from The Theatre of Psychodialysis


to misr-em-ember    

                ... but don't be surprised, my feuding friend,
                    my enemy, seized by black love,
                    if the groans of love will be the groans of torture,
                    kisses – tinged with blood.
                                         Nikolay Gumilyov, tr. Richard McKane

 

if that is what we call love
that persistent yearning to touch
like a river's to change course
the star of redemption

physique de l'amour
a lamp leaning forward like her face /
in a forgotten town
out of prison or the army
gazing at the sun a forlorn young man
seedy part of town
american is talked here
your heartstrings hear its familiar strains

a soft oblivion around your weathered skin
its text open to the air
'for we are but of yesterday
and know nothing because our days upon earth are a shadow'

underexposed the heart hidden forever
a shower of solace on a carpet of citrus blossom
three times the hands obscure the face
three times the hands reveal the face
first impressions last but have no right to stop
no right to mine nostalgia
a veil of joy over his face a delicate grin
a state of sporadic animality
every word I say devoured by a voracious ghost inside you
I'm a burning juniper
endless longing
time is running out

caress her in that tender vein
the flight you undertook
biblical behest
her naked body

the chinese poet shunned by men
had to play his jade flute to the gods' silent congress
there are beings some human some divine
from whom we need to maintain our distance

it's raining outside
the awareness of a stone or a blade of grass
as if reality were quite simply excess weight
a sandbank of incomprehension
the confounding syllable wedged like a thorn between creation and exhaustion
the vessel through which the longing is expressed
the intensity of a word correctly chosen and precisely placed
an angel without a visa among the damned.

 

***

New York, 1958: black love, dark courtyard, noises faraway, beyond the sooty fire-escapes.

Berlin, 1938: black love, dark courtyard, footsteps at my heels. God flees.

London, 1978: black love, dark courtyard, she prostrates herself at the plinth of a statue. The next year there is famine, and the year after that, too. God makes a connection between infinity and death, filling the synapse.

Lisbon, 2008: black love, dark courtyard, hysterical voices at the windows swallowed by a voracious earth. She is wearing black, o un-angel, and her feet are quiet, dusty and bare.

Paris, 2038: black love, dark courtyard, glancing at her sodden shoes in the rain, she reminisces about what had been, what might have been, what had never been. The old grow nostalgic for the very old, and God is falling through the wet air.

London, 2001: black love, dark courtyard, a glass of red wine opposite another, talk of hard times once, and intimations of times to come, her mouth in black & white like an old TV. The evening chill at his back.

Sinai, 2004: black love, dark courtyard, an improvised street corner, he holds up a sign that reads "I am God." It means: Help Wanted. Nobody applies. It is the year of the nouvelle cuisine famine. Ice-cream melts down the gutters in the middle of the streets. A woman walks past and says: "You have the capacity to be happy." Parched, dry as the space between the sentiment she speaks and the cliché that marks it. The signs multiply. Black love, dark courtyard, o un-angel, a man was broken in obscurity.

 

***


I suffer but I enjoy the pain. Suffering is my ambrosia; I savour it with a sense of purpose – to overcome pain. Once my masochistic thirst has been quenched, I descend from above and wander among mortals. But when I see your pathetic grovelling, your feeble genuflection at the foot of my statue, I grow homesick for pain and long to suffer again. No sooner do I arrive than I'm compelled to leave, to escape through clouds and return to my suffering. I suffer in dark, away from it all. That's how I like it. At the heart of my pain is my yearning for your stupid humanity. I don't always express such yearning quietly, there are times when I wail in the night. You've heard me, black love, you've hurt me. A full moon opens my larynx. Black love, I love women and men, I love animals of every species, and I love the stars and every speck of dust in the universe. I cry under a full moon, my throat open, my fingers urgently stroking your vulva, teasing the tears out drop by drop, offering my pain for your pleasure. Yes I love women, so much, my voice fading in garbled intimacy. I love supermodels as I love supernovae, each class rousing a unique desire. But I suffer for love, too. Women I love for their form and their cool solar warmth, and supernovae for the climax of their blinding intelligence; yet when I hold one in my arms the other shyly retreats into a vacuum, and the absence of either tortures me as if I were being flayed. I love women because their soul is anchored in a sea of love where I drown perpetually, my breath expelled forever in its depth, and I love the stars in the sky because each foretells the secret place of my drowning; I hear it at night when I lean my head on its womb. In my dark I see you, black love. I've tasted seed between your thighs and roamed inside your eyes for light. I've stroked your eyebrows with my fingers and my lips have kissed the downy brow of your sex. I've smiled on your nose that tilts this way or that and have closed my mouth on your breast like an infant. I've held your hand like a god, my desire was divine, my soul mythic, my love full of disquiet. I want to replenish your breasts with milk, to fill your womb with honeycomb, to provide you with the agonies of childbirth, so that when you cry I will cry and when you laugh I will laugh. In my dark, black love, I see you, and you are beautiful in my eyes.

 

SLOW FADE IN FROM WHITE:

EXT. DAY. THE SUN IN A CLOUDLESS SKY. OVEREXPOSED.

 

If I say you … you know, you are, you is ambiguous. So what should I call you, black love, lurking in the foreground of thought, shy in the depths of oblivion, adrift among the false shadows of dreams? I want to distinguish the no from the no, extinguish the yes in the embers of light. I want, and you want, and we are lost.

And light – that filter we place over dark to defer a certain cast of nostalgia… I don't  remember light in its proper genetic shape. It is said to have a magical, frivolous quality and to excel at capturing the moment, any moment, before releasing it to view. Do you agree, black love? And do you remember? Are you nodding behind your starched apron in that celestial kitchen? My thoughts encircle your absence, a disembodied presence, beyond whose extremes I can taste flesh as I approach reality, peering over its take-away counter – a breast, a thigh, the vapid skin of chicken parts dipped in sizzling oil – and then retreat, lower my eyes, submerge them in your smell, close them on your thigh, your breast, your sable skin, engage them in the aura of your difference, collect them in a dream.


***


I told you about Benjamin of Tudela, the Spanish Jew who travelled East, weaving his way around the Crusades. And about Jacob of Ancona, who travelled to China before Marco Polo. I mentioned the latter through a breath of love, the words on my tongue plying your labia, my mouth enfolded in flesh, an exotic scent compounding my meaning as the wet delirium of expectancy climbed the ladder to heaven. I could tell by that sweet swelling smell you believed every word; and I at least wasn't lying, only repeating what I had heard, prone with my ear to your thigh, my memory tenderly creeping into your heart, your heart dilating like the pupils of your eyes in a surging desire to swallow light as light died away, while my tongue distended into your deepest torments.


***


Torture is poetic, a discourse of ambiguity rising through a wellspring of pain. Victim or perpetrator, we identify with it completely, accept its frisson, settle into its anticipation. Unlike murder, torture has no cause or effect; on either side of pain, titillation, anxiety, humiliation, depth of gratitude, clarity's cruelty and other psychological titbits circle like slow planets. Torture is a misty hope lifting out of hopelessness; we call it beautiful or ugly, misnaming it in a brutal revenge. You love to torture me; I in turn love to be tortured by you. This is all we know, our love of pain and pleasure. Our respective ideologies are at odds with each other, but we step back from the brink, we do not desire each other's annihilation; only submission is at stake, a gift of the last giving. We might abolish the pain or enhance the pleasure, or opt for a dreamless sleep, but given or taken, our pain is more pleasurable than nothingness. This is our fear. Torture is the most savoury form of love; we could build a religion out of it were we not blinded by the acuity of pain, deafened by the purity of heard or unheard screams. We are implicated in torture as in our own civilisation; if we deferred on it we would recognise ourselves as inhuman. This is our shame, from which we hide in the garden.

Merchants of light, peering into the dark and bringing good tidings with them, tarnish our solitude and join our mouths together in a profitable parody of – what's the word after ineffable?


***


We talked and we talked, talked till dawn or till dusk, talked till midnight or noon, and watched the moon and the sun and the stars ignoring our talk. We watched the trees and the couples under the trees exchanging essential rumours of love. We talked until language got tired, atrophied and turned back on itself, enfolded in silence, lulled by an easy seduction. And silence spread herself wide like a whore, sucking each syllable out of our talk and becoming big with meaning. But what were we trying to say?

Now we're homesick and don't know which way to turn. But we talk and we pray. We pay silence her fee and then talk some more. And as night arrives on the scene we fall asleep in the deepest sleep and dream out our love, and our talk issues out of the dark, incomprehensibly, passing over us in an alphabet of shooting stars from an unknown language.

copyright © Gad Hollander, 2005.

Gad Hollander lives in London. His books include Walserian Waltzes, Benching With Virgil (both from Avec Books, Penngrove, CA 2000) and The Palaver, a collaborative artist's book with Andrew Bick (Book Works, London 1998). His films & videos include "Euripides' Movies" (1987), "Diary of Sane Man" (1990), "the palaver transcription" (2000) and "Talker" (2003).

Theatre of Psychodialysis is a work-in-progress and -regress, an oscillating labour with no fixed abode, its projected form suspended like the redundant ampersand in black & white. Special thanks to translator and poet Cristina Viti for the cut-up of The Palaver that became the opening section of Black Love, and for collaborating on the text's final edit.