there’s no Eden anyway
branches crystallise the sunshine there.
It was in this shaded place that he was left, the predestined child who lies so strangely quiet in the patchwork light.
No cry of pain, no call for rescue; does he almost know what lies ahead, the horror and hardship? For he will be found, there is someone foraging nearby who will stumble here soon.
It is like a labyrinth where he is going, a walled-in world quite unlike this green and rustling shelter where sometimes there is the crack of a stem and always the camouflage net of light broken up in fragments while the child in the brief peace, and needing no company, waits in the home of the mountain god
it isn’t very noisy play (if it can even be called play) but just the same perhaps it does disturb the elderly neighbours and if so do they make no complaint because they understand him being there like that on his own, making something out of nothing, and won’t risk depriving him of his tiny freedom?
Long afterwards all this comes back – the pity and the waste of time – when, at a church of middle-class euphoria some misplaced hope has led him to, a woman practicing what they call prophecy there places hands on him, breathes, closes her eyes and says,
I have this image of you as a boy in an orchard but terribly lost, it isn’t a tempting orchard, not a garden of delight, it’s a sort of gloomy blighted moon, no birds are singing, the wind is sharp and cold and worst of all there is no fruit
His love was his hope and his coat and his fiction. In this black hour his honour was his weakness.
He was losing his grip, he was heading for disaster.
In his dread and sorrow he dreamed he was a tropical steamship captain, an old man captain with a sailor’s beard, a skilled navigator finding secret routes out of every archipelago:
in the dream it is one of these hidden channels, you move through it like a minefield, the banks are overgrown, strange trees emerge everywhere, a shroud for the ship, a green and choking garment, a death coat drowning out the light drowning even this little splinter of sea
you ask what’s wrong, you know something’s wrong, then you’re tired (very tired) and you need to find a nest.
*
This faded Boy Wonder has turned forty,
he remembers a love affair and other simpler sufferings. He has always worn his uniform (a golden fleece) but now it sticks and stings. He thinks his strength is being stolen.
He’s just a bag of nerves. He imagines himself nameless and alone. Is this his vertigo or his vision?
He remembers the old ovations,
pictures the ovations to come,
he must get back,
he would rather go on even a dreary commuter train than become a forgotten exile longing for reprieve—
in the mirror he practices cold business eyes
he wants to understand what it really is. He feels like an alien where once he felt at home, close to the soil and the past, in this house of so many years, among his books and things.
He sees or thinks he sees faces changing. At night he watches soldiers beautiful as archangels but sickly-seeming, drugged. Or like living masks. Perhaps it’s all a hospital now.
Still he walks, searches. One day he cries out:
“I can’t even find the words, but I sense something moving – some force or factor, some figure – behind the curtain of whatever this new stage-show actually is, changing the faces and the costumes, working so that there is only make-up and costumes, and not even ghosts like me any more”
A rotten smell comes from upstairs but nothing is dying there. The odour has no source in the walls or under the floorboards—
it is fake and also real because now there is a physics of hallucination and a law.
(translation from an old play)
The way sacred things were eclipsed in ancient theatre – as when a dead man’s daughters are told by a stranger, only after the event, how their father’s last companion solemnly shielded his eyes so as not to see what it wasn’t right to see – this speaks to him of what is happening now:
there are new noises in the night, far-off cries and squabbling in the early hours, agitated voices in the half-light, and for months the city has seemed so dismal and endangered, brittle with unease and denial, and the remorse of a gambler’s mistake—
he sees people swaying as they walk, their faces too taut or too empty, who appear to him like funeral marchers dressed in eerie bright colours where they should be wearing black—
he remembers the lockdowns when he had been so sick with cancer he nearly died but he was less afraid, it felt safe then as he walked for miles down deserted streets, crossed the river over London Bridge then doubled back over Southwark Bridge and his athlete’s watch with its orange strap measured the distance and his speed and let him control the music player to listen again to songs he loved when he was young.
When she stands in front of them she will dress smartly and the outfit’s dowdy mirror will help her theories hit home even though they are actually bizarre!
There are roses in the corner of her eye that need pruning with her shears but she has to focus the lecture won’t write itself.
Her ambitious mind assists her she lets it fly telescopically out of the rose garden into the specialist soul system she has made her own area.
After all these years her son is still at the back of her mind yes it is true that she cared more than anything about her career and colleagues to look up to her /
and he was so serious so severe
his eyes looked straight past her
he didn’t seem to trust her
even though
a mother deserves to be trusted
perhaps he was a teacher once, this man who shuffles past every day or every other day, pensive, pondering. To them he seems sad, they call it sadness because they have no other name for what they think it is. They are only boys, urchins even, after all. They’re going to stop him one day with a riddle they thought up in the huddle, which goes like this: what is it that we lose when we catch but keep when we miss?
There are still boys like them now
non-experience mourned, missed opportunities transformed into ghost memories… until some cybernetic revolution finally cancels out the loneliness and grief on the outskirts, in the old shadows, so that real and virtual are the same.
The night and the city are beautiful and empty. The sadness and the years have been left behind. No one speaks now of obligation. The line is broken and there are no ties. Unworldised, you are far away. You aren’t there—
you can go anywhere and your pain out there in the dark is a measure of the cost not only of having left
but also of going back