a guide not to the places we see and that we leave but to the indefinable and contiguous images that they press up from within themselves those brilliant and elusive refractions of what it is we are (at morning, midday and at evening) in the sunlit plaza or in our room staring up at the alabaster cornice, as we wait (in autumn, winter, spring or summer) to enrol ourselves in the catalogue of our deceptions, and the mystery of how we lose what was in the first place not our own, and never will be, deepens.

*

The idolatry of meaning. Through the streets of the living, apparitions and portents of happiness and despair pursue us. A hand raised in anguish, pointing to some irreversible act. A face like a neophyte’s – imploring and rapt. And the fear of nothing – waiting, around the corner. The sky a bleached and endless indictment of what we cannot have. What is it? That point at which all that has gone before it is redefined. Up until that point, then, nothing is determined and can just as easily turn out to be the opposite of what it appeared to be. So, in this city that we have come to, it is always the Day of Lamentation and Remembrance at which the inhabitants are reminded of how we are caught in the cruel and remorseless cycles of time. Shards of the infinite are drenched in the sweet scent of the dying. Sails break upon reefs. Always more than we are, and less than that to which we aspire to belong. The earthly community so richly divided – priests, writers, whores, entertainers, vendors and artisans – on the same sidewalk. And for all of them the price of deliverance from doubt, is what? Fragrant utopias proliferate on each street corner. Democratic and undemocratic. Near and far off. The leper rings his bell and everyone runs into the arms of another.

*

In the bamboo palace that sits alongside the river – no architecture of permanent forms would be appropriate in this land of instability of reference – the dirty square umbers on walls where the artworks were looted, the life support equipment in the basement, a virtual miniature hospital, and the shadows that have eaten everything that was not fastened down, and some of those that were. Origin of edicts and imperial encyclicals. Now the cockroach and the termite digest it. The liveried orchestra. The prestidigitators – gone. And in their place the fake title deed to a property someone had spent their life’s savings on acquiring. The bogus film production crew, full of blandishments and cameras, entering a house to relieve it of its possessions. A carnival of whores and politicians singing the national anthem. While, in the plantations, pubescents cut sugar cane faster than adults, from dawn to evening, for a few cents a day. And, in the capital, a ‘city’ of slums visible to visiting foreign dignitaries on the road from the airport, is encircled by a white wall, air brushed out of existence. Quelle triste vie!

*

Our little angst, in a polis of sad peregrinations towards bed and night, our ablutions almost over. Pay the leaves to entertain us, they are almost as bored as we are; open a new leisure centre; invent a new drug that will save us from tomorrow – and from all the days that will come after. The guilt at having left when we were away and the guilt, when we return, at having not stayed, are different. Where do we belong? Not to ourselves that is sure, for we don’t know where that particular item can be located. And the Other stands at a distance from us, waiting for us to approach. Only, as we walk through the mirrors into ourselves can we find it. And it is then that we realize that distance and time are so many false trajectories out of the mind of the inattentive. And that all objective categories are superfluous. Without landfall, without a horizon, we lack nothing, but the confidence to explore this land, and its cities, drenched with the scent of unripe fruits – including the endeavour of all its darkness and horrors. Priests, flinging the heart into the fire, should not dissuade us. Even its government’s declaration of A State of Rebellion should be interpreted not as a disincentive, but as an incentive for us to begin the journey.

*

(2)

On that faint exiguous line (contract, horizon, point of rest) of the future someone has signed their name more deeply than the rest, as if they had been there before. The pattern of our lives is circular. The same route that takes us forward also takes us back. We wave to ourselves in passing, knowing that no one else waves back. Out of the shadows our own ghosts move amongst us. Until, finally, they sit down with us and listen to us as we talk amongst ourselves, while the afternoon monsoon rain falls raising a bright spume, a fine mist, on the roads and rooftops that surround us.

*

We remember the piles of dromedary dung freezing at might on the outskirts of town under cold stars. At the railway station it was so cold all the thermometer casings cracked. But in the morning the smell of coal dust in the streets, the gleam of fish ponds and canals, the sound of dried grass crackling under brick ovens, woke us. We had dreamed we had left for another land and woke, instead, to find ourselves twisting under mosquito nets again, perspiring in rooms sheathed in a fine mesh that shone. That normally invisible skein of our senses, sifting and mediating the world, seemed, suddenly, to have appeared before us. Behind it, time sobbed in the branches of the acacia trees outside the window.

*

To be in a place, without memory, in absolute time. To know that one has, finally, come home. In this city of eternal longing, this body in which we feel we are in exile, the penumbras and pandemonium of appearances unfold before us the true nature of our being. We move backwards and forwards through time in a motion that is continually interesecting itself, until we are lost amid the calated, the sublated and the circumfused. On the long grey kerb that we stepped off many years ago to get here, the same space, opening onto that moment, remains. The breath of a distance that no one has measured, or counted, runs through it. Undescribed, unmapped, it burns inside us, like a virus – a tenderly nursed prospect that has become, we know, the sad fulcrum of our fate.

*

The many voices, of the living and the dead that we are assailed by, on going to sleep and on waking. Stitched into that silence that underlies every discourse. A fragment of a phrase, rhythm, tilt of the head, characteristic pause. Listening, and looking, for them we get drawn into the maze of the body’s backstreets, and alleyways. Disorientated – without a street map or compass. The midday sun obliterates the names in the window of a bookstore where we stop. Across the road a wave drags into the harbour another fragment of that silence that seems, minute by minute, to be breathing inside us. And somewhere else, too, on a small shelving parabola of beach, it is setting down – on a light washed horizon. In that liquid, far off, ripple, we hear our bones speak in the amalgamate of an anonymous discourse, above the traffic.

*

Behind the dark tree of winter – a glimmer. From the dark roots – a sigh. That distance could be disentangled from what is present. Everything bends with the weight of what it is not. A silvery thin air glides over the water beneath iron bridges. The mind has carried off what it cannot live among and cannot leave. A caravanserai of objects. Calendars and ledgers, encyclopedias and atlases, ride on the backs of angels. We tap the glass fronts of barometers and constellations rot above airless plains where signs we cannot decipher are carved into the rocks. And then, soon, it will be summer again, and we will discover the white cadaver, left under the sheet from another year. And the red fruit bending the branches, dropping, unpicked; because we have not excised these apparitions from our lives.

*

From around the edges of door frames, the serrated perimeters of palm fronds, light; from across anonymous distances, consuming the wainscots and eaves, issuing through the windows of the library where we sit, reading, looking up at the slow luminous diffusion from the burned out xerox machine invading bodies and walls, listening to its paper feed crunch then halt. Light, omniscient, emanating out of all those porous and immense spaces, out of old forsaken imperial domains, demarcations of land and interconnecting seas, flickering, here, upon spines with such gilded titles as Administrative Districts Of British India 1800-1900; A Flora And Fauna Of The Province Of Medinora... Alas, all our limited lexicons and taxonomies, all our frail genera and classes. They thrash, unillumining, within it. Leaving only the dust of a silence, a white dying gasp, like a sea drying up, that robs us of our voice.

*

We walk each day through the cluttered bazaars that run all the way along the foreshore and back up the narrow precipitous streets that ascend into hills of jungle where light filters slowly down in dappled pools and bright dust wreathed columns. Textiles and tapestries laid out on the ground and hung from bamboo frames throb with an energy derived from the same profligacy of line and colour exhibited by the flora of these hills. Beside the roads, counterfeiters and copyists, scribes and illustrators, in this land of continuous reproduction in which we have spent so many years of our lives trying, unsuccessfully, to find what it is we left for. An antidote, perhaps, in the confident and fecund way its objects assert themselves before us, to an overwhelming sense of absence. And, in the long, hot, uninterrupted stream of this illusion another illusion emerges - a forlorn wailing of tugs on a grey river moving through the treacherous sediments at Shoreditch, Purfleet and Gravesend, seeping into an emptiness difficult to bear ... A loss. An acquisition ... Both part of the same ineluctable dream that does not attenuate the older we get; to represent what is and has always been irritably adumbratmg, at the back of our consciousness, a self that can’t be spanned - ghost ship gliding silently in and out of a harbour, whose hawsers turn hauling us slowly, again, in: to a dark hold crammed with lapping water, with invisible shores, unidentifiable and rich scents...

*

The huge swell of the sea running up the almost vertical embankment. Perspiring brokers scurrying, this way and that, scouring the pier heads for business. In the customs sheds the interminable wrangling with officials. Bargains struck, and then unravelled. Our passports cursorily inspected. For who would suspect that as we cross this border we are anything other than we appear to be or describe ourselves as being – vague spirits, traders in the ineffable wares of an interior where, frequently, we lose ourselves amidst an array of false turnings and washed out tracks and end up at night at an inn in a dark room with the lamp extinguished, the only sound the sound of our own voices – and, in some other part of the building, a child crying. We leave before dawn our trunks lashed to our backs muttering our own names in a ritual of emancipation, going over and over the same road littered with torn up inventories and bills of lading, and do not return. Inaudible cantors, the dust on our tongues of an endlessly perishing moment, we are to be found at midday crouched at some food vendor’s street stall, impervious to the din of people and traffic around us, thinking.

copyright © Martin Anderson, 2002