SPOKEN WORDS
He had just one friend, one clever friend who had steered him away from danger before. More than one pair of eyes looked at him with malice, sensed his weakness.
He was losing his grip. His love was his hope and his coat and his fiction. Here his honour was his weakness. He was heading for disaster.
In his fear and sorrow he dreamed he was a tropical steamship captain — an old man captain with a sailor’s beard — a skilled reader of maps who found secret ways out of any archipelago. In the dream it was one of these hidden channels. You moved through it like a minefield. The banks were overgrown — strange trees emerged 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.
(ii) Mr. F.
This faded Boy Wonder has turned forty. He remembers a love affair and other simpler sufferings. He has always worn a uniform — a golden fleece — and now it stings. He thinks his strength is being stolen.
Attacks from the outside are different from attacks on the inside. At least the outside ones can be seen, even if there’s no time to dodge. But the inside kind is basically poison — something bad (very bad) in the bloodstream.
You ask what’s wrong, you know something’s wrong. Then you’re tired (very tired) and you want to find a nest.
He’s just a bag of nerves. He wants to be alone and undressed. Is this his vertigo or his vision? He remembers the old ovations, he thinks of ovations to come.
There is one path, which is not a path, and another path, which is like a train with a luxury compartment. He would rather get on even a dreary commuter train than become an exile dreaming of the lost empire.
In the mirror he practices cold business eyes.
(iii) Baron R.
He wants to believe his gothic theory of a dungeon world unleashing monsters. That way the nightmare is like a nightmare and not... well, he doesn’t know what.
He wants to understand what it really is. Again the underground, the labyrinth because at least that makes sense of the fact that he feels himself like a wraith 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. One night he watches soldiers beautiful as archangels but... sickly, drugged. 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 theatre actually is, changing the faces and the costumes, working so that there are only faces 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 (let alone the catacombs). The smell is fake and also real because now there is a physics of hallucination and a law.
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.
Often in the evening I sat with a friend for half an hour, talking of little else than our playing cards and the cribbage board. And being in the comfort of his kindness was a different sort of lesson.
Thirty years later we were talking again, he and I, and I said to him that I would go back to those days if I could and he said “oh I would too” and I thought it was beautiful how an old man treasured what was gone.
And it was the time of goodbye, and he called me by the nickname he chose when I was still a teenager, and like a father he called me by my given name.
They built out the house and made the garden still more beautiful, so you could look from the village road over the low stone wall, and be deceived by the green and immaculate mask (with a k) hiding the soulless, neurotic family masque (with a q) replaying day after day on the other side of the wall — replaying day after day, all so they could respect nothing, remember nothing.
A strong wind blows through the quarry garden as it was and as you see it now from the strange high place of return where, however, words reach you from below.
First come kindly words: “Don’t linger there, it is better to move on — give up this lonely and unhappy vigil, don’t get lost in the leaves.” And then something more: “You don’t see things clearly, there is so much you’ll never understand, and you’d be wise not to let your lurid imagination rip. Your remembering twists the truth. And who are you anyway to say this beautiful garden is guilty and forgetful?”
I lost a long-term job at a cultural institute. I visited Malcolm in his grand college rooms filled with his collection of art books which seemed like something out of another age. I asked for his advice. “Try to be an independent,” he said. He also told me that his illness was in remission, but he died not long afterwards. He never enjoyed the peak of his eminence. And maybe it wasn’t a small matter that he made the time to give honest and difficult advice to a former student who felt lost.
Then I was a contractor working from home, years before the pandemic made it normal. Instead of giving me independence, gradually the work invaded my home. It was the mid-2000s and I remember reading somewhere the idea that what went along with increasingly insecure terms and conditions was a new level of subjection to work, the proof of it being (the writer said) that, more and more, people dreamt about work, and so it was for me.
There was restructuring, a new regime, and suddenly I thought “at last I have a reason to leave”. But it made me nervous and so I weighed the pros and cons. I wrote lists, the good and the bad, feared what might follow but kept realising that there was no-one in this whole literary world that I truly admired. Some I respected for their ability or even brilliance, but where was anyone really resisting the careful institutional instinct of pushing it only so far no matter what, which bit by bit eats away at you, and which now I was deciding to reject?
I went to see my old tutor in his plush common room and admitted that sometimes I felt like a failure. Why couldn’t I realise my potential, build a career? Why wasn’t I nimbler at working within the rules? There was more than a trace of a smirk when he asked me, “Do you want to be some kind of saint?” And what he said hurt me, this man I so want to be kinder and cleverer than he is. but also all my life until now, all the almost forty years since I was brought to this country I have been in one way or another surrounded by the barren culture of its education system, with all its envy and ambition and mediocrity, and I have tried in earnest and good faith to adapt to it, and even if part of me wishes I could have succeeded on its terms, I also loathe it. And so now I’ve given up whatever standing I had, and if that also means I can be scoffed at as someone trying be a saint, and if too I don’t yet know the true nature of the trials of regret and self-doubt that are coming, still I am determined to seek something better than a false home.