Noanswers's blog

Salvation in Crossing a Street

For a long time I was convinced my salvation lay in any man's ability to cross a street multiple times at the correct places -- places that could not be known in advance, -- and that the secrets of eternity subsisted in those decisions.

Seeking a concrete example, I imagined a prophet, either alone or accompanied by a very young -- or perhaps very old -- child. Effortlessly the prophet crossed from left to right at one point, from right to left at another. The child, sometimes scarcely mature enough to walk, sometimes supporting his aged body on a walking stick, mimicked his actions. And I saw that this secret gave back no answers. While both the child and the prophet attained salvation, it was not because of anything specific that either of them did.

To confirm this, I re-ran the same scenario without the prophet. The child matched the now invisible movements step for step, yet attained nothing.

Then I ran the scenario again, with just the prophet. He crossed in all the places he crossed before, and he did not attain salvation either.

Finally I repeated the first scenario, with both prophet and child. Once again, they crossed in all the places they crossed. Neither of them attained salvation.

The disagreement

"Oh yes, he and I remember one another very well; he and I have had a disagreement," I say as winningly as I can. So now he looks at me sharply with not so much suspicion as self-doubt, since he doesn't remember this disagreement, and is trying to guess what sort of thing we might have disagreed about, and which of us was really in the wrong.

I continue to smile, offering him nothing, wondering if he will finally decide it is his own superstition that constitutes the difference between us, or, less charitably, if he will conclude the slight is my reluctance to reveal the slight, quite overlooking the fact he has as much responsibility as I do to remember a grievance, and if he cannot remember it for himself, he can make no claim upon me to help him remember.

It is enough that I have sown the suspicion in his mind, for his not remembering is more powerful than any remembering; it is centred nowhere and has nowhere as its check; his mind is as adequate a labyrinth for him as any world.

The heart of an Alcanian

"The heart of an Alcanian is encircled with three unbreakable chains. Two of these chains have padlocks. Only one of these padlocks has a key," Fernando once told me proudly.

"Oh, that's just the sort of nonsense Fernando *would* say," she retorted. "And, you know, I have no doubt he meant every word of it," she added wistfully.

This morning, autumn

This morning, autumn. I feel my life has been cut so many different ways, like a piece of cloth that is simultaneously every garment that could be worked from it. Some days pass, others advance; some hearken and some remember. But the topical reality of autumn seems to infuse -- even undermine -- all other realities. Such is its potency, it is akin to my life becoming, for the entirety of one season, a single shirt with imperishable creases.

"I thought I was walking to work, but in fact I am walking to autumn," I decided, thinking nothing and unsurprised therefore by any conclusion. "Yet work is on the way to autumn, so I shall stop by there as well."

Autumn

Autumn -- when the light falls merely lengthways, and the days seem longer and emptier than any possible time and content made absent through their presence.

Sheena

She's one of those people who, always being a bit mad, will recognise me as a bit mad, and never consider the fact that perhaps I am exploiting my madness in such a way I gain comeuppance upon her -- precisely because she -- of course -- is exploiting her own madness to gain comeuppance upon everyone else.

This isn't an equal match. She is more desperate than me, and, were I desperate, she would be the first to know it. My security, in fact, is a kind of -- security. I succeed precisely because she has not figured that I can, or planned a scenario around it.

Upon the scene of a posthumous murder

How inconsequential by day the uneventful sight of a previous night's murder. Stunned, the day itself is lost for words; about the bloodstain on the path and the crushed cartridge it has nothing to say. Yet, such is the nature of the day, it cannot exclude them; it can exclude nothing. And so everything is welcomed -- too quickly, too indiscriminately, too deftly by half. The bloodstain -- well, that is one with the shadows beneath the trees. And the crushed cartridge is just another piece of litter. Everything belongs, declares the day, even the things outside of the day -- they also belong. Even everything that fails to convince, even everything that can never convince -- by daylight these things also belong; they are more than things; they are the reality we share.

Here, once again

Here, once again: I am in exactly the same room, in precisely the same house, in the identical town in which I was two years past. And yet, how impossible it is to be here again. And yet again, here I am.

Perhaps the question now is: What is this here that I am? What is it that can be transplanted from place to place, and what is it that cannot be transplanted from place to place? Should one be more wary of the interval that has passed -- the unmonitored, ongoing and somewhat abstract foreignness of all things within the places that one is not; -- or is return a form of resumption (the vital quality was the one you took away, the one that follows you now, so that from distant hills your shadow stands vast across the valleys)?

What if here is different? What if here is exactly the same? And isn't something lost if either of these is true, yet both cannot be false? And, following this line of reasoning, one asks: What if the "here" is only what I bring, and the "I am" -- my identity -- is the thing that remained, and could not be taken away? What if the "here", everywhere, is what one brings to it, and one's identity, correspondingly, is the sum of one's historical shadows, the echoes one evokes in the places one has been?

Should there even be a question, then, if one is here, again? Is one's life not simply passing and repassing the selfsame streets in which all places are here, and all equally attuned (though whether sympathetically or indifferently, it would be impossible to say) to some unstoppable act of becoming on the part of those that for a time live there?

When I look at rainy evening summer skies with a particular proximity of distant roof tops to the drearily commited slant of the sky, and particularly if the lights in the windows fail to shine for themselves, but rather hold external illuminations in a certain way, I think of the rainy smell of the paving slabs all down Leicester Road, looking down on the Abergavenny Estate, until one reaches it, and looks upward toward everything else.

The image of a young man running bare footed along a wall like a rampart, far, far above a busy street: "What time is it?" we call up from below. "Six o'clock," he returns, without looking at us, without missing a step.

For some reason this image keeps returning to me; I don't have Borges' story to hand, and what I remember is doubtless not quite what he wrote. But in the special case of this story, what he wrote is not important, because that story is "Funes the Memorious."

No one was standing

There was no one standing in the suddenly subdued space beyond my window, and that extends, even as one thinks about it, as far as one can envisage in all directions. At the same time, the space also extends in time; it becomes eternal; it becomes timeless. A space that has always been summer with just this amount of rain, a temporary lull that is also eternally temporary. Colours redefine themselves; red is now the weaker hued red of brickwork in the distance, almost out of view, beneath a flat pale sky into which the frighteningly real chestnut tree pokes dark and multi-dimensioned tentacles.

There is no one standing beside the trellis which is now the type and form of every trellis (less warped, less intimate, more like some sort of thoroughfare, even if no one could ever pass through it). Similarly, the gravel about it, uniform as the newly fixed shadows upon it, is not so much a surface as an announcement.

Far away, though, the slanted window is still a characteristic window, more inward than outward, a triangular, mostly imaginary space defined by a great shoal of rooftiles to the fore and the slender little gable that falls away with a gasp behind it, as though hanging by its fingernails. Beyond the window, as beyond all windows, things are seldom so dim as one supposes, nor the house quite so empty, nor the staircases so long, nor the echoes so huge, nor the kitchens so bare, nor the cat so existent, nor the young boy so bored, nor the young girl so thoughtful, nor indeed anything quite so unfamiliar, out of place, historical as one imagines, looking out one's own window through the rainy space where today no one is standing.