No Answers

My Letters

If, hypothetically, I were able to read back through the many thousands of private letters I have written over the years, I know I would feel uneasy on two counts.

I would experience, first of all, a chronological uneasiness, which best expresses itself as follows: *Sooner or later, however hard I try to avoid it, I shall say something stupid, inopportune, and impossible to retract or forgive.* And what would annoy me most as I re-read those letters would be that, whatever the objectionable thing were to be that I found myself saying, I would know in advance that it would actually be a lie, as well.

Secondly, taken as a whole, I would appreciate that everything I have written to specific people, everything I have written to any specific audience, has been a lie, and anything I write in the future will be a lie. For this reason, I would derive no insight or satisfaction from reading what I had written. Indeed, I would understand only one thing -- that, however touching my accounts of things, at heart they would be neither accurate nor personal, and therefore incapable of instructing anyone in the only ways worthwhile.

The two faults belong together, and shed light upon one another: I want simultaneously to find the truth and tell the truth, as well. Yet when I want to write to others, there is often no truth, and when there is truth, there is often enough no one to share it with. The real truth -- the truth at odds with letter-writing -- is that, at heart, I have nothing to recount, and often enough I lose all faith in my endeavour. Yet I cannot keep silent; I must write letters all the same, to try to keep the potential for expressible truth still close, to try to prepare a place for it, a sympathetic ear for that day the true truth dawns, and I have the courage and strength to tell it, and the language to make myself understood, and, above all, the reason to speak.

It is against all this that I contrast my fictions, which paradoxically are the only *true* things I can write; they are the only place I do not have an agenda of sorts, the only place I can speak about myself without simultaneously having to hunt myself down in the process, or cover up my face. So if I could write those perfect letters, to someone for whom language and communication were one -- I would hand that person my stories one by one, since they may not say things I specifically want to say, but, at the same time, they say all the true things that I would want to have been said.

Too Late

"Do you know how late it is?" she contested.

"It is too late, then?"

"Too late! Do you not know how late it is?" she reaffirmed, as though proposing something beyond all limit.

The Individual Self

"How does one forge an individual self when one exists in the world primarily as an idea for others? That is, what happens when one’s deeper cultural identity has been irrevocably scattered, reshaped, and claimed?" asks Leora Skolkin-Smith.

How much is implicit in that paradoxical turn of phrase: "individual self" -- at the heart of a question which thereby becomes its own objection, since it stumbles only upon itself.

Email and the rite of ablution

Involuntarily, I wash my hands each morning before checking my email. Invountarily, I swear under my breath by way of explanation: "Look, you never know how pure may be the things you will have to touch, or how far or with what thoughts they may have come, they that have chosen their stopping place in you, or even they that have chosen nothing, but simply been pushed along, like delicate paper lanterns on a lake ..."

Banbury is in Oxfordshire

"... and your stories are the best part, since now your creativity will always be within my easy access …"

Somewhere there must still exist the woman who penned this observation. But, then again, perhaps not, since nothing really exists within it -- neither an author, an audience, nor even a meaningful arrangement of words, and if I remember what scarcely merits remembrance so possessively, it is because I remember it for this reason alone. It, and the sentences accompanying it, aren't written in such a way as to answer to anything in particular. They are a kind of nominal meaning -- deliberated, yes, -- but keyed to the lowest common denominator of commitment. They intend nothing, and therefore if anything has been intended by them, they have failed. Today, all of them exist in my memory alone.

A timely response, insofar as these words, by way of ink and air, arrived within two months of my returning home. But an untimely response, since nothing followed them. Nothing, that is, for a few weeks. And then nothing particular -- which is to say, nothing at all -- for a few months after that. At last, maybe in the early part of spring the next year, something further arrived: nothing. And so it was through the second summer, and into the second autumn. And then the year after that, that was much like the previous year, although there were hints things might be about to change. They didn't. Then the next few years -- they were, all things considered, much as one might have expected. But the few years that followed, when really everything should have been forgotten, which meant there was every reason to write again, because nothing was any longer at stake -- they were the hardest. And the first years after that, she was really pushing her luck; it was almost as if she no longer cared to keep in touch. As we approached the centenary of our not-writing though, a kind of calm overtook me, as I stealed myself for a last word, a breach, a break of some kind; in my mind I ran over for the thousandth time the things she had said, so that I no longer even saw her face, but only five decades of Ave Marias pushed tight against their Murano glass Paternosters. But the tenth anniversary came and went in silence. I could no longer call the K.'s I periodically convinced myself were her in Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal, because I had already called them all. I could no longer call International Directory enquiries because, it seemed, even they had taken the measure of me.

One night I spoke for over an hour long distance to the operator in Sherbrooke, at first about K. in passing, and then about K. definitively, and then not about K. at all, and, having reminded me that this call was a fixed price, though she had no decisive information to go on, she guessed various things about K., mostly wrong. Then she, and indeed I, said all sorts of other things, things elsewhere and everywhere in the world, as though even in Quebec (Ste-Marguerite, to be precise) I had earned a confidence for what I myself confided, or perhaps she simply envied me my fidelity on that long, faraway Sunday afternoon: "It's Sunday; I'm in Banbury," I said, "Yes, Banbury. It's the same place as the nursery rhyme. Banbury is in Oxfordshire; Oxfordshire is a county; a county is like a province." And, then again: "You can't find her, I know that -- but if you could? You see, it wouldn’t do any harm, really, after all these years. It wouldn’t do any harm if -- well -- she were simply to *alight* at the end of a number, and then I dialled it with a phone?”

"I understand, A.,” she said. “But even if you found it -- the right number -- if there really is such a thing, who's to say someone else isn't the name of that number, now? Not necessarily, but just perhaps?”

“Well yes,” I said calmly: “that must be how things are.” Secretly, I didn’t believe it for an instant; secretly, I believed nothing at all.

“You don’t need to stand on ceremony, A.,” she said. “I’ll tell you the truth: it’s a long Sunday here, in Quebec as well. You are a strange man: why do you never call people by their name?”

"I’m sorry,“ I said automatically, and then: “June,” --  my mind entirely blank. “June: that's the name of a month, in English."

"I know very well that June is also the name of a month," she said stiffly, after a pause. "Do you really have to explain a little thing like that to me?" -- and then, very quickly, as if someone else were about to enter the room -- "But as you insist, I cannot find the lady you are looking for, and so it is goodbye."

The Yawnful Unbecoming of H.

She was named, she said, after a country that no longer exists. But it had not been extinguished, nothing like that; its people had not been displaced; it had not been conquered; no treaties had been signed; its name had not been annulled; the last letter of its Law had not been hidden under a stone. It had simply been swallowed up by an adjoining neighbour, like a great, inopportune yawn that closes on something quite accidentally, and then swallows it without even thinking in its sleep.

D. the Butcher

My friend D. – how far away he seems today, although we even shared a house together, and all that’s come between us is time. He once told me, around the time he almost lost his license, that he had been a butcher before getting into I.T; he explained that when you made sausage meat, the most important part was the lungs, since it was these that gave it its flavour. We were sitting in the pub just up from Banbury Cross with old radials on the wall, and he said with self-conscious deprecation: “Now you’ll know how sad I really am, because I can tell you exactly what those are – 010s. Or rather, to be even more sad, that’s an 010, and that’s an 012."

Yet when, a few years later, I reminded him again about his past, about the strange ways by which we arrive at the places we now stand, and yet the whole thing seems natural and predestined for all that – he had ceased to exist. Even his birth had been erased from the books. “A butcher?” he said, “I think you’re thinking of someone else.” And when I insisted, and even drew the whole thing out, explaining how this and that was logical and fitted together, and therefore why it could not have been anyone but him, and only he could have acted in this way, -- and besides, how else was one to account for the life we both knew fully well he had lived, the five years or so before we met, the five years in which he had worked in the Butcher’s shop just west of Banbury -- he continued to listen as if I were making up stories, and he were honestly curious as to what would happen next. But: “I was never a butcher,” he insisted: “I don’t know where you got that idea from. I don’t know anything about that.”

The Bus

I was on the bus, and I remember because a pretty woman got on early on, and then, a few stops later, another pretty woman, so that I debated with myself which was the prettier. Except that, considered more narrowly, neither was actually pretty; rather, prettiness was simply a word by means of which the two could be taken up and carried aloft. Two stops later, the first woman got off, and then the other at the next stop. We left the town, and at an inopportune little stop in the country, as if planted there simply out of spite, the bus driver himself dismounted. A few minutes later, the bus entered the depot, where workmen wearing caps were swiftly dismantling it, wielding drills and wrenches and pulling off whole panels at a time. When at last they prised away the window beside me -- and so were forced to acknowledge me, still sitting there in my seat -- “You’re just like my pa,” one of them declared with kindly indulgence: “But you can’t sit there all day, you know."

The Haunted House

I ran about the darkness of the house, placing small green flares like lightsticks in different rooms -- in the front room, along a passageway, up the steps, across a balcony, -- and hot on my heels, it seemed, my sister rushed after me, just out of sight, collecting the flares before they burned out, as if together -- the flares and she -- they just held the night at bay by their fingertips, one moment at a time. And sometimes I outstripped her, and darkness collapsed between us, and I heard then her short, thin cry, as the inward heaviness of the air lumbered suddenly against her. For I had not revealed to her -- indeed, I had scarcely dared to acknowledge myself -- that this house was haunted.

R.

I was walking through the clean, largely featureless roads of a town without houses. The town was based upon a grid; each block had a half-height wall beyond which you could see the rusty tops of abandoned cars, empty oil drums and disused tyres, all ensnared in wild, half-dead brambles, so that there was scarcely space even for a patch of grass to grow. I knew though, beneath it all, there was a thin layer of top-soil - if you could only reach it - which had slowly gathered over the years, and smelt of damp and camomile and the beginnings of things.

"This is beautiful, "I said. "I'm so happy here; there's something about this place. It's so beautiful ..." Aware that I wasn't explaining myself clearly, I reflected a little longer, before concluding: "I just feel so *free* here."

"Well, of course, you know that R. shot two of his films here," R. said. "And his first film, he shot on this very street."

"Yes, yes," I said, slightly irritated. Even as he had started to speak, I realised I knew what he was going to say. And though R. and I perhaps shared something in common, I suspected that what he saw in this town was very different from what I loved about it; he would have been making some kind of social statement; this landscape would have suited him for that, I was thinking. I was not interested in social statements.

The slightly complicated thing is, the R. we were discussing was exactly the same R. walking beside me. It's just that he didn't recognise himself to be, and I didn't recognise him as R. either. He was, as it were, some third person, a neutral face or placeholder providing limited access to the real R. whom we both knew to be absent; perhaps this was pure psychological economy, not multiplying personalities beyond necessity.

We had started to cross a football pitch.

"You know," I said, feeling I could confide in him, "now that you mention R., I've always felt that he and I had much in common. I have much more time for him than he probably imagines. But that's not really something you can explain. He was a philosopher, and now he writes software; everything has to be so precise. He can't read even a page of fiction; he can't even hold it in his hand. You put it up there, and down it falls again. Yet he's slept with every woman under the sun, and once he even tried to kill himself. I don't know what it is that's so hard to understand. But I suppose that's just the way it is, isn't it?"

R. said nothing; I suspected he didn't really agree with me. More probably, he wasn't actually interested; some part of him always seemed to detach itself when I tried to discuss feelings - ambition, admiration, desire. I knew he must feel these things, just as I did, yet I never seemed able to share them with him; whatever words we used, they were always coming from different directions, heavy with ideological baggage, and thus invariably missing the point.

Instead, he passed the ball without looking to one of the defenders. He did it effortlessly, almost as though he were sleepwalking. I ran forward to the left, to try, like him, to be a part of the game. Somehow I had secured the ball behind the goalkeeper; he didn't seem overly concerned; indeed, he didn't even turn to face me. Now R. was somewhere far away; he had walked clear across the pitch the same way his eyes fell through my stories. I was no longer an idea in his head; instead I was just "here" -- though the "here" to which we had walked together wasn't a place I had chosen or a place in which I felt I belonged.

Sister

Sister is the other one, I said, continuing a conversation with myself I had begun at some indeterminate point in the past: You know it, all your life. And then, when you really look at it, you realise that you don't know the word at all.

The Overabundance of Time

"There wasn't really time for us to get to know one another in the first place ..." she said sadly, though it was not certain that the sadness she used belonged to her, or whether it was just an emotion she had chanced upon second-hand, and now offered up impulsively, as if she had nothing else with which to fill the void.

“There wasn’t really time for us …” she said. But this is precisely the opposite of the problem. It’s not that there isn't enough time; it’s precisely that there is always an overabundance of it, an inconsiderate excess. Even where our encounters are fleeting, briefer than the beat of a mayfly's wing, -- even where they are little more than blurs upon a retina, snapshots snatched in passing -- from a train, a chance word, the definitive percussiveness of a closing door, -- even *here* there is always time, more time than we can spend, more time than we can make sense of.

And so, when we come to this experience of one another, we know not by way of economy but by way of surfeit. Those characteristic gestures for which we wait -- in a waiting of which we are only conscious by dint of the many images we suspend, the words, the emotions, all flailing in the ether, intent upon some finally incontestable form -- come not once, but time and time again, effortless and therefore impossible to annul. Each thing falls in its rightful place, identity passes and repasses, yet it presses so hard in repetition upon itself that its own shadow becomes buried far beneath the soil; and however softly we take hands together by way of parting, it is the geology of our own lives that we drag out of shape.

Come the evening and time‘s own change of heart -- today, it seems, time no longer passes but endures -- we have it within us nonetheless, having spent the opportunities we had, to remain unequal to our time, and thereby to live placably with it the longer. To do this, one must set one’s face askance, so that the patter of time falls laterally -- it does not matter “laterally with respect to *what*?” -- just laterally, like small dry sticks or pieces of mud upon a roof, small dry sticks hurled from urchins upon a cloud, a yieldless blossom perpendicular to every plane of active influence.

"That whereof we cannot speak, thereof must we remain silent"

I think what I love most about Wittgenstein's proposition is its anthropocentric commitment to the imperfectibility of human knowledge, affirming human limits in order to defend what lies within them. In this way, what remains unexpressed has not necessarily been overlooked. And where all propositions are in a tight focus, allowing little beyond, their assertions must be measured against the specifications of the lens itself, and nothing more.

At the same time, even within our own limits, we touch for a moment the ineffable: we say very precisely, the words: "that whereof we cannot speak", and thereby something is contained, even if it is not something that can be reached. Something is touched upon, even if it cannot be elaborated. An impediment is made *real*, projecting a self-conscious absence, an absence with focus, where previously there was only narrowness, stumbling, prejudice, an absence deduced from without.

Wittgenstein *makes good* the dependency upon partial knowledge; and he offers, in one, compact statement, a possible argument for necessity, as a result of which as readers, if one accepts that specific limits here apply, the hinterland of each argument takes on the same focus as the argument, and everything re-proposes itself by way of tranpose, by way of what is missed. And thereby a specific silence is given speech, a specific absence made present, a specific lack given agenda, and perhaps, such are the tribulations of expression, that which comes to the fore is greater and more compelling than that beneath which it had been concealed.

Som thing for to fare the bet

693  And with the showting, whan hir song was do,
694  That foules maden at hir flight a-way,
695  I wook, and other bokes took me to
696  To rede upon, and yet I rede alway;
697  In hope, y-wis, to rede so som day
698  That I shal mete som thing for to fare
699  The bet; and thus to rede I nil not spare.

Whether we read this as "yet I rede alway; in hope ..." or "yet I rede alway in hope ...", there is still the turn of thought with that word "yet" (presumably continuation, in the sense "I did this, and I yet do it") rather than qualification ("I did this, yet it wasn't what I wanted"). The "turn" to which I refer is that which renders the closing phrase of the poem a prescription rather merely than a casual reflection -- "to rede I nil not spare."

Is not reading ever this -- the hope that we shall meet "som thing for to fare the bet"? And this encounter will, in some strange way, relieve of us of a different -- and as yet unexpressed -- obligation?

Circe (n.); cf. circen (v.)

"It was with Circe, though, that things really started to go to pot ..." he declared. I bit my lip: it was years since I'd thought about Circe, except on the rare days that, by chance, I thought about something else. She had been in my thoughts so constantly and so long that she seemed a second form of sight.

In my dreams that night I saw her again as the eternally winding path, as an unheralded granary of trees. I saw her as *my Circe* on the other side of herself, like a shopfront outshone by a puddle. I saw her as the drag-footed, life-wild, mud-wretched study of her reflection, and the indifferent world before which, as if sick for lack of speech, she simultaneously cried herself forth and dried herself away to nothing by way of self-expression.

circen (v.)

I circe,

You circe,

He (she) circe

We circe

You (form., pl.) circe

They circe

The Place of Meaning in Art

I have been called to task a few times now over the meaning of my work. Typically, the assertion is either that it "doesn't *mean* anything", or else I am explicitly asked: "*What* does it mean?"

The problem is, I neither understand nor credit the relevance of these assertions (the second, indeed, is far more an assertion than a question).

So far as literature goes, meaning is one of the many ways that a reader seeks to take control of a text. I say "take control" rather than "understand", because when a reader disputes the meaning of a text, there's a concomitant implication that the artistic status of that text is also somehow in dispute. This is specious reasoning that needs to be addressed.

I have said several times, both in my criticism and fiction (the two are inseparable; I'm not even sure the two are distinct), that art does not need to "mean" anything. It's a familiar enough idea; after all, if we failed to accept this, abstract art would be a contradiction in terms. But my assertion goes somewhat further:

1. Art actually occurs only where meaning is in jeopardy;

2. Art resists meaning because:

2.1 Meaning is exclusive, not inclusive: it prejudices the communication between people concerning a thing over the communication between a person and a thing, which it deems irrelevant. And even where people and things come to an agreement on this count, meaning still reduces communication to that of the lowest common denominator -- the group's maximum level of "meaningful" agreement. Art, on the other hand, does not distinguish between its recipients; even viewed as its own recipient, art resists the formation of meaning.

2.2 Meaning entails the abuse of power. It occurs where something is forcibly taken away from something or someone else. In other words, meaning cannot be exercised "neutrally." Where meaning is taken, meaning is also taken *away*; it is finite, indivisible, and shareable only in an impoverished form as per 2.1. Art, on the other hand, entails the balance of opposing forces; it is not an assertion, but a rearrangement.

2.3 Meaning is a socialising tool; it enforces a level of communal understanding at the expense of private (individual) understanding. It is the fear of losing meaning that holds a society together, even against itself: the rationalisation is that meaning and identity are inseparable.

2.4 Meaning comes to us coloured by a history of human engagement. Its elements -- words, sounds, colours and shapes -- are smooth at the edges, for the number of times, like old currency, they have changed hands in dispute; they carry the smell and taint of those struggles. It is impossible, for example, even to imagine the word "apostasy" without a sensation of dread.

3. Since art is compelled to work with second-hand products (2.4), it seeks to set its elements against themselves, so that all parts are in balance; the experience of this is effortless.

Vanquen

On every page there was a drawing of a flower, with text above, below, to the sides, even creeping between its leaves. I asked if it was the book "Flowers of Love" by Ramon Llull, but he shook his head. Then I asked him to translate the text, but he said it could not be translated. There was one place though, a kind of confluence which he described as a "necessary meaning." It was, he said, the declension of the verb "vanquen", which begins: "I am not, yet I shall be," and ends: "They are not, yet they shall be." I asked, then, why the confluence should be here of all places, and he said that it was for this reason alone that the text was composed in cipher. "Which reason?" I repeated. "I have already answered you," he countered. Then I asked if a "necessary meaning" were akin to an "original utterance", in which the word and the thing coexisted, the word calling forth the thing, the thing collapsing back into the word. He said yes, though it was more accurate to say that the word for a time called forth the thing, and the thing for a time collapsed back into the word. So I asked about the significance of "vanquen", and why it should be so important. "Our judgments are perfunctory, short-lived, born of their time," he said easily: "None of these qualities constitutes a reason to hold them, or not to hold them ..." But even as he spoke, I realised that what he said had another agenda; he was striving, without arousing suspicion, to weigh each thing equally, as though any imbalance could only be borne so far, -- beyond which point, like a kind of fury at the possibility of beginning, a rage at the very heart of birth, all language and all things, by way of the confluence, would be ensnared, fused and broken apart; everything would be carried imperatively into everything else.

Grey eyes of the world

A grey, grey evening sky, with the promise -- as all things grey -- of something inestimable. As though one not only turned away, but also retraced one's steps infinitely far, infinitely slowly, toward an absolute nullity, a pure and all encompassing void.

I love grey, since it summons so acutely the moments just past, the moments still breathing on the other side of the pane; it is like the great, coiled masses of different and now impossible futures, outdated and redundant, which perhaps is why, whenever I meet people with grey eyes, something about them always reminds me of the past.

Grey eyes are at one with their greyness, perhaps because greyness is an outward reflection, perhaps because it is an inward manifestation. Whichever the case, grey is the tenor of understanding; and it is only by means of grey, by the indulgence it allows, that emotion and intellect come to play upon it.

"Worldly wise with the whole world behind them": the first words that come to mind. There are some things that offer us the future, and grey is no exception; it's just that its proposition is the overindulgence, the broken walls, the unrestrainable powerlessness of the past.

Greyness doesn't have to do with books; it is at the heart of aesthetics, but it is the art that attracts no comment. It is akin to the immense residue of the creative effort, the misshapen dreams and imprecise offcuts of ideas, the great stir, and bulk, and hallucination of vibrant colours, all refluxed and revolved, held taut beyond their time and rendered equal against their will. It is the promise of extinction, but the promise, also, of sharing that space with every other thing, the promise of absolute community where all meanings fail and have been set aside.

Looking toward grey, I look toward the *necessarily greater*, not some kind of arch solution to a private life. It is great, final, diffuse, unreflecting, and absolutely self-unaware. It is inherently powerless, yet it overpowers simply by dint of its extent. It has nothing with which to distract us, and yet it holds our attention precisely for that reason. It is the common shape of the world that was not, the enduring distillate of our dreams after they have had all identity stripped from them, and instead have been crushed to a self-annulling mulch of different thoughts, from different lives, all more or less transient, and from all of which only a single quality can be deduced: greyness, greying, -- grey.

It is like a blessing that has died.

No Shouts, No Calls

In the dusk, I kept passing and repassing the small track to the left, where it entered the forest. In the end I managed to turn the bike around on the asphalt road, waiting for the other cars to pass. Little more than the slow blur of their headlamps, they seemed to hang in the greyness and the rain, somnolent and outdated, like small mechanical moons distilled from daffodils.

The track now was mostly mud, with furrows several inches deep. Twenty yards or so into the forest though it opened out into a small clearing, where, to the right, there was a book set up on a stand, like an artist’s easel. It was Steve Mitchelmore’s recent work “Hold On”, made up (according to the blurb) of “anagrams from Chekhov.” I saw there were various quotation marks on the front cover, but there were no actual words between them, only faint pictures, which appeared, anyway, to be part of something else, as though the quotes, like remaindered stickers, had just been superposed as an afterthought.

25 o’clock

I was cycling toward the office in a state of absolute exhaustion. Tired, I had never felt so tired. The road like an endless tape, and just the soundless juggernauts alongside me, as though an entire country, an entire mode of being were being pulled to pieces and transported somewhere else by road. And there, at the tip of my left foot, the pedal turning effortlessly with the end of a chrome bolt catching the light, so it was as if a small star were chiming away the seconds in an arc.

As I drew closer, it became harder and harder to stay awake. Now I was looking at the petrol station far past the office, at the other end of the road, and, in between, I realised that, like a series of muffled thuds mostly underwater, I had intermittently ceased to exist; it was impossible to say for how long.

So tired that, even when I awoke now, I could not believe it were possible to feel so tired, and I held up my watch against the window where it continued to declare it was 25 o’clock, no matter how much I slapped myself and squinted at it. Until, finally, even reality grew too weary to uphold itself; it slipped away, reassuming its default form, the form that encompasses it without effort, the form in which it curls up to go to sleep itself. And where the watch too had slid down the pane, as though in the grasp of different fingers, it was no longer 25 o’clock, and none of us had been cycling, not this time; it was just part of a morning, somewhere.

A Game

K. and I are playing a game.

- No, she says.

- No, I repeat.

- No, she repeats.

The game is completed.

The Wee Ghostie

At first I wasn't sure what I was seeing; then I realised that a ghost had taken up residence in my bedroom. She was so thin and insubstantial that it was very difficult to see her against the curtains, but when the moonlight was at the correct angle I could sometimes perceive parts of her skin and clothes. She didn't seem to want to say anything; and I was not even convinced she knew she was here. Her expression was that of a sleep-walker, a real girl who somewhere was dreaming her own projection, in my room.

I went into the kitchen and made her up a little bowl of fear. She looked at me absent-mindedly; her hands were like vapour, and she seemed incapable of holding anything at all. So I got a spoon and fed her from the bowl myself. But if the fear made her a little more substantial, it also seemed to take something from her, and make her ugly. Before, her features had been delicate and even neglected. Now they became increasingly forthright and vaguely offensive, as if she were trying to summon the strength to accuse me of something.

I didn't feed her again. Over the following days the ugliness receeded; she grew thin once more, and the thinner she grew, the prettier and more frail she seemed to become. Still she stood by the curtain without addressing me; and when she closed her eyes it was as if she were drifting into an ever deeper sleep.

Finally, after a week, it was nearly impossible to see her any longer. The moonlight seldom fell the right way, and even when it did there was almost nothing there now for it to settle upon. But I had the sense of an enormously beautiful face and the palest pair of eyes; I think I glimpsed them both for a moment in the dust that rose from the coverlet and the stacks of clothes on the chair. Then she had gone completely.

Three days walking

"Well, you can walk with us," J. concedes: "But we're going to be walking for three days."

He says: "We're going to be walking for three days." He doesn't say: "We've three days walk ahead of us." For there is nothing ahead but the present, the present drawn out languidly and exhaustingly, the words we are speaking now, as we walk together -- the prospect of these and nothing else, -- except, of course, the same fields, in which young cabbages seem to have been spaced very far apart, and whose isometric lines pull to one side, like a declivity of water, far down in the valley; while the valley itself is three days of speaking; the smoke above it just the cough from an unseasoned apple, and the cars in the road little more than stutters, doors that failed to sit fast when they were closed.

"Well, you can walk with us," J. said. But I was wearing cycling shoes, imagining three days of chalk in the cleats, and the way they would slip to one side as we climbed the empty temple in the abandoned barn, thrown together from hunks of water pipe, with a small cross half spun about, as if it had taken a blow to the cheek. And I knew that J. would outstrip me among the gullies and outstrip me across the fields, and it would be more than myself, and, indeed, everything else that I was dragging onward with me for three days.

Which was why, in a subtle, diffuse way, I contrived to lose myself; and it was finally a relief when, however hard I bounded, I could not find any of them again along the roadside, or at the foot of the field, or their tightly corsetted packs bobbing above the hedgerows, or any sign in the empty temple, with its old genuflections now curled and stiff upon the door; and the room beyond it, when you forced yourself through, seemed to have been balanced on edge, looking down precariously without a lintel into the overrun garden, as though it were only safe for it to stand here with those it trusted completely.

On the road out of town

Elsewhere, a woman drives a bus, but she does so as if she had just stepped in for the day, as though, really, she has an ocean -- or a prison -- to go back to. Something about the way she waits and listens, as though faintly bemused by even the idea of conversation. As though every question I could ask must make no sense. At the same time, by way of compensation (an uncalled for, undeserved, somehow blissful compensation) she has been infused today with a deep, humanising languor, an absolute commitment to the “us” of this world. Her time here – time which seems generously folded, plait upon lazy plait of it, like a hot summer among the cushions – has been secured by an equal and opposite contract guaranteeing her release; she is infused, permeated, tranquilly at one with the unblinking temporality of her involvement here.

But as I mount the bus, it is too late already; I have already missed whatever it is – the life – that I need to hold in order to be here, and the fact I’ve actually grabbed a hand rail, knocked upon a folding door, this is simply hearsay; this is simply proof of something else inapplicable.

She doesn’t ask me where I want to go; she doesn’t ask me anything. The other passengers are nodding there, somnolent, half-born, a vague collision of discarded hats, broomsticks and pieces of dry clay.

In the silence: “It’s RBS,” I say at last. I speak out of sheer desperation; I know it *isn’t* RBS; this isn’t where I want to go; I don’t even know if there’s an RBS here. I’m waiting for her to refute me, to correct me, to help me out in some way. But she says nothing, as though already aware that I have only begun, as though only I have ownership of my words, and only I am bound by them and answerable to them.

“It’s the place you send things away to,” I try again: “the Corporate centre.” But I know this isn’t true, either. Now I’m just trying to convince us both that I’m not all bad, that, in brief, I can put two ideas together rationally, and therefore she does not need to be afraid of me. “There is an RBS somewhere,” I’m suggesting. “And there’s a Corporate centre, too. RBS has a Corporate centre. It’s just that, neither of these places is the place I actually want to go to.”

Still the woman waits, in silence.

“Please don’t hurry me,” I say softly, realising I have no choice but to appeal to her humanity: “I can’t say things when I have to think about things, when I get stressed. I just can’t do things.” And, involuntarily, I wonder with grim resignation: “So, we’ve finally come to this. And this won’t be the last time, either; I’ve denied for years what was going on.”

“I’m not going to hurry you,” she says neutrally, as if this is something she has learned to say without thinking. At the same time, she pauses – pauses in the middle of nothing in particular, but pauses nevertheless, as though, in answering me, she has to make amends for the silence she has broken. She rests her bare elbows on the large, almost flat steering wheel, and looks toward my feet.

Now the bus has pulled away, and I am still clinging there, up at the pole, clinging like a spendthrift to a rattlestick. Almost without a murmur, the bus passes among different coloured lights, circling and re-circling the fretwork of the streets, closed as they are, half-filled or closed, half-closed or filled with people. And every few moments I have to ask again that she let me know when we are there; and then, every few moments, again, I find myself apologising, since somehow I forget everything she says. And each time she glances slightly aside, deducing nothing, concealing nothing, allowing me -- allowing me whatever it is, whether life or knowledge or something else, that one can only be allowed by way of suspension, -- as she repeats gently: “It’s on the road out of town -– it’s on the road out of town.”

The twelve hapless faces of art

I feel like that moment in a dream when the teacher called us all up to the front desk, where he had lain out in a row the twelve objects, and asked us to put the ones that were Art on one side, and the ones that were Not Art on the other.

It was a summer's day; he saw me turning away, frustrated and sad, and it was as if, as he moved to the side of the desk and placed a hand gently on my shoulder, I could already smell the coffee on his breath. It was an unfamiliar scent to which I was entirely indifferent -- a scent that led nowhere.

"Well, you see," he began, amiably enough: "if you can't even begin to reduce this thing ... But I do know what it is that you are trying to do."

"You know what *I* am trying to do?" I repeated.

"You believe in something you call art," he said. "I'm not here to take your beliefs from you. That's not my place. But I *am* here to make you question. Because that *is* my place, you see ... And I do still need an answer from you."

"Let them all be art, then," I said.

"What, all?" He smiled, as if this were too easy, easier than he had anticipated: "Even the hunk of concrete? And the -- the orange bus?" he added with tentative indulgence, as though secretly he pitied me now, and wanted to keep me from stumbling further than I must.

"Yes," I said, sensing that by refusing him a trial, by refusing him the opportunity to argue the part, I was actually taking something away from him, the irrefutable truth of something else which he might have spotted in passing, if he had only been looking.

"So of course, by extension, the entire world is art, then, is it not?" he concluded.

"Yes," I said, the spite in me hiding in a corner, and turning itself round and round. I was watching a great locomotive forcing itself further and further down a dead siding out of sight. And, for a fleeting instant, I felt so clearly: "If you could only experience the pain of this, the pain of what we do to ourselves like this, then you would know instantly, without even trying, what it is we are arguing about."

The bell

At what point is *all that is already written* sufficient? Apparently never. But who or what affirms this? Writing? Writing that says that it is never good enough, never clear enough, never exhaustive enough, never concise enough? Or the writer, who still has in his mind but a single text, a text he seems to have multiplied in poor facsimile, without ever delivering an original?

“What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” 

Writing that is lacking in achievement, in clarity, in scope, in focus: is this *really* what it is lacking? Or is it simply that it still waits, implacably, to be dismissed? It waits for a greater authority than its progenitor to set it loose and let it be. And so, for his part, the author soon seeks not so much to perfect it as to write himself apart from it, not so much to deliver it as to cut himself free of it.

Milton

"That be from thee far; that far be from thee, father!" I remember hooting, quite incapable of keeping a straight face as I strove to give credence to the fact I found the greatest epic poem in the English language at times ... well ... uninspired.

My tutor, legs still crossed, leaned forward; as she did so, the soles of both feet touched the floor -- an uncanny trait to which several colleagues had earlier drawn my attention.

"Oh, please!" she said with conscious dignity.

Abraham

It was my father's birthday; he had just returned from Zimbabwe.

"Look at what they gave me, Bat," he declared, though, as always, I couldn't quite tell if the enthusiasm were entirely sincere, or whether it had a slightly ironic edge to it. My father received gifts, expressed emotions and expounded views with facility; it was a part of his upbringing, and to this day I did not know how he really felt about anything. I suspect he always assumed I read beneath the surface, and tacitly applauded the fact that, like him, I said nothing explicitly about what I saw there. But the truth was that I read nothing at all; the two of us shared an ignominious dignity, since on my part it was entirely undeserved. If he could only know how little I made of him, and how much more it was needful for him to say, even for me to begin to be his son.

I had not bought my father a present. Of course, I had vaguely intended to, and now that he was here it struck me suddenly: How long can this go on, my year on year indifference toward him? In fact, my indifference only seemed to make my father still more kindly and solicitous. And, again, I asked under my breath: What on earth is it that you *see* in me? Why should my happiness be of such importance to you? But it was too late to do anything about it now. I would always assume there would be another year to make amends, and, generally speaking, there would be. Until a decisive moment after which there would be no more years, and the decision would be taken out of my hands forever.

"It's the half-lily that was given to Abraham," he was saying, taking it out of its tissue paper. And, sure enough, a moment later I held up the small, fluted thing next to the red Stanley range in my mother's kitchen. It was a small and delicate thing, blown from fused transparent and green glass, and the flute had a characteristic kink -- a clear glass tongue that twisted completely over almost in self-severance, like a Rupert's Drop, as though the entire flower, its life, its history, even its meaning, had all been sworn to silence in every way possible.

The Number of the Heart

"At the end of the five yard fence there begins the ten yard fence, and at the end of the ten yard fence is the fifteen yard fence. The mathematics are simple, and, for that reason, elusive. Let yourself not be disheartened because your mind runs ahead, runs faster than your feet. For the least important thing is the league of fences you imagine; the only important thing is reaching them.

In times past, there were many who failed even to reach the five yard fence; indeed, there was only one who, whether by diligence or some accident of birth, attained the twenty yard fence. Yet today inexperienced men routinely pass the twenty, the twenty five yard fence. Why should this be? I hazard it is because today we understand things well enough to take strength from uncertainty; we know now it is folly to hope that the fence before us is the last.

For myself, I was bearer of a son who reached the fifty five yard fence; that was in his prime, and had he not, like so many others, found his limit there - although all limits are equal, for they treat us just the same - who knows how much further he, like those many others, might have proved his talents?" He paused at this, since, among the many emotions in his mind - to instruct, to recount, to reminisce - there seemed for a moment no clear way forward.

"There are those who would say a son is a fine thing," he continued at last. "What a thing it is to sacrifice one in this way. Yes, that is the word they would use: sacrifice. We understand, of course, that they are wrong, but let us imagine for a moment that they are right; suppose indeed it were a sacrifice. What then? Would not this action translate itself, through the medium of my instruction, into a pledge to you? Would it not justify both our cause and our relationship to it? Does it not vindicate my station - if ever it had been suspect - and thus, as both its own sentence and its own reprieve, compel me to instruct you to the end? Let me put this truth to you as a kind of question, which - immediately - I turn into a prescription: you may think that a son is this or that, but, whatever your preconceptions, you will find that you doubt many things when you are all alone, with nothing but the world for company. Today I will teach you that doubt in all its strength, for it is this - not faith - that propels us forward, that sweeps our cares aside and heaps them up again on the other side of the fence before us. In life, too, don’t we seem to mount one fence after another? Maybe, in its hardship, we even confuse the two, and pass away without recognising the content of the night. It is easier, after all, to die half in fiction and half in fact than give over the monopoly of one's life on a probability of black or white. But it is precisely on this account that I often wonder if those who come after us will acknowledge us truly. Will they see beyond the blandness of our apparent task; will they see both the true aspiration and the true antagonist? And, in so doing, will they recognise, at heart, the austerity of our quest?" At this, he looked slowly along the first row; his mild, almost absent-minded eyes demanding: Will they? Will they recognise it?

Then he stepped down from the podium; he stepped down gently, as though he wished to give attention to everything; he stepped down gently, in a different sentence, like someone still awaiting the things he has lost. When he spoke again it was only after he had walked from the start of the room to its finish, and the room itself had become equal to his footsteps, so that there was no longer any before or behind.

"Yes, I think, now, I will answer that question," he ended: "the only question that, in your silence, you could ask. You should believe nothing; neither should you doubt; so let it be the one question between us, and, like the fences, stand on each side and the other. My children, it is the number of the heart. Five is the number of the heart."

The Thirteen Notes

In time, such is the nature of time, all that we have chosen proves inadequate, and our own hearts turn against us. The faithful phrases that represented us are battered out of shape, so dependably and so long have they risen to each occasion. And we their followers have also lost our shape, refashioning ourselves out of comfort in their decaying image. In time then we come, of necessity, to the repetition of the thirteen notes. And when we do so, there are those who listening will say that that repetition of thirteen notes, that is not enough, that does not describe its subject. And there are others who will say those thirteen notes, yes. And there are others still who will say those thirteen notes, they go somewhat beyond what is required; they reach their zenith too soon; they leave no place left to go.

My Mother's Daughter

Sometimes, at school, the other children ask around about their families, and some say that they have two brothers and a sister, and others that they have two sisters and a brother; and so it goes on, until they come to me, and I have to say that my mother has just the one, single daughter, and that's all there is to us, at which point a general hush descends, and they make a way for me, as if I had just delivered a rousing speech, and they need time alone to reflect upon it. What I don't add, though, is that this daughter of hers doesn't please her so well, on which account I myself often wish she could have been somebody else. Her features are soft and delicate, yet there is something not altogether right about them; their softness is somehow impersonal, as though they had developed at the expense of individuality, rather than in response to it, leaving you with the overall impression of a child completely lost within the world. Yet, even if she perceives this, it does little to subdue her spirit, since she is also as every bit lost within herself; perhaps she even takes a kind of solace from her state. Who can say who lost her way first, she in the world or she in herself, or even if the two are reciprocal, and what is left, in her, is some kind of answer to that lack, some kind of perturbed reflection of the conflict between the two? Her calmness inspires me, and yet I would not want to live long inside her head. It would remind me too much of a room without furniture, which you can't escape because they forgot to put a handle on the door.

How slowly Evening comes

Every morning, on my way to work, I walk past the hospital and look at the long, graceful sweep of its various buildings. Within them there is no space for regret, and little space for any personal past, and instinctively I envy the hospital the unreflecting peace it has made with itself. On the other side of the road is the nurses' home, with its decayed windows and rusty walls. The nurses are mostly immigrants from a part of the world that no one ever visits, and to be true to what they feel themselves it is best to introduce them in this way, only adding parenthetically that they are also my compatriots. For when I see them sitting at the windows watching the traffic on the road beneath them, I know that their hearts do not belong here either; and when they huddle together in their tight little groups, I can almost feel the spiritual warmth they are trying to kindle among themselves. Even now, there they are, standing about the overgrown gardens near the archway, the corners of their mouths sucking away at their smoky lives, as if trying to comprehend some unfamiliar scent. Sometimes I think they have been here forever, without moving on, in their own minds, from the idea that they have only just arrived. Perhaps it is the lack of things the nurses’ home offers them in compensation for the memories it takes away that makes the exchange a poor one; perhaps, on the contrary, their past is too bright for the present here to seem anything but shadowy and dim and difficult to decipher. My father and I used to sound the horn as we rode past them in the car when I was young; I liked the way they instinctively moved aside and looked back at me guiltily, as though I had caught them doing something they shouldn't. But of my father, I remember little more than that hand - a hand at the tiller, a hand at the wheel, a hand to fashion me and pick me up and admonish me for crimes I never really understood. Perhaps this versatile hand was attached somewhere to a body of sorts, but the possibility neither concerned nor interested me. Looking over my shoulder, I see that childhood again stretched calmly behind me, like a soft, blank field upon which all the flowers have been painted black.

Then one day, apropos our persecutions during the war, I came across the intimate yet ambiguous assessment: "They were an insular, religious, self-destructive people, filled with superstition and pride, dreams and old horrors, rooted to a past they revered and despised and never could regain,” and, described this way, I suddenly felt a bitter love for my race, and the strange tongue that sustains it, and the fact that everything about us seems always to have settled about or stood between, but never quite touched upon or been secured by anything. Indeed, it sounded so romantic I felt jealous of the ones who had remained, and wanted to leave right then, if only because the past tense that recalled them also extinguished their lives forever, and I wondered how it must feel to live with them beyond the void. It was then that my personal past, as if in collusion with its more collective parent, started to sidle away from me; I caught at it absently, but it would not wait, though ultimately neither one of us had the strength to drag the other back completely. I was a young man and this was not the only provocation, of course, but it was the first, and once a chink had become visible, then I could see clearly the outline of the door, and the rest of it was easy and involuntary. Suffice to say, beyond the door there was a great house; there was light in every corridor as uniform and undiluted as the greyness of the gardens about it; there was a furious bustling and clinking of glasses, and, in the exhileration of the thing, I hardly noticed I had spent all evening loitering in the entranceway listening to an effusive, overbearing divorcee, while the bakelite switch panel dug in my back, and the only initiative I undertook was to find out ever-changing routes among the spaces of carpet where people had chosen for a moment not to stand, in the many quests for wine that I undertook on her behalf. Returning on the last of these, I met with more opposition than I had anticipated, for a sizeable group had chosen that moment to depart, and whether she had forgotten me, or misunderstood and thought that I had forgotten her, or whether she was simply swept along by that general exodus, having lost her bearings among the many suits and tables and rooms and wine, there was now only an empty sweets trolley where she had been standing. And then I saw that the dishes, too, had been cleared away, and the piano closed up at the end of the dance hall, and people with unkempt hair and dirty overalls were starting to move about behind the scenes, and sometimes crossed quickly in the shadows between two rooms, like rats that lived in the walls. I do not have a word for that gulf, that prelingual gasp that is the shape of that evening in a calendar, and the bright windows of the house hanging on the night. At the same time, if I could have my life again, I would do things in exactly the same way, for it is not so much the sense of misspent opportunity that causes my past to seem separated so starkly from my present, but rather the fact that my story is the story of our race; my people are their own inheritance, sown by their own fingers, and garnered by their own hands; we have no guides or advocates, yet we have always been too proud to ask the way or turn aside when we are spoken to.

On the wall where the pigeon spikes end, one of the nurses is sitting, swinging her legs and watching me.

“You wish you had a different life; you wish you could go home,” she says suddenly. Then she asks me for the price of a bus fare, and I know, if I see her again, she will probably make exactly the same observation, followed by exactly the same request, with the same admixture of sincerity and dissimulation. If I knew for sure she were thinking only of me when she spoke, then perhaps it would be different, even as if I knew for sure she were thinking only of herself or her family. But we do not understand one another; we do not understand generally in this place, and what concerns us is usually at odds with anything we can change.

Later, somewhere between night and day, I suddenly find myself awake, as if the thin, irresolute drone of the present had abruptly ceased. Then, once again, I hear my daughter crying in her sleep, like a lost, grey ghost at the end of a long, lightless path; and, hearing her like that, I remember again the black flowers governing the field, and do not envy her the way ahead. For at such times, when there is nothing to distract you except the darkness about you, it is very hard to accept that everything your children will learn and love and achieve will die with them, and yet their lives will need to be lived and believed in, all the same.

The Hand

My cousin is a surgeon. I do not understand what it is about surgeons. But not just surgeons - doctors too, anyone associated with medicine. I don't know what it is about him and his brother either, who is also a doctor. They were like that ever since they were children. It wasn't that you guessed what they were going to be; it's that they were already doctors, from birth. They took on more, and so there would be less to give those around them. The moment of their attention would be constantly divided, shared out among the many. And they didn't see this; even if they had seen it, they wouldn't really have understood what I am getting at. It would be as if I were asking for something selfish.

"You'd better have one of these," he said in that abstracted way of his. I knew really he was thinking about something else that had to be done, some arrangement which even now he had to get underway, though he was instead taking his time entertaining me, pretending - but not doing a very good job of it - that I was the only thing on his mind. I realised that perhaps some of his professional practice came into play here - to be involved with his patients, without seeming to promise the needy ones too much attention.

"You'd better have one of these," he had said, and handed me a full-size human hand, made out of black plastic. Almost immediately though I realised that there was something wrong with it - and then I saw that it had six fingers.

He emitted a vague sound which could have been interpreted as anything; I held the hand in my palm and turned it over, trying to look at it approvingly, utterly incapable of understanding why I had been given this thing or what I was supposed to say about it. I assumed it must have been some early experiment of his, the consequence of some anatomical workshop. I even imagined that the grotesque thing might first have seen the light of day in a joke shop somewhere, purchased by a friend for his stag-night.

During the festivities I was to stay in his own bedroom, since I was family. He had tidied away a few things, just enough to make space for me. But it was the neat curtains, inconspicuous against the walls, that seemed to characterise the room. Unassertive, utilitarian, they were part and parcel of the kinds of places he worked on a daily basis. It was as if, in some way, he always carried the hospital about with him, - as if this house itself, in which he had grown up, were always the potential hospital, waiting to find its home through him.

Now he raised his voice. There were people in the hallway; they seemed to stream endlessly through the front door, like distracted beams of light, half in, half out of the house.

"I summoned you admirable gentlemen and no less admirable spouses, partners, hangers on, or what you will, as one’s audience dictates, to witness my formal wedding ties to a very wonderful young lady," he was saying with a voice that instinctively I appreciated as "genial." He endowed the voice with a sense of affectionate irony, so that, even if there were nothing ironic in what he said, it seemed that he was reaching carefully for each word, disregarding other words that might have done just as well.

"All of us have some claim to fame. Well, my young lady's claim to fame is this - she has eleven fingers," he added matter of factedly. Evidently the admission was important; it was clear this was something he would presently build upon; nevertheless, its indecorous objectivity sat uneasily with the somewhat grandiose adddress which had preceded it.

"This may sound a little ghoulish to some of you," he went on in explanation, "but those who don't want to hear it don't have to.” The briefest pause that followed brooked no dissent: “The fact is, she was born with a birth defect; her left hand had five fingers, but two of them were thumbs. Well, three weeks ago, all that was to change. After a few - very painful and tense - " (he laughed, to show that he, too, was human) - "very painful and tense hours with me in the operating theatre, I should like to present you with my wife."

I realised that a good part of this was the intimacy he clearly felt that he owed us, and that we, in turn, owed him, in being here and sharing something personal with a man who seldom has anything of the personal to impart. This must be why he was telling us things which, anywhere else, should have been private between the two of them. Admittedly, it seemed possible his wife might have been unable to conceal her deformity, but, all the same, I found it odd that he was talking about it quite so openly. Instinctively I wondered why he could not just have left things alone. Somehow, I was convinced, he would just have given an awkward laugh, clearly offended, and retorted drily "So the world will choose magnanimously to overlook what my wife must have before her every day. May I ask why?"

Now the crowd of people in the hallway had subsided a little; it was like a flood of sunlight becoming covered in dust. Then, near the doorway to the library, he was bobbing up and down, handing out the little black hands again, like prayer books at a church. As if unconsciously recalling similar ceremonies, the guests in turn bowed formally, respectfully receiving their hand, and perhaps slipping it into a pocket or a bag. Each one shiny, each one too heavy for itself, it was as if it were really an actual human hand that had been painted.

At last I saw what it was that he had been getting at - that strange mixture of horror and tenderness, which we all seemed to have accepted with an equanimity that astonished me. At last I realised the awful logic of the thing he had done. The fourth member of that hand was a grotesque appendage with no skeletal continuity, inserted next to the second thumb, and bizarrely swollen toward its base. Then I realised that what I was holding was an actual cast of his wife's hand, and there, on the newly added fourth finger, was the wedding ring.

But touching that hand’s original, beyond the fact we carried away its likenesses as unquestioningly as our clothes, there seemed nothing further to be said. Indeed, I vaguely felt there was something too terrible about its bearer to endure the light of day.

Voices from a foreign quarter

In the very teeth of winter, when your life drifts and billows about you, it is not unusual to hear voices from a foreign quarter as you make your way slowly in your suit toward the office through the ice – as you make your way slowly from the room in which you live across the frozen paving of the town – as you make your way slowly in your slowness, since everything is at the mercy of all things, and you must wrap your reasons fast about you.

Sometimes the voices are peppermint in their freshness, and you feel their brief warmth in condensation on a glass, as they crackle past the school gates; sometimes, again, they are drawn out from the early morning, like the clean rustling of silk against a sky – drawn out like cars passing softly in the snow. And sometimes they are no more than recollections from the night before that have slid a few inches from the roof, and now, as if to test themselves, heap up in their height and overhang the gutters.

It is against all this that a woman passes by and says: Good morning.

And suddenly you wonder how it would be if all we strangers started to say “Good morning.” Good morning, and also good night. And not only that, but to invite one another in for coffee, for example. And not just coffee, either, but many other things about which one can only speculate.

“You, in particular, would have asked if I wanted to go out for drinks, and I would have said: No. Because whoever disdains the small part wants the whole and I cannot forswear my ambitions toward you, my beloved, ungovernable world.”

Twenty Interpreters

Twenty interpreters were brought before the prophet. The prophet did not belong in the court, but the king was contrary - he had plucked him out of the wilderness. Maybe the two could learn from one another. The prophet enjoyed the king's patronage; the king enjoyed the prophet's reputation. But it was not entirely for formality's sake that he summoned the twenty interpreters - the wisest men of his kingdom - as the prophet had requested. He, too, wanted to know the truth of the prophet. He wanted to know what the prophet's story really meant.

"I will tell the story again," the prophet said to the king. "Then let them challenge me. You must warn them that if they are wrong they shall suffer the consequences. But I will do nothing to conceal the truth, and I am not a wise man. Therefore a wise man should see the truth as clearly as I do."

To this the king readily agreed. Why surround yourself with a court of wise men who are only pretenders to the name? And even if the prophet showed some guile, surely twenty wise men could rustle the truth out of him? He himself looked forward to seeing which of them deserved the title he had received, which of them, in common matters, could lay a genuine claim to his reputation.

Now they are all summoned to the state room. The twenty interpreters sit down, some nervous, some with equanimity. Alike, they wait in silence for the prophet to speak. As he does so, some take notes, some look at the ground; some look at his face, as if they could read the answer there.

Finally the interpreters separate and think long and hard. They know the importance of their endeavour. Their king is a precipitate king, unforgiving, cantankerous. More is at stake than just the words they say. At last, they settle their stories; they are summoned a second time to the state room. In turn, each offers his explanation of the prophet's story. Certainly their originality knows no bounds, nor their scholarship. They pin down every last nuance; they trace out every last theme.

"I was wrong," the prophet concludes, when, many hours later, the last of them has fallen silent. “Nothing can be hidden by words, when those words are only made out of more words, and the places from which those words have come."

Out of respect for them, he lowers his voice, and beckons the king aside.

"Take these fools away and put them to death," he says. "All they see is different forms of truth. Bring me someone who can see the lies."

Nathaniel

In a moment of poise, I found I was offering him, as though he alone contained the potential of the world, not only all the things I had already written, but all the ones I should some day write, as well.

"Except this," I added, with sudden inspiration: "Should you choose to change a word, then you lose the right to change a word."

"Should I change a word, I lose a right ..." he repeated neutrally; evidently the sentence itself was made up only of words, and conveyed no ideas of its own. There was a movement in the hallway.

"Nathaniel," he declared; the very world stood at his side now, while I was no more than a person in a room. "See, Nathaniel: the gentleman begrudges me even the things I refuse to take away from him ..."

Truth

"There is no truth," she said, "only different systems of truth. You want, of course, to press further, to be curtailed by nothing. But what exactly is it that you can feel, believe, or know, in such a place? Surely you must come running back to the language we have chosen to share. And how can we share, but by way of the constraints we impose upon ourselves? As though each bares his back, only so that he can show his neighbour: See, I have bared my back?"

Natural

In the unexpected sun and the rain and the suddenness with which suburban streets give way, like their own seasons, to grass and water, and the tangles of hedgerow that press where the fences subside, and the cul de sacs T'd by a river, and the railway lines clumped with camomile - seeing the countryside sometimes, as it starts out on its own, uncertain among the backyards, uncertain of its destiny, uncertain how far forth it can hurl a future, I feel the urge, I don't know, to encompass myself by dint of sheer extinguishment within it, and wish I could curl myself up as soft and dry as the dust of the tow-path, and be nothing but the smell of all that is underfoot.

Nature, I reflect in those moments, has no conscience, no comprehension of perfection. There is no onus upon it to be perfect, and, failing therefore to understand its absolute inadequacy, it attains perfection without even trying. It understands innately that perfection cannot be reached by way of desire; it can only be reached by forgoing desire forever, by teaching itself how to *be* without the possibility for self-reflection.

How much that seems for us to take on trust, and yet how natural it also seems, to trust. As though trust came not from ourselves, and our own community, but were something intuited from the world about us, and then immediately forgotten, for fear it might yet put us to shame.

Wherever

"It's the same old decorations," he said, looking at them sadly, although they seemed without malice and intended nothing particular by their return: "the same old decorations, year after year ..."

"But there's the difference between us," I said. "You've already seen them before, but I won't be here next year; I'll never see them again."

"Where will you go?" he asked, faintly interested.

"I don't know. Wherever they aren’t, that’s all. Wherever they aren’t, precisely in order that they can be here, as they are, today.

From so far distant

From so far distant, it feels a long, long way back to faith, and you don’t know whether to renege, for the company you will find about your heels, or regress, for the potential of all that, some day, you might regain.

Indian

The last time I saw my father it was a little under eight months since he had died. I was walking along the corridor to the cafeteria the very moment I knew it would open. Then, just ahead of me, I recognised the short white beard and my father's back of head.

He seemed in good health; clearly he had recovered his spirits considerably since the funeral, and he walked at a similar pace to my own. I was rather hoping we might both end up in the cafeteria, where I could say hello, and perhaps we could get a table together. But at the last moment he turned instead into the Testers' room - a decision which surprised me for a moment, since all the testers were Indian.

Then I realised that most probably nothing was amiss; my father, evidently, was Indian now himself, and, as I carried my body onward alone, I began to adjuce reasons why my father, in fact, must always have been Indian all those years, and therefore why, assuming something else, it had been so hard for me to understand him.

The Cold Walk back

“No matter how far, in times of easy grace, you have thrown yourself ahead, nothing will ever prevent that last, cold walk back through a dark place, “ she said. “And no matter how beloved you find yourself to be, the time shall come when we can no longer take a stand to protect your faith from calumny.”

In an afternoon

On a fine day, he bows his head, as if by allowing the skies the chance not to be recognised and reasoned about, he can, in turn, escape the obligation to say anything - even to himself.

Games

An idle speculation: What is a game? I would suggest: A game is simply that within which one chooses to risk something personal. It needs no other paraphernalia, for the key epithets here are “choose”, “risk” and “personal.” A game, in other words, is about personal liberty. One is free to choose, and one is free to lose; that is what’s at stake, even if the stakes are intangible. Every game therefore is necessarily voluntary; there cannot be such a thing as an involuntary game.

Perhaps this is why, where personal liberty is in jeopardy, humour rather than polemic often seems the truest form of dissent. For humour invites confrontation, and risks identity itself. But polemic, in contrast, is only so powerful as the injustice that has been done.

The Composer

He wrote music. He wrote music for late middle-aged singers who had been singers all their lives. He wrote music in order to take advantage of their specific harmonies -- the fact that they hit each note spot on, in an ever decreasing range, the fact that their vibrato was regular, assured, and almost weary.

Not everyone was suited to such songs, and the ambition of these particular songs was subtle, since they belonged neither to the young, nor yet the old, but to something in its mastery, and just touching the end of its mastery. The songs therefore made no new challenges, but rather looked back toward all that had already been sung, so that their singers could sing them with the particular joy of their past, and their lifetime within it.

At the same time, taken in isolation, these new songs offered nothing to those just starting out, those who did not know these people for what they were, or the culture within which, over the years, they had finally carved out the shapes today familiar as themselves. The songs no longer explained; they *depended*, for they were written not to express, but to sustain, to consolidate, to make fast all that had gone before.

This was, though, a two-fold denial. For, however soberly the singers must have viewed the future, however self-conscious they must have felt within this place, it was also not their part in these songs to sign toward the place where singing stopped, the place where neither singer nor song any longer were free to sing.

The Letters

When challenged as to why he had not responded to the letters, he answered: "Because no one would ever send me mail."

It seemed he had lived in the house almost 20 years, and the other residents of the house had often received mail, but never him. As a result, he had ceased to look for mail, and, since no one in the house knew who he was, this was why those particular letters had remained there, in the little pile beneath the telephone, for so long.

Escape

The world may not appeal to you, yet the fact remains, there will always be a place within it to call your own. The place may not physically exist; it may not make sense, and it may not be explicable when your only desire is to make it clear. But it exists, all the same, and while you may have to travel to find it, the journey is not necessarily physical, mental or spiritual: the journey can be anything that takes you away from the place which you - and only you - feel yourself unable to escape.

Don't forget everything

"Don't forget everything," my brother used to say, seemingly a belt-and-braces appeal we complete, to the best of our abilities, the things we've agreed to complete without mishap. Is it not a reasonable request that nothing be overlooked, left out, forgotten?

And yet, even without forgetting or overlooking anything specific, how is it possible not to forget everything as he puts it? Doesn't this make us uneasy, for isn't this an impossible appeal?

What, then, is it that escapes? Which part are we unable to commit to remember, even in our certainty that we will not forget it?

The end of everything

“The day there are no more questions, my work here is complete.”

“You say work, but is it only work? Is it not joy, as well?”

“At their limit, work and joy are the same. They constitute the complete experience of that which must be done.”