Copyright © 2016 by James Roy Blair Anderson
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© 2016 JAMES ROY BLAIR ANDERSON
PREFACE to VANILLA
The purpose of this edition was to integrate the
collaborative works from this project in to one medium.
And in doing so, utilise the devices that so often distract
us from lengthy periods of reading, to aid concentration,
focus, engagement, and immersion in to the book.
The second purpose, was to stretch the road a little
further ahead from where we have come to with books.
That e-books are not the best use of digital integration
with books. And that print still matters, but digital could
make it matter even more.
The inspiration for this edition came from album
sleeves, which have artwork, photographs, drawings,
and lyrics. I would enjoy leafing through these sleeves
whilst listening to an album, to feel more engaged with
the concept and art direction of the album as a whole.
This book is a literary album sleeve. A long poem,
interspliced by photographs, artwork, and music.
The writing of this book was also inspired by lyrical
songs. There is an ability in song writing that is enviable
to a novel. The ability to change time, place, and
scenario line by line, but as a stanza strength the context.
The use language with so much more irony, and to
persuade and seduce emotions in the manner of poets.
There is something about song-writing that seems to
capture a real presence in relation to life and to be
articulating what no novel or other genre can express.
There is a freedom with lyrics that allows writing to
betray the rules of a novel. You don’t hear a song and
ask what’s the story, the story is the matter of the song,
and the song is the expression of the matter. I tried to
refrain from where I begin narrating and instead
approach this as song writing. I don’t want the reader to
feel they have to be hand-held through every moment. I
haven’t described scenes or characters, but relied on the
emotion and image of the line to create the world and
character. I wanted time to move freely, for moments to
appear and disappear without explanatory development,
just like in a song.
I wanted to write something larger in a similar way to
how I wrote Paris Spleen and why I wanted to write it.
Something written in the same rush of spirit, but less
autobiographical, it had to be fiction.
I think of Vanilla as ten imagist prose-poems. Rather
than a linear plot, the language moves the story forward,
and the plot reshapes around the focal character
impressionistically. Moving fluidly from one image in
the narrative to the next. I’m not concerned whether
there is any drama whatsoever in terms of plot. The book
is structured in five parts, each part concluded by short
poem. Instead of the novel, I used Greek Tragedy as my
model. My concern was to make lyrical prose-poems
that shape a journey.
What is the book about? It is about time and intimacy;
moments over the course of a life. Selected summers
over five points in a character’s life. I wanted to write
something well-written with an atmosphere of being
young, vibrant, without being cliché; of all the passions,
desperations, difficulties, feelings and contemplations.
I’ve included motifs. Clouds are a metaphor for the
change and passing of time and events, and vanilla for a
sensory intimacy with the event.
The benefit of releasing the work myself is that a book
returns to simply being pages between two covers again
- it can be anything. So instead of trying to write a shortstory, a poem, or a novel, or anything else that I would
be required to write if I went by any other route, I
thought about what I really enjoyed about literature and
culture and how I can make a complete work from
engaging with those specific things. This was an honest
attempt to create something that was distinctively my
own.
James Roy Blair Anderson
January 17th 2016
VAN I L LA
TEN
Choral Ode One
EIGHTEEN
Choral Ode Two
TWENTY-FIVE
Choral Ode Three
THIRTY-SIX
Choral Ode Four
SIXTY-ONE
Choral Ode Five
TEN
Jeane whispered at the clouds "that one looks like a
turtle" and again a few seconds later "and that one
looks like a dragon" she lay on her back beside me
waving her fingers at the sky as if painting water
colours of the afternoon. We were only children, of
course, and all that occurred to us in this time in our
lives was the heat of the summer sun and the shapes
of unfurling clouds that passed through the sky like
horses on carousels.
The sun was the only memory as a child. Jeane felt
the warmth of the sun on her hand as the shadows of
the day passed over her. The coolness of her body was
lifted by the radiance of light that stretched over us.
We were unphased by the summer wasps with their
curved honey coloured tails, they were the size of our
thumbs, and flew around the garden like toy
helicopters with the buzz of distant tree loppers.
I had my dungarees on, the ones that reached down
a little passed the knee and my socks pulled high
above my trainers, and a t-shirt. The clips on my
dungarees dug a little in to my back as I lay on the
grass, and ever since I was a boy I'd never felt
comfortable lying on my back. Something with my
bones or my muscles maybe...
There were no other children in the garden. Alone
it was Jeane, and I. The flowering season allowed the
garden to appear like a secret forest and we were in
some secluded clearing on a grassy mound by a secret
lake. Jeane always used to encourage my imagination
in playing thought games. She was lovely, and open
to everybody. She never seemed to conceal her
private thought or lock them up for only one other or
herself to see. She was public in her expressions, she
loved and appreciated so much. I so clearly remember
those moments of lying in the garden together in the
summer. I'm not quite sure if the season was summer,
all youth is summer in the memory.
As children, moving through the city was like
moving through canyons of granite and glass.
Everything was white like a swan's body and I just
wanted to sleep. The city which did not seem giant to
me then but only an incalculable, unthinkable size
and I only fathomed what I saw, without relation to
its real map.
I remember there was this ice-cream parlour, they'd
keep all the ice-creams in containers under the
counter, they were all refrigerated there but there was
this sort of whisk thing that kept stirring them making
swirls of ice cream in vanilla, strawberry, mint,
chocolate and others, and we'd often swing by the
place to buy something but I really just wanted to
stare at the vanilla whisk, twisting and making circles
in the creamiest, yummiest, ice-cream I'd ever seen.
It wouldn't probably be as impressive to me now if I
saw it again, but back then I thought it was just
marvellous.
I fell asleep in the dream-like sunlight of the
afternoon that bounced off the glass just like the
sunlight bouncing off the ocean. We often fell asleep
under the sun in the garden. Jeane did so almost by
habit as though it were a playtime between us that we
shared together.
"I like sleeping outside." she told me once, "I can
sleep much better outside than indoors. Something
about the sun I suppose. If I wake up in my bed I
know that it's my bed, and there will be my room and
my mother and my teddy and all the things I see every
morning. But when I wake up outside I feel as though
there could be anything."
We would take our bodies to cool off from the heat
in the swimming pool laid in my garden. The pool lay
shimmering in the sunlight, whilst our feet dangled
over the edge lightly touching its surface, causing all
the minor ripples to swim down the length.
We'd hold our breathes for as long as possible under
water, pretending to be marine mammals and fish,
fanning our legs out like tails, we'd open our eyes
under the water seeing each other, waving and
making silly faces. We'd swim to the bottom and try
to sit crossed legged on the floor like we did in the
school hall, except we'd move in slow motion and lift
off the floor of the pool like we weighed nothing at
all. We'd come rushing up to the surface and take a
deep breath of air and laugh. We'd run up to the pool
and leap in, holding our arms around our legs and
tucking our knees to our chest, our feet would strike
the water and a huge splash would leap up and soak
the lagoon plants that leaned in for the cool.
At this age I had already begun to create, to make
art and paint and draw. I knelt over my canvases,
creating as if in ritual, whatever my dreaming desired,
already begun to lose myself in to the act, envisioning
my own future, who I was and choosing to be. I
communicated with my future self in the act of
painting there I was seeing myself years ahead, as
what I believed myself to be, separated from the
present day, calling to what I was to be, and hearing
it throwing back visions of itself, I knew, I knew even
then, but could not grasp it. I was always ahead of
myself in my dreams, jumping in to visions created
by my creativity.
There were little handprints that could be seen on
the patio glass as the sun turned in the afternoon,
mixing light and shadow, and everything merged in
to one image like moving water reflected on to walls,
whilst white light caught shimmering leaves in the
afternoon breeze.
"I just had a dream." Jeane said nudging me to wake
up. And I breathed out trying to remember our
whereabouts.
"What did you dream?" I asked in a little breath of
a yawn.
Jeane would have remarkable dreams that were full
of imaginative worlds that I could never envision in
my sleep. She had absorbed so much from her little
life that it all seemed to fall on her like the ice cream
that would melt in the sun.
We'd lay on the poolside loungers, falling asleep in
the sun beneath the parasols, like the visitors at
Tuileries in the summer. The sun shone its brilliance
as though it were hovering directly above the garden,
encrusted with diamonds that shimmered against
itself revealing blues, greens, pinks, and yellows,
when we tried to stare at it.
The sky was clear enough that the moon was visible
in the day light.
"If you look at the moon tomorrow night," she said,
"and I look at the moon tomorrow night, that will be
same moon. And although we won't be anywhere
near each other it will be like we are because we're
looking at the same moon together."
Sunlight danced between the wavering tree tops,
stretching everything over motions to our eyes and
we lay still, on our backs, shielding our eyes watching
the redness of our eyelids as we closed them in the
sunshine.
The afternoon had reached its full heat and the drier
grass was already turning to the colour of coastal
beachgrass.
"Are you still sleeping?" Jeane asked me.
I furrowed my eyes in the light and yawned.
"I've just had a strange dream," she expressed
animatedly.
I looked over and smiled "what did you dream,
Jeane?"
She had been awake for some time waiting
impatiently for me to wake up, with an eagerness that
seemed to have grown with the passing minutes.
"I've been trying to remember," she answered
quickly, "Don't say anything else or I might forget it."
I moved my hand across my lips as if to gesture that
they would stay sealed until she'd finished.
In my dreaming, I saw myself in a veil of mist,
clouds had descended over my eyes, there I was
recreated in visions I believed were returning from
the future to call me to which direction would appear
in my life, I believed this was my own life looking
back at me. Therein I saw all my dreams as clearly as
if I could grasp them, walk in them, and talk with
those I saw. They were as clear as memories and I
walked in them like following a light in the dark, I
lived through them as though they were my truer life,
veiled in the mist of my dreams, I was guided in the
directions of my life by what I saw there. It appeared
as though a ship on the horizon of the sea that slowly
came in to view, gradually broadening its reach, so
that it smothered me and I left my true sight behind,
and saw only the visions before me, there I felt even
truer to myself, even more accurately defined as my
essence. I believed I would meet all the people I saw
in these visions and all the places I appeared in and I
would step in to it as though it were as familiar as the
garden wherein I spent my summers.
We'd sit in silence beside each other at the pool, the
waters would play and dance across the surface in the
stillness of the afternoon. There were smells of smoke
from summer barbecues. And there was this slushing
sound as though there were invisible swimmers that
moved between the ripples of the pool.
As I whispered goodnight, the ocean-deep pale blue
of the night sky overtook the day. The sound was
taken asunder with the sun. Each star adorned its
bedded blanket in the coolly blowing night.
What do you dream now, Jeane?
Choral Ode 1
I do not know if the years behind could have
predicted this present. When would my youngest
self have predicted today? I am not meant to
know; I will not know. So much of life is
unplanned and unpromised. We do what we can
in the moments that we’re living. So much rests
on chance. The present is everything, knowledge
remains ignorant; wisdom is the anticipation of
not knowing.
If we knew the route why would we begin? It
is well enough we don’t know so we keep
wandering through, wondering what the next
event will be after this one. If we knew the route
to our lives from the beginning all our pleasures
would not have occurred, for we would not have
met them in the same way, not have desired to
meet them by way of mistakes, and meeting them
differently may somehow not make them
pleasures at all. To enjoy a single moment is to
enjoy every moment that ever occurred. Good or
ill, to be happy once is to be happy at the entire
time.
Just as the eye cannot see itself, we cannot
fully appreciate our present life we feel too
partial to it to know it and our thoughts drift
ahead and behind. We cannot know more than
the hours which we live. Our foresight comes not
to us when we open tomorrow’s door, our
imagination was but a mirage in the desert.
Today is all. Tomorrow has no lobby.
TPS
EIGHTEEN
All things begin with meeting.
"There had always been something between you
and me" Dick says at the end of a Francis S.
Fitzgerald novel. What was that something? I'd heard
it said so often. Strange, that for all the people in the
world, there were occasionally one or two you would
come across at a time where there would be this
something between you, as though it were a real and
material something that we could see and touch.
Jessica and I had that. Naturally we experienced it as
a kind of music, as a kind of electrical chord that
connected us together, like magnets, with the effect
that iron fillings leave as they flow along their
current. That was our something between us, she was
positive and I was positive.
I never forgot that time when I first met her on the
twelfth story of a Westminster hotel balcony. She was
young, and all the pleasures of her financial
circumstance couldn't eliminate the chaos that youth
heaps upon the young. Things which at a later date
are cynically seen as fictitious drama for the lack of
world engagement.
My life was in the spring of its hour. There were
new horizons ahead of me. I believed I was soon to
walk in to new frontiers. Surfing the waves of the sun
in flame wrapped afternoons, bathed in heat and light.
I was carried on the winds with the pulse of new
beginnings. I was ready and willing to become older,
as though to be older was a key to unlock all the secret
adventures kept hidden away from teenage life.
Our families were of well-to-do society, and would
meet at these social gatherings for charity funding,
award celebrations, or faux-events created to gather
the wealthy of London in one space so new
businesses and investors could make connections
with established success. And the established would
bring their families along to maintain the appearance
of stability of their success and beam aspirations of a
beautiful wife and children in the eager young
entrepreneurial. That was why I was there.
They always took place in hotels, hired out for the
occasion. These occasions were always brilliantly
decorated, tables dotted around the room like dots of
a polka dot skirt, the yellow sunlight beamed on the
soft cream tablecloths and marquee parasols.
Anonymous men and women appeared, come to
make connections and hustle some new deals, or
something. Most of my memory were based on what
I disliked about it than what I knew. There was always
some flustered woman rushing around with a
clipboard and an ear piece in a black suit and red hair
trying to hold everything together. She would look at
you as though she had some kind of electronic laser
eye that scanned your outfit to check you were
appropriate. She came up to me and straightened my
collar and would say things like "try not to look so
defeated," with a forced smile. I wasn't entirely sure
if she was capable of smiling, that might have been
the first time. The whole event was rather boring to
me, and I amused myself with how dramatically I
could sigh.
But there was one evening I met Jessica, as though
out of all the commotion there was a figure that came
out of the hysteria of the dark.
In those days I felt small in the expanse of the
great circling world. Everybody else seemed to know
what they were doing, how to behave in this place or
that, strangers would just walk up each other and just
talk and appear to be having a good time like it was
nothing. Most of the time I didn't know what or how
to be so I just kept up with everybody else. The only
things I understood and made sense were things four
paces in front of me. The rest of the commotion was
a busy hubbub that was beyond my understanding
and just seemed to flow like the butterflies that
scattered around forests.
Jessica seemed to help make sense of everything as
though all that she consisted of were all the right
elements of the world I'd been looking for and
through her all things were good and correct, and I
would never swerve off course in life if I lived to the
measure of her affections and favour. There was a
path in my life as though it would be forever
remembered as the name Jessica. I'd brand it to that
year of my life which would define a whole summer.
Jessica and I were only teenagers. Eighteen. I
remember when she first appeared to me, it was a
moment that still emanates clear in my mind. She
dressed as though the air itself had woven her clothes
around her. Her whites and blues blended perfectly in
to the city skyline and the balcony where I first saw
her. The canvas to this scene was the peach blushed
sky of the early evening. Jessica was a real marvel.
Her hair then was golden, soft, a length to her
shoulder. She wore a long-sleeved white, skirt, black
shoes. Her parents were people she'd later only
described to me as economists and right up to the
dissolution of our friendship, I'd never been curious
to ask what exactly that meant. In any case, her
troubles were not financial ones, but nevertheless all
the same troubles for a girl her age then. She
consciously slimmed herself, the way girls after
looking through internet streams of slim girls and
trained themselves to have as similar figure as
possible by the fastest means, which meant often she
ate little and moved less. She lacked energy and this
made her fatigued, subsequently she felt miserable a
lot of the time, slightly irritable, and looked
disdainfully at the world as though it looked back at
her with some secret disapproval.
Jessica leaned herself dangerously over the balcony
of the hotel, the breeze hoping to settle her back with
its blow. Her golden hair moved rhythmically in the
wind. Her face filled with all of spring's sweet
youthfulness. Now that I know her, I realise then she
leaned herself over the balcony railings because that
was laughing back at the world's opinion of her. To
be truthful, she was very well liked, curious to boys,
good humoured to her friends, and her parents knew
about all the things she thought she successfully kept
hidden. But she was young enough that her own
private thoughts were what she believed the world
thought of her, still of an age when emotions made up
most of reality. It was a kind of freedom to lean over
the edge. There was some liberty in the danger, not
from the fall, but from the punishment. She felt at the
back of her mind she affected nothing and no one. She
stared out across London in lost thoughts There was
always something else to consider and someone else
to be who might improve her in some way. So she
leaned over the balcony staring at the London skyline
and the amber skies with dusty clouds, whilst the
breeze tried to lean her back.
The outward appearance of her life seemed
fantastic. I couldn't consider her like anybody I'd
meet on an average evening, in all those dinner
parties with family friends, Jessica was a real
privileged type. She swung around fashionable places
and was looked after by that indulgence that young
men adorned on to girls of 'good society', who
belonged to families that were well connected. The
city meant little, London wasn't like a
neighbourhood, it was as though it belonged to a
boulevard lined up of large houses alongside New
York, Shanghai, Rome, Moscow, and Paris, as though
house number nine was London and we skipped from
door to door by aeroplanes and private cars. A lot of
people got lost in London, for us, there was only a
select number of places you would be seen and we'd
all come to know all those by the time we were
fifteen.
Her friends didn't interest me the way she did, they
didn't interest me much at all. They just fluttered
around her with excitement, enjoying her association.
They were like ministers to some ancient duchess.
They didn't contain any of the excitement that Jessica
had in my eyes. They weren't as beautiful, weren't as
interesting, or pleasant to be around. Jessica gathered
lots of interest from boys whether she was in London
or across the world lying on a lounger under the sun
on a tropical beach in Asia, and she had friends she
considered close dotted around all over the world. At
this time I was able to see her about every two weeks,
which seemed a distance of years.
What mattered was all that felt to matter. My heart
was my truest oracle. Its voice was my reason. It was
callous and cool and always told the truth. On no
other dice did I proceed in life. But was the roll that
always encouraged my feet.
These business events our families would go to
happened every two weeks of the year, and in the
beginning Jessica and I only met when our families
crossed paths at these gatherings, things which they
did to keep business connections stable and close. So
we got to know each other slowly, or as I thought of
it, we got to know each other comfortably. Outside
the time I got to see Jessica, the rest of the time she
was a mystery to me, and I only had my own life to
colour in all my curiosities. I believed the next time
I'd see her I'd have lost her.
But Jessica and I got to know each other of the
summer of my eighteenth and for those brief five
months they seemed some of the most blissful I
remember.
I arrived with anxiety that she wouldn't be there,
which meant it would be a month until I'd possibly
see her again, and if she wasn't here that time I don't
know what I'd do. I tried to divert my feelings from
the sinking disappointment and draw their attention
to the pleasure I took in some music, and sullenly
took out some discreet headphones and placed them
in my ears.
"Can I listen?" a voice said approaching from my
right,
Of course it was Jessica. I don't remember
answering, I don't remember gesturing, and more
probably I gave her an expression as though I was
open to giving her the permission to do anything she
had ever wished for in her life. She sat down beside
me and took one of the ear pieces out of my ear and
placed it in one of her own ears.
"I like it," she said
"Yeah?"
"What else do you have?" she asked
I was still young and filled with all those natural
insecurities. A wave of terror passed over me. Here
I'd had it, surely the next choice on my player was
going to be something she hated, she'd stand and
leave, and it would be her last and most vital
impression of me.
"Why don't you have a look," I replied handing her
my player.
She scrolled through reading the names of artists
and nodded occasionally at ones she recognised as
though confirming and grading my selection. She
smiled and stopped on one and chose a track.
"Oh I love this!"
"This one? Yeah not many people have heard of
this, but I really like it."
She made no reply, but a sound as if to acknowledge
she'd heard it, and I felt as though I were interrupting
her listening a little and kept quiet for a moment or
two whilst she enjoyed.
Music, it was something that connected the whole
world, spanned generations, and centuries in bringing
people together under a melody or a lyric, but at the
same time could be so personal as though you were
the only one in the history of world who had ever
experienced or understood it.
She passed her eyes around the room ahead of her,
looking at the suits and women wearing fascinators
sipping Martinis.
"These things are such a drag, right?" she remarked.
"Tell me about it."
After that, she came over to me the next few times,
and soon I understood that I was able to enter her
world and sat with her as she had pleasantly come to
expect. I became a sort of emblem of cynicism to the
place, a sort of satirical charade to the whole
spectacle of the event which amused her very much
and we bonded quickly on our loves our hates and our
laughter. These moments brought a sense of instant
comfort between us and really sparked our electricity.
Our beginning was filled with warming flirtations,
gravitating us together each week, observing the
company with mocking remarks and sniggering
under our breaths, hidden away behind menus or
napkins. Like most young boys and girls we viewed
everyone adult with a kind of comic appeal, as though
we would never become the men and women we saw,
as though none of their troubles or circumstances
would ever find their way in our lives as we grew
older. We viewed them with a kind of advanced
warning. And laughed as though we had just won
before the race. We became close quickly and upon
reuniting each fortnight, Jessica would begin talking
as though we'd been sat together involved in
conversation for an hour and was now collecting her
sentence from where she had briefly left off. We were
as comfortable as old friends and as excited about
each other as new ones.
We felt very out of keeping with these events. Not
because we were opposed to the formalism of it all.
But because we were young and the place was a
façade for the canned laughter, polite gestures, and
the diary makings of hungry young professionals and
old men whose youth was entirely in their freshly
pressed suits. The hand-drier in the gentleman's
bathroom was constantly in use to hand-dry the sweat
from shirts that had been dripping from the
nervousness of the younger ones after their
interviews, the blue shirts deepening in to a dark blue
like the ocean as it descends rapidly from a shoreline.
The meticulous concern for the right cuff-link, the
gold pin on the breast pocket, the seemingly
unfashionable but professional red tie against a blue
shirt, that pronounced itself against a turned down
white collar, and a blazer that was off-blue, a
Winchester navy like the ones they remembered as
school boys. It was a world a thousand kilometres
away from us, one that I didn't recognise any identity
with and was a kind of plaster board film-set for the
episodes that Jessica and I appeared in every
fortnight. And in that something between Jessica and
I, each fortnight every touch, presence, sound,
brought us closer as if our magnets charged by our
new activity.
We would walk through South Kensington in the
summer with the musicians playing sweet love songs
to the tunnel walls, and she, sunglasses, golden hair,
walking like we were the stars of the summer, as if
she walked in slow motion, beautiful, turning heads
and making everyone stare. A cool summer fantasy of
the great, while we, the stars of the cool romance of
the young and free. The clock had turned and the
world was our new adventure. We didn't consider all
those people who thought themselves already
experienced in the world, we were gravitating to a
new history, we were our own leaders. There we were
fresh-faced to the world, grown in to a new world, a
new frontier, and approached the world with the
greenest naivety and all enthusiasm. We’d walk
through Portobello Road finding new sentiments to
mark our time together. We’d dress controversially
compared to our society.
From then on, I was impossible. Already swallowed
up in to the fantasy of a girl I barely knew or
understood whose existence had effected me. We'd
circle the city at night, venturing in to places as
though we were caught in the buzz of the millions of
tourists in London. We felt a special appeal to
ourselves as though wherever we went the shop
owners should welcome us with delight like a proud
endorsement of their venue, that we, Jessica and I,
had chosen at that moment. A sort of notoriety of the
world where all the great lovers of history would be
declaimed once the world had discovered us. We
went to the cinema watching actors spread across the
giant silver screen that rose floor to ceiling and wall
to wall, appearing like gods to their small audience,
and we struck our necks up like altars to the divine.
We'd wait in the cinema until everyone had left, to
kiss and fondle in the dark. I believed her gaze was
my gaze, that she understood every depth of my
existential sense of living by that gaze, as though I
projected a hologram on to the glass of the window
she viewed and she watched the playback of a movie
I invented. She was cool. Cooler than the music that
played over our heads. She had numbers on everyone.
Every part of her was better than other girls. Even the
way she hunched over for a moment to read her
phone, the way she held her glass, the turn of her
head... I was driven mad momentarily. Have you ever
felt like this? Have you? The dart had already
pricked, what more could it do. The city became a
park, a toyshop, of clubs, bars, cinemas in which to
amuse ourselves. The whole city was a directory of
things which I could surprise and spoil Jessica with
and make her happy and to have fun together. That's
all I considered. I took it on-board like a
responsibility of duty, as if it was a great necessity in
life that all other things were submissive to, Jessica,
the great figure in my life that swung from the silver
moon and walked on the beams of the sun, who at that
time meant everything in the world and beyond to me,
and all that was important was to be happy together
another day. I'd gone mad with it. Driven myself in to
an obsession of devotion.
We lay on summer grass, under the full heat of July,
swans and geese cooled off in the water, children
passed with ice-creams, Jessica and I lay in arms
kissing and running hands through our hair, cocooned
in to desires, before an observant world which
frowned and eyed with disapproval. We rolled apart
and and felt our lips with fingers, and lay on our sides
facing each other, staring in to each other as though
the rest of the city was covered in sunlight and mist.
We lay this way in heat for several moments before
Jessica broke the silence, as though she struck a
forked light through a humid summer.
"I'm going away next month," she said.
"For how long?" I questioned.
"A month," she said, and squinted her eyes looking
at me.
I frowned and titled my head to pretend it was from
the sun, covering my face with my hand.
"Why?"
No other question occurred to me to ask.
"Daddy's taking the family," she replied, "and the
place is so beautiful."
I continued to look at her. Lying there with the sun
above our heads in the heat of Hyde Park, the still
lingering flavour of her lipstick, together, I couldn't
imagine how those words were true. But I could
recognise the excitement in her tone. I didn't escalate
my concern in to anything difficult and
confrontational. And instead simply smiled and lay
back on to the grass with her on my arm staring in to
that brilliant sky watching a single cloud turn over in
its shape as it crossed my view. It was one of the
moments in my life I naively thought could last
forever.
She'd be away for a month. I didn't know what I
would do. All my thoughts circulated around her
satisfaction and I'd become irritable and emotionally
quickly offended, suspicious and insecure. Our
relationship began to grow sore, wearisome and
difficult.
Without her everything was quiet. A deepening
silence that made my hot summer a frozen winter
without excitement or interest. Nothing drew me
outdoors, and all my thoughts revisited conversations
and moments we'd shared. I looked at maps to
visualise before me the distance we were. I made a
mark on the calender to date her return and made
crosses every day, painfully edging closer to the last
day. It became a mammoth endurance wherein I could
neither speak or see Jessica at all, but only wait. It felt
like a lifetime. I felt punished like being locked in a
prison being unable to communicate with the outside
world. It seemed to me that all the pleasant things of
life seemed to flow from her and to be cut off was like
being unable to breathe.
But eventually there was one more day. And it
brought soothing relief to all the desperation I had to
see her again. That singular, small, and finite one was
the most harmonious of sounds, it corrected all the
discord of the twenty-nine days I'd experienced. And
I focused solely on that one. I only had twenty-four
hours to get through.
The hour she returned, she had contacted me to say
she wanted to come over right away. In my
excitement, I announced to my parents as though it
were updates on some breaking news story. They
merely glanced at each other and smiled. And when
the doorbell rang, I welcomed her with immediate
kisses planted like freckles on a summer cheek, took
her hand and lead her quickly upstairs with barely a
moment for her to wave across the hall to my parents
in the lounge room before we were ascending the stair
case.
When we reached the landing, I was breathless in
my excitement, looking at her as if I believed she
would disappear in an unpredicted moment. She
appeared bronzed by the Eastern sun, with a
confidence without a word, a strength in her that
seemed to hold her up, and a brightness in her eyes
that suggested she had regained a rebirth of herself,
somehow shed something which she had carried with
her on her voyage and returned slimmed of it, as new
as the first daffodils of spring. But I smiled at her, in
her new confident radiance that made her seem all the
more alluring.
"Come to my room," I said. And I led her, taking
her hand, which I noticed did not wrap itself to mine.
Her manner confused me. She looked at me as if I
were fading in to the dimmed light of the room, and
in a moment would be somewhat irretrievable. I
repeated my greeting in kisses and hugs. Wrapping
my arms around her, smiling with satisfaction. But
her kisses were as if accidents and she leaned away
from my embrace. It was a dramatically sudden
change as though all the heat in the room had gone
cold and the fluster of our greeting only moments
earlier had faded in to silence and stillness.
"What's the matter?" I asked laughing.
But she didn't laugh. Instead, she looked away from
my face, walking a few paces aside, letting go of her
smile and turned again to face me with a straighter
expression.
"I need to tell you something," she spoke so softly
it was almost without realising she had said anything
at all.
"What about?" I asked having now stopped
laughing and meeting her tone.
She didn't say anything.
"About the holiday?" I asked.
She nodded in response.
"I'm listening," I said without any warmth in my
voice, but with an expectation of disappointment.
"There was a guy," she slowly spoke, "he was
twenty-one, who was on vacation there too. He was
nice, and kept making everybody laugh. Daddy took
a liking to him and he was allowed to come with us
to the party. We'd become friends. I didn't set out to..."
she said. But was immediately broken by her crying
that burst out as if they were themselves the following
words.
"We were dancing..." she continued, "and I suppose
the light and the music... I'd had a bit to drink, maybe
that affected me too. And everything just came over
me and..." She had paused.
"And what?" I insisted.
"And before I knew what I'd done..." she said,
shaking her head, "I hadn't planned or wanted to."
"And what?" I insisted again.
"And we kissed. We began kissing. And I liked it."
I didn't speak, I just pursed my lips, tucking them
back inside my mouth to prevent from speaking. And
swallowed. I took a breath but she continued as if to
interrupt any approach of my first words.
"I'm sorry. It just happened. Things with us
happened so quickly. And out there on vacation
everything was new and exciting. All sorts of things
can happen especially when everybody is having a
good time. And we..."
And then it occurred to me through her eyes that
some larger part of the story was still unsaid and she
wept less for the remorse than the damage it would
inflict on me.
"Did you sleep with him?"
"It wasn't anybody's intention to do any wrong.
Things just happened -" she continued.
"Just say," I remarked.
She half-turned her head away and raised her eyes
to face me.
"Yes," she replied.
In that moment, all the fear, relief, and desperation
that had mixed together desiring to tell the truth had
arrived, and she fell in to the emotion of the moment.
Every tear she had been holding back was let out and
she sank in to their shudders that caused them
trickling down her cheeks. I was frozen and simply
watched the tears run down her cheek to the corners
of her mouth as she swallowed them whilst she tried
to explain between her sobs. I bit the back of my teeth
together and my breathing quickened.
"I don't know what this feeling is," I said, "But I feel
sick. And I can't look at you." I said breathing
difficultly. I wasn't crying but I sniffed as if my nose
had begun to run.
I'd managed to conjure in my mind all sorts of
doubts and fears, re-envisioning smiles, remarks,
glances, which I hadn't considered at an earlier time
which now seemed to hold some concealed message
that when put together revealed more of her true
feeling which lay beneath. I was caught between this
disillusion of this girl who I'd believed was
incredible, who I could still believe was incredible
and that I could see through this incident, for whom I
could revive my feeling and desire for her and get
through past this. And the other feeling, a direct and
sharp feeling of her careless betrayal and unlove. If I
stayed, she would think my limits undoubtedly
pushed back, and would only behave more cavalier
with me if she believed my affection would not fail
her, and then deceive and love me as she herself
willed. No, this had already gone too far. I could not
trust her again. And I could not love her anymore. An
entire disregard for another person must have come
into play; and that I could not forget.
In time I'd realise she had lied about a lot of things.
Things maybe to keep me happy, ironically to sort of
spare me of some confusion and disappointment. But
all that made things worse and to a larger effect made
the outcome of the event even clearer.
From my young feelings I created something that
was more than the girl I really knew. All my desires,
frustrations, curiosities, admiration had manifested in
my impressions of her as someone unlike the actual
girl she was, which had become lost to my mind many
months ago. The girl I saw on the balcony and the girl
sat beside me listening to my music in the hotel event
club that evening, that girl was the real Jessica, who
I'd all but forgotten about, all I could see was my
imagined perfect glorious Jessica who hoisted the sun
which the world spun around, without faults except
that she had reached her limits of perfection and had
an inability to be any more perfect than she was.
We'd got wrapped up in all our complications of
individual needs. And a new person brought all the
freshness of a new day, clear of complexities, and
everything was once again new and exciting with
much to be curious of still and much unexplored.
Someone who came in to her world and once again
saw the Jessica she wished others to see, even if it
was only a brief one, it was not the one I dreamed up
of her, and through his flirtations she experienced a
shockwave of new and all the excitement that it
brought. The limited time of the vacation, the
inevitable flight returning to London, made her desire
to make a permanent act within the temporary
moment of a passing holiday and to be cavalier with
the transient encounter of two strangers who will
never meet again.
That was really the end of us. We couldn't go any
further. We'd met all the obstacles and successes,
been through all the flirtations and appeared to have
had all the best memories we were going to have.
What seemed ahead of us were the exhaustive
attempts to relive the old ones and pretending we
could still make each other laugh and that we were
truly the close people we had once been. Something
about the electricity around us that brought us
together and mixed us up perfectly in this world
seemed to have gone. As though we'd lost it without
knowing one night through a midnight open window.
It was better not to allow it to fizzle out and create
memories that were forced and clumsy which would
be our last and clearest remembered. But whatever
we had been it was over. Time and Life had made new
plans, decided a new scene, and preferred to take our
lives in new directions, and we together wasn't part of
the new plot.
I accepted it coldly. The only thing we could be now
was apart, and it was the best thing for us. What she
or I wanted wasn't there to want anymore. There were
new adventures, new people to meet, new people to
make of ourselves. Unknown pleasures awaited. I
simply did not know it at this point, and when it
arrived I'd be so glad everything.
Everything had changed, of course, I'd stopped
going to the hotel events every fortnight, and
probably she did too. In retrospect, the months of that
summer seemed to have lasted no longer than a day.
I remember waking up the following weeks in a sort
of stillness, unknowing how to move or what to do
with the day, as though a desert storm had passed and
I'd looked out on to the destruction of its path, amazed
and distraught. It was eerie, and I recognised a hole
in my life that in time would sew itself together like
a slight cut, but at the time I didn't know if it would
ever heal or disappear at all.
Where I am now I was glad that I was freed of the
deformities of the dramatic emotional fluctuations of
teenage life. Back then my emotions were catapulting
in all directions, with the impossibility of being able
to choo-se or catch a one of them. Before I'd managed
to recognise I'd felt one, I'd felt another. They were
like fireworks on November nights that splintered
and shocked the abyssal night sky, teeming with
explosions of colours and sensation, and there was
nothing to do but allow them all the freedom to leap
in all directions like a bee in a glass jar. You're not
ready to love until your heart’s been broken a few
times.
What happened to Jessica? I don't know. She
became something, married someone, wore white,
I'm sure she'd wear white, if she got married, maybe
has a child or two, she'd be good at that, someone
later in time had swept her off her feet and been able
to fly longer in the sky than I was able to and keep
her there in the perpetual bliss of floating above the
world like clouds on a summer afternoon.
All things end with parting.
Choral Ode 2
V
A desert is an ocean of sand. An ocean as
undrinkable as the desert. We go to what we do
not see, to see it more clearly, and when we get
there it is but still clouds and smoke what we did
not expect to see – still further we go. The starry
sky spins like a globe on its stand And upon our
fate is it that we live unknowing. I, in this hour,
and I forever. Life is like a river, wherever there
is a dead end it will find new open space to
continue on until it meets the fated sea.
Life will be what it will be, and patterns work
in everything. A crow does not pass without
some pattern within it, nor bloody war, nor
raging sea that swallows the land, nor blissful
marriage nor mating beast. It is that which
lowers the tides at morning and raises them in
the evening.
We would talk until the sun grew tired of our
verses, Trying to guess the path in a day-dream;
it eludes us like trying to catch a beam of light
that stretches out through the window. One thing
is certain, it will take you where you neither
dreamed nor imagined. Life moves on. Let go.
TPS
TWENTY-FIVE
Now the world pulls away from me in some wild
unmerciful roll that I cannot draw back. School
friends scattered around the continent. We will not
meet again.
I'd gone to an arts university, to the disgruntled
opinions of my parents, and was quickly wrapped in
the pressures and demands of university life which
grasped me breathlessly.
I visited Paris frequently, wandering through
corridors of sculptures and paintings, envisioning my
own name on frames I saw in museums. That would
be my work soon enough, I would tell myself. All
these people who visited the museum would come to
see my work in time. There I would see it, soon
enough, maybe not in my lifetime but it would be
seen, known and remembered. I dreamed of images,
images of my own creation. I envisioned my work in
exhibitions I'd never been to, speaking with people I'd
never met, and existing in a circumstance that was not
my present one. I walked in the vision of the future
and it became the ritual I would come to undertake on
a regular basis. I lifted myself up in to the frenzy of
these visions of what I saw myself becoming.
Now competition, meaning, self, success, all
created a circulation of pressures. I was lost in the
waves of a world much bigger than I had come to
understand.
The city, once a vague and ominous canyon of
granite and glass, was now my studio, my lecture
halls, my campus, so familiar to me I could be
identified by my fingerprints on their doors.
I would read the newspaper and feel to have arrived
in to the world in some great disturbance. I joined in
student protests that I didn't believe in, I joined to
shout my voice and to dance, as though it were a
masquerade, as though we could change the world
with a stomp and a song.
I was working towards something I did not know as
though caught in the waves on the current. I seemed
drawn to something each time naturally as though I
understood it always to be more important. As though
it required no thought at all. I drifted in to the
impulses one after another. Life knew the route I did
not. I gave myself to it each time. But somehow I
knew it would come to good. I knew somewhere on
the float, some gladness of it all would be on the drift
too and all the worries wouldn't have mattered. No
matter of them I would swim with the belief that I
knew where I was heading. Somehow it had to,
somehow it needed to, no matter how vast the ocean,
I would dare. Everything in my life lead me to believe
that all my defeats and failures looked out to that
horizon. I was drawn by an unspeakable invisible
impulse that wrapped me every moment.
Many things came to mind which earlier in life I
never thought to contemplate. The world seemed
more of a chaotic world just when I thought I had
grasped hold of it. Things concerned me which hadn't
occurred to me in the world were anything serious to
consider. And not knowing their meaning meant the
world took on a new colour and turned at a new
speed. Suddenly I had to discover who I was in the
grandest way. I had to make choices and mistakes and
accept that my decisions became important realities.
But there I was, out on my own, doing my own thing,
trying to live the world my way.
This was my apartment, these my plates, my bed,
my window, this my front door.
Here was central London, pummelled by cafés, here
was the bustle, the hurry, where the isolation on the
streets frothed with the milk in the cafés. The streets
poured with people in to the circling spoons of coffee
cups, dissolving in to time like sugar in hot water.
Lights from cranes hung like gods in the sky, making
and remaking the cityscape. Here were the red lights
of Soho, the neon sizzle that made ponds of colour on
every pavement, we in the turbulent heat of our youth
didn't step out of the light, like moths we followed
lights and we walked most of the night through the
centre of London. Here was Trafalgar Square with its
fountains and great black lions. Here was the
Japanese garden in Notting Hill. Here my art college
tucked away behind the Royal Albert Hall. Here a
restaurant in Camden by the river where I would eat
lunch with a girl beneath the hazel tree catkins that
would fall on our heads. Here the glamour girls of
city-night life that buzz the streets like swarms of
blue collar débutantes. We took all the backstreets,
winding around quiet cobbled streets in the fake
warm red lights. Laughing and talking whilst the
smell of cooking mated with the air.
Here were the lights inside the bars, the clubs, the
music venues, the honey bee'd yellows, vibrant reds,
and twisting blues and purples that flicker the walls
all ascending from the shadowy black earth of its
congregation. The music seemed to jump with its
own life, as though we were inside the stirring beating
heart of a larger animal that twitched in its waking.
This, not the venue but the belly of some great
elephant. The alarm bells. The electricity. The
absurdities had overtaken me. I lost myself in their
working. Every moment was as though the stirring of
some new beginning. The release of a tightly wound
cord. A white flash. Out of the shadows we danced.
Our arms raised high above our heads only made
visible by the shock flashes of white light that filled
the building now and then revealing sun spots of
trailing hands seen for seconds later after they had
disappeared out of sight. Everything was vanilla,
sweet to taste, soft like vanilla petals that flavoured
the night and gave it its name. This night time city,
shone lights as we flowed between streets We danced
in and out of shadows, as lights floated in the sky, and
colours came rushing past our eyes. We were lifted
up by night's colours like a universe on the street, just
like a galaxy. red stars and green spheres, above us
and around us. And by nature too, there came the
lightning flashes, come to strip the humid night,
setting fire to the stomachs of clouds. Flash. Flash.
Energy everywhere alight. And the chorus of
crackling clouds sang a few moments later. Darkness
glowed, shining beams flood roads just like I
remembered of those times in November. The night
splintered in to a thousand fireworks, and overhead
the fireflies suck in to the tar of the night sky sticking
in their sparkle. We danced, stealing the sunset's light
to be the dancers in the dark.
Here was a city sky line, city view, glass, sunset,
silhouette scrapers, flowing water through the grand
Thames. I stood rooftop, overlooking the city,
unafraid, indestructible. I dropped a cigarette from
the saddle of this stone, letting it wisp in to the
altitude, ash and smoke trailing like tassels, watching
it twist and spin as it fell below, flickering
occasionally in the wind as though skimming the air,
as though caught in an electricity within the clouds
and travelled its forked route to the earth,
disappearing out of view. The sun was disappearing
then, sunk in to the mist behind the skyline. A dying
orange mixed like watercolours in to the deathly grey.
From the streets below, trumpets could be heard,
rising to my ears with the steaming smells from
evening cuisine, whilst my eyes could see nothing but
the sinking bulb that dimmed the light of day, and cast
the city in twilight hues. Little lights flickered and the
earth became the starry sky. A cold wind blew. The
trumpets played on. Where did they come from?
Here was the bar that overlooked the city on my
twenty-fifth summer.
Here is the woman in the black dress who stares at
me from across the room. Who, like us all, was
struggling to swallow all the pressures of work and
life in the big smoking city. Tonight here she was
swallowing drinks down. The rocks in the glass kept
everything cool.
You staying? I ask
If you have some money to spend, she says
We talked art, exhibitions, artists, films, our
sensations and ecstasies. We flirted as we unravelled
our passions like desert ribbons left to dance in desert
winds. Her lipstick matched the wine. I'd been
drinking enough by now that the world appeared
unfocused. Lights and shadows were in blocks like a
cubist painting. She spun her glass and the wine spun
in rolls around its base like a light flamenco dress.
The waitress looked over and smiled to me as she
walked the room. I wasn't interested. This woman had
me tonight. Her manners. Manners were always
something I noticed and was taken in by, the way a
woman moves, the way a woman animates herself. It
was a second language.
We began to flirt as though we believed in the
naivety of our intentions, as though there were some
correctness in the method of the spectacle, like a
ritual announcement to make to our surrounding of
what was about to happen and that the sky, sea, and
land, had a matter of minutes to decide to be here or
leave to more decent settings. The moonlight
voyeuristicly viewed. It gave us a full eye that didn't
blink whilst the clock struck hours we couldn't tell.
I had passed my hand up her leg during
conversation, without her flinching, not so much
inviting as numb to an indifference, as though if
anything it had arrived with delay. I spoke in to her
ear, cheek to cheek, so that we talked with our bodies
nearly meeting. She spoke nothing that I remember, I
was attentive only to any restriction of my
movements; when I placed a hand, when I moved a
little closer, the position of crossing bodies, her focus,
her laugh, to slide in to moments of meeting.
After talking cheek-close, naturally I began kissing
her neck, cheek and to the lips, as naturally as
continuing a sentence. Swapping lips from top to
bottom. Teasing, playing, biting. Tasting tongues of
red wine. Soured only by her lipstick that tasted like
fruit flavoured crayons.
The warmth of each leg against the other,
stimulated our passion and was all the heat for our
journey from the bar to the bedroom.
We'd arrived to her apartment nearby and behind a
closed door we were leaning in, that lean as you give
yourself over, as you bring another near to yourself,
as you close your eyes, closing out your thought, your
conscience, and become sensations, losing yourself in
to the touching of lips, feeling the wetness of a tongue
enter your mouth, as you feel your lips fall on to the
lips of another like crashing waves that hit the sand.
As you express in the most delicate of sensations your
passions and desires, where passion is given
precedence to revive and express. During our kissing,
I realised she'd already taken, already reached in to
take hold of my piece and brought it out in the open
room, the walls viewing, and I broke away from the
kiss seeing her eyes staring into mine as she
continued repeatedly stroking it with her hand. I
responded by slowly feeling down her dress between
the legs and circled her softly with my fingers. I
leaned in to stroke my lips against her lips. We fooled
like this in our foreplay, meeting each other with our
lips as though catching ourselves passing in the wind.
Our lips met and broke away, met and broke away. I
smelled her perfume that travelled all the way to my
brain. A flower, her cheeks and lips as soft as petals,
her fragrance of flowers. Our clothes came off like
autumn leaves that fall the branch. revealing the cold
ribs of her body spread over like a bird's wing. I
travelled my lips across her skin, letting them touch
and kiss her. My hands on her back were like feeling
nude statues, the smoothness of her skin and those
peaks of shoulder bones that poked out from the
curve of her back. I grasped and squeezed her breasts,
her hips, her arms, her thighs. Her skin seemed to be
hung on her wire frame. I was hungry just looking at
her. This near skeleton of a girl. Soft skin, and lips so
thin they could cut you to kiss. Her hair, as though
dried in heat, waved in rhythmic curls. Our lips would
kiss in collision, and our tongues seemed to dive like
sea birds scooping fish in a mouth full of water.
Sensation had taken over her body. Currents of air
energetically moved through her, she became
warmer, and delicate touches became sparks which
rippled across her skin. She moved to turn around and
faced her rear towards me, and squeezing her asscheeks like fruit, I began tonguing her from behind
like eating plums from the rock, it had the zing of
summer cherries. I turned her around and lay her over
on her back so I was face-deep in the softness of her
flesh. I could have stayed there for hours with her legs
flung around my neck. I wanted my tongue to explore
inside like the unknown corridors through the
labyrinth, running my tongue through every spot that
would stir and shudder her to her fulfilling. She wet
her bottom lip and with her tongue lightly pinched it
with her top teeth. She lifted my head desiring to give
in return, and she sat up and taking my piece in to her
mouth, running her hand up and down as she bobbed
and tongue-circled the head. I thought I'd lost her,
disappeared in to a rhythm of her own bobbing. She
had an aim for pleasure as if she wouldn't cease until
I came. Her whole body seemed to lunge in to it, as
though she were riding me with her mouth. I pushed
myself up in to her in keeping with her rhythms. Her
body had swallowed up my piece and I flew my
fingers around hers, circling her clit, giving her
sensations to stir and revive her as she grew with
speed. I pulled out from her mouth and I lay over her,
feeling her opening and slid myself inside. It went in
to the hot embers of her inside, like a train through a
tunnel approaching the heat of a fire on the other side,
like diving in to those hot currents on the ocean floor
heated by volcano rock beneath. Her soft moaning
sounded sweeter than her talking. We started making
it together. Gradually at first and then picking up
speed and drive. It was hot and messy. Fumbling in
the dark like scrambling out of a rosebushes. I was
flesh landing on bones. What flesh I could grasp from
her legs, arms, breasts had become soft sponge in my
hands, and I could feel the heat on my body that had
been rising from her. She slid her hand from my back
and held my behind as we drove on, pushing me to
deeper pleasure, I ran my hand along her raised legs
I was between, climbing over and over in waves of
new thirst as though to drink was to become thirsty
again, pounding as if trying to melt in to one body.
Our hip bones collided, her chest was blushed at the
lungs, and her pale skin was flushed pastel pinks and
her eyes seemed to stare out in to a second space I
couldn't reach. A volcanic pressure had arisen within
us that needed to vent its release. I felt a desire to put
out a fire inside. Internally my impulses seemed to
chant rhythmically and conduct my movements in
their own desire. All the passion we had verbally and
all our gestures was flowing out now in physical
energy. We sought for exhaustion, for our whole
bodies to become loose, as if with the omnipotent
energy to reshape the mountains smooth. We were for
a time no longer our names or identities, not the
people we met earlier, now only bodies exchanging
for the sole aim of fulfilling passion. We exchanged
positions as if trying to invent some new step in
lifting our ecstasies, hatching upon some unthought
of method of twisting our bodies that we were the first
to discover. Like the cable wires that followed along
the roads that roll up and down in waves, our backs
swung in their rhythm as we bounced to the same
beat, twisting and turning in rolls, panting breathing
in bursts, as though unable to breath in for the
humidity of the room, through our breaths we
couldn't speak. The sound was the slapping patter of
her buttocks against my hips whilst we hit in reverse.
Loose sweaty wet hair and every limb was tender and
her face was lost in to the throws of a thousand
feelings stimulated at once. Half numbed by pleasure
half desiring further. We were goners at this point. We
couldn't see each other as we were. We'd lost all
identity. Flesh moulded with flesh and all the grunt,
slaps, slurps, hisses of the most ugly looking love had
conquered us. We together were like a fire in a winter
cabin, a centre heat to the whole room. She put her
hands on the bed frame and repeatedly threw herself
down on it. Her thighs smacked my thighs as she
landed in her dancing as she swayed her body over
mine. It was ugly and sensational as though all the
contrasts of the world met in the act and everything
was made out of it. There was new thrill in this new
girl, new thrill of a new body. We bounced off each
other in wild desire. Limbs twisting, knocking hard
and soft parts together. Shudders of pleasure seemed
to ripple through her. In the last, she let out her finale.
The waves hit the breakers, the roar of their impact
and the sizzle as it hit the waters surface seemed to
ripple, the penultimate wave of the storm before the
settle. The pressure welled up inside her and her
moans became almost deeper as though low throated
moaning leaped from her throat until her final aching
wail that sounded as if her throat had shattered,
combusting in to splinters of ecstasy. It was over. The
sweat trickled from the base of my head, liquid falls
from my brain, what is solid turns to water, plunges
to the base of my skull. All things slowed and my
body heaved in contractions, I felt to fall, dismantled,
like a building blown from the base. My head was a
wine glass of red that was spinning like the swirl
before the swallow. How many lights curtailed my
vision. Flowing wine, flowing, in to the glass of my
skull. The pillows of my lungs inflated. And like
wave on wave of water, forcing rock to crumble to
wave, I melt, and I melt. All heavy things were made
light. Contractions squeeze and shake the earthquake
in my chest, waves of morphine sting that trouble and
worry. A moment blind from sight. My head was wine
in a spinning glass. Morphine kissed my brain and
sucked the good spirit from my flesh. My head was a
spinning ball hit by a cue. Joyful sparks travelled my
brain. Radiance at last. Water dries to clay. The air in
my lungs let loose. Feather-light. I am blown away by
the wind. An ecstasy after was like floating in salt
lakes.
I slept pleased with myself for a few hours until
dawn seemed to break by the light that crept through
the curtains and stirred me from sleeping. We slept in
arms, her head rested on my bicep if only for the
spectacle. I reached my hand over to stroke her hair.
She brushed my hand away. The morning version was
a tougher, colder, more distant version than the night
previous. Almost with the intention of discontinuing
any sentiments of the night before. The nightingale
had gone, and the lark instead of being able to sing
was shot dead with the indifference of two people to
each other who had been so intimate only a matter of
hours earlier who awoke in the same bed. She wasn't
going to fool herself or be fooled that this was
anything more than it was. I made an attempt to stroke
her hair again “don't patronise me,” she remarked
irritably “I'm not your girlfriend.” I was glad she said
that. I had made a gesture for the spectacle. I was also
disinterested. Who was this young woman? This
young man? This space? We shared nothing, we were
nothing. An emptiness existed and our act merely
attempted to fill it. She was right to brush away my
sentimentality. The event didn't eclipse the loneliness
of the city or the vacuous relationships that are
thrown together. It was just another spectacle; one of
a thousand stories of the same kind. We knew it was
only a joy for the night. To kill the fire and mock the
day. To waste for the fun. It was throw-away sex. The
pointless kind that meant nothing and that you don't
forget. The kind of sex made frequently in cities. Like
a shoulder struck by a stranger on the crossing of the
station subway. It revived life for an hour. Passed the
hours between sundown and sunrise, and gave a story
for the morning. In the city, to love was an old dream.
I reflected on how I'd made love to women before.
The soft ecstasy of strong desire, as two people
melted in to each other's passions. This wasn't love.
There was nothing of love, where a touch would be
inflamed, a kiss would shiver the skin, everything
was fruit, sweeter to taste, sweeter to feel.
"I'm going to go," I said
She mumbled something in her stirring, but didn't
raise, moving only to turn to her side and pull the
covers around her more closely.
The morning was chilly and pearl blue light made
everything some way between colour and grey. The
birds warmed up their vocals. It was the anonymous
hour. The street was still as though the world and
everyone in it were caught in lost time. Early enough
that the neighbourhood was unstirred, settled in to
retirement of the activity of the day, sleeping
somewhere between yesterday and today, and to walk
through it was like walking through an abandoned
fairground, whilst passersby were given ghostly
acknowledgement like passing other visitors at a
cemetery. I took a taxi home, I''d never been to the
area she lived and saw no reason I would again. My
feet were on tarmac, the engine now running in the
taxi, the unfamiliar slam of a stranger's car shutting,
"where to?" asked the driver. I directed him the long
route home. I wanted some extra minutes to let time
pass and recall myself a young man, singular, in this
vast city, lost amonsgt the lonely and desperate hopes
of millions of inhabitants that sped by anonymously
everyday. Our last words had been nothing but the
mumbled music of goodbye forever. Gone was the
girl, gone like the day before the eyelids close in to a
deep sleep; lost like dust into dust, a handful of sand
dropped into a desert, a breath in to the wind, a
shadow in the darkness. Gone; a transient love, like
passing clouds that shape sublime for a moment and
disappear in to new forms. Indecipherable at the
speed they travelled from one object to the next like
passing trees on the road side travelling across the
country, no different than one hill from the next.
I was lost in the waves of the city. Examinations,
graduation, interviews, my first day of work. Now I
have appointments, I must wear this shirt, I have
cleaned my shoes - I have become the men I mocked
as a teenager - I must arrive early to everything and
seem eager.
What I deeply felt, was not the call of the world
luring me to work or to social duty, but was my
innermost being that had learned to hear itself and
speak for itself now call out. To work, to duty, meant
what and who I must become. A secret impulse
perhaps only I could know and see, there my essence
seemed to rile up in me as if it had command.
I spent the summers in my studio, all my paintings
disorderly arranged around the room. I even had a bed
made up of stacked mattresses and sheets, itself like
a pile of canvas sheets, laid at the back of the room
where I would lay down after rigorously working in
bursts of creative energy.
The beginning was terrible. I made nothing but bad
work. And I affirmed it all. I required a period where
all my work was a disaster, only in that would I ever
break the conventions of my own art. My work was
seen as horrifying, a disaster, receiving only confused
and uncomfortable expressions to its reception. To
onlookers it was incomprehensible as though form
and beauty had been vandalised. This was how they
saw the work I had slaved over for half the summer. I
was urged not to release my work and that I had a
doubtful career. No one understood it. But I
understand now that was all just right, as if ill-luck
was wiser than I and saw more than I knew, if all
those failures had been successes then I would have
really failed.
These exhibitions were filled with anonymous art
collectors, people kissed cheeks, waiters brought
champagne on silver trays with accidental smiles,
artists gave presentations of their work from behind a
table to a well-dressed audience. The exhibitions left
me tired, they began to feel distant and inhuman. I
wanted to explore, even in this room, I wanted to
explore, like when I was younger when I would visit
the Musée d'Orsay and travel cornerstones of time,
turn a corner and I see a landmark of history like great
mountains that came in to view. But exhibitions were
a kind of well-dressed waiting area, conversations
were inebriated, reduced to remarks, and nothing
made sense of why I was there. I'll never forget that
night after an exhibition when I ran across the city
without a care to be seen, just to please and tire my
legs, I ran, and ran, until the night caught up with me,
as though there were endless road under my feet and
I weren't travelling anywhere but to exhaustion. I felt
nothing, as though for years I had been feeling
everything.
Life had become tedious. I had a constant need for
discovery and exploration. The clothes I wore did not
suit me. I began to no longer recognise myself and
felt I was drawn in to chasing all the desperation of
my peers.
There comes a time in your life when there are no
rules, when you feel to be the capital city of your own
conscience. When what is true for you is true for all
the world. When your thought is the undiscovered
gold of California, and only you have the permit to
the mine.
Where was the end of all my wandering, to where
do the geese reach, under which clouds, under which
sky, under which sunsets and summers, wandering
which streets; where the axis of the world would find
its central point, the magnet to which my wandering
could be brought back, that place that was my home,
like standing over glass that looked back at me in
exact reflection?
But I am mid-way, I thought, I am twenty-five. Still
with the uncertainty and hopes in front of me. My life
is still the child of its own world, I am still on the first
roads of my adventures, still to be swept on to
unknown voyages. I will make attempts, discover, I
will not decide, I will try and fail and try. And
eventually I will know. That this one is my calling.
This is my world. And toss my hopes out in to the
world to see where they will land. In my twenty-fifth
summer I was filled with a delighted anticipation for
what was to come. Hope, eternity, belief, all came
rushing to me. All new possibilities came flooding in
to me, as though a new surge of power to realise them
had awakened. Now it was as though I had electricity
to switch on all the facilities of my abilities. I was a
hundred times more impressive to myself, a hundred
times more eager to fly upwards, carrying my art in
to the blossoming world.
I wanted to be out of London. To see my country, to
see the fields where no concrete met them. There was
an impulse to be on the current. As if for a moment to
become wind, or racing waters, to be like nature, to
twin with her and the flux of the entire universe. To
be on the road with its golden glitter that flew past
like sparklers on November nights. To be like racing
water, racing under the blue space like the ocean
sucked into the sky. And that long grey, everlasting
grey, with white lines along the rim, in the cool of the
wind and the heat of the sun.
I set off on my travel, loading my car with enough
means to get by for the first couple of weeks. I drove
out of London, bound North, to experience cities
unlike my own. Now gradually appearing in to view
was the northern country. Here the great tall fur trees,
with chimneys nestled within, here the great humped
hills, the damp green earth, the ponds and lakes
drawn out by the rain fall. Here is the lump of earth
of the northern countryside. Here are the farmers'
fields with little steeple towers, here are the red
bricks, grey bricks, earth bricks, here are the hills like
kneaded dough, here are the stone walls and woolly
fields. Here the bright blue sky hovers overhead. Here
are the red bricks of Manchester, here is the stone
crescent of Buxton. Here is the stream that runs
through the valley and the stream that dances down
the stone steps. Here are the old cotton mills, the wool
mills, the breweries, stone boxes with chimneys for
spires. Hill sloped houses hidden in sleepy hills. Here
the Georgian stone of Edinburgh. There I waited, I
lived, I learned, I understood what my life really
needed.
That summer I saw the rest of my life. I saw it
in the hazy light that veiled my eyes, in the glare of
sun beams as they tried to tickle my eyes through my
eyelashes. I felt ready for the future, even the night
seemed as bright as the day. It was as though the
world had grown still and grown to a youthfulness
that I'll never forget. It appeared as if in retrospect as
though the world I looked at were old photographs
from my parents lives, not mine. I felt I'd stepped
back in time for a moment and stared at the past. My
past, my very real and now past that I had just
outgrown in the hazy light of summer wherein I saw
all my dreams come alive. As though I could see all
my future in the glare of sunsets and sunrises and
somehow if I could reach these horizons I would
attain them. There in the horizon of my life, veiled by
a mist, I saw the sunrise of my dreams.
Choral Ode 3
We lived as though the world were a nonsense
dream. We are youth who know nothing; we
lived as if there are no great lessons to be
learned, in all fearlessness and freedom. Lost in
the waves of the motion of life. Lost, lonely,
dissatisfied, in the vast chaos of life, fuelled with
the urge for emancipation, freedom,
restlessness. Life had become true again, as
though it came embarking over the red horizon
of morning. Death to us was a vanishing dream
like a mirage in a desert. And all life tasted of
vanilla.
People passed in and out of my life with
obscurity. Like coal burners on the steam ship,
shovelling coal in to the furnace once more
igniting the fire with a new brighter flame.
People arrive, lit up my world and passed as
though there were no grip to my life, but simply
a smooth frictionless surface that let nothing
stick. And then, like echoes, people sunk in to the
further corridors of my life.
Through ageing years; the past disappears,
gone, sank in to time, dissolved like sugar in hot
water; irretrievable and lost; sweet sugar's
youth, a vanilla history, sweet to taste.
Memories of youth on ageless spots like
phantom ghosts playing somewhere between the
real and the unreal. From where we cannot
reach and plummets we cannot venture deep, but
staring in to the great goodbye.
But that was life; the incessant to and fro.
We were bystanders in the great abyss, ready to
be knocked by the heaving tide. Sank in to the
mystery of some stillborn universe. Buried and
arriving, buried and arriving, like boxes that
float somewhere on the Indian ocean.
TPS
THIRTY-SIX
I was growing in to a whole new youth. The year
was beginning all over again. I kept dreaming in
summer afternoons, washed with a second birth of
sunlight. The season of blossoms had passed, and it
was just beginning to gather sway with sun-dazed
flowers. The trees fanned in a gentle breeze, and a
mosaic of light and shadows covered the lawn.
Bundles of freshly cut grass were pulled up on the
field whilst its fragrance coloured the air. The skies
were cloudless yet washed in a light where it glowed
around that unglancable sun that glared like a
diamond wedding ring.
It was at this age I’d realised something about
myself: I was no longer young. And it filled me with
great relief and pleasure. Not that I had not wished to
be young, but that I had understood it and seen it for
all its needless complexities. Rather, it was not being
young, but “youth” that I was so gladly strayed from.
I felt new, grander, and individual. Important
adventures called that I believed youth could not
understand. Although admittedly, I’d occasionally
felt to have become boring, there was a sublime
indifference to all the happenings of the young that
seemed now simply an empty parade.
I waved farewell and goodbye to all that young
world, as I entered and tread on forbidden fruit,
journeying beyond spring years to summer seasons.
Assured of my feet, though not knowing their next
steps or where to venture and tread with stable
footing, but enthusiastic for the road, with only one
shadow and one purpose; freed of the self-made
complexities of insecure comparison which youth
undergoes. At thirty I affirmatively accepted myself.
A new doorway opened. I felt I had access to a much
greater world which did not previously reveal to me
under the juvenile spell of youth. But had all new
roads ahead to create life once more. Undefined by
any one but by the sum of my experiences, which
seemed to defy definition, and in themselves create
potential for all new definitions. I experienced
repeated sensations of all new, blank, washed, and
clean beginnings several times a year, as though in
the midst of summer it felt like a new year again. I no
more felt that melancholy breeze that existed in
youth. I felt gifted with a wholly new power in
myself, straight-eyed with the world, confident, and
direct with life and my goal. New ability to look down
on my own travels, much more at peace with my
afflictions, as if they were an amusing friend. More
able to let things slide; at last, a man.
But there was a certain sense of youth I still felt
attached to: that eternal youth. A youthfulness
unaccommodating to adulthood. That care-free
attitude, away from all sense of industriousness. An
attitude of arrogance toward sober life, still drunk
with youth, still sexed, still holding the reigns on
being drunk, wild, and out of control, still with an
urge to live ruthlessly and impassioned.
My work was all that mattered now. One becomes
great. When one sets oneself around greatness. One
who every day is pregnant with great things, will
experience the pains of pregnancy each day.
Conditions where art did not exist I found harsh and
near unbearable
I continued to visit Paris to immerse myself in
works of art. I loved to be in rooms of sculpture. In
them I saw reflections. Art as men as art. There was
some kind of ungraspable infinity to the sculptures
unsolidified in time. They already existed, but I met
them in my moment, and will continue to exist longer,
awaiting someone else’s moment. They lived in a
way I would never live. Immortalised. Until ruined
by weather or war. They became my places I could go
without the constant flow of the road. Young dream
laden artists plotted around the floor, drafting work to
hone their skills. They toured the quiet rooms, a train
of young minds, dressed in the present, looking at the
past.
You never feel so still than among sculpture. Frozen
motion. There was something majestic about these
rooms. I heard brass and percussion when I entered
them. They moulded me as I watched them. You don’t
understand art. It understands you. I looked up to
these statues and wanted to be them. With all the
gazing world at its feet.
Gradually my work gained a reception, steadily
growing and then more rapidly I was being
discovered. Eventually it was greeted by its true and
proper audience. Making me wonder why I had any
concern at all for the few who sneered at my work in
my early days. It took time to gather itself but my
work began to cause a rumble. The sneers became
instead an energetic discussion and excitement in the
art world.
I was somewhat prophetic in the early days. I
professed a profound certainty of what I was to
become. I understood how my success would gather
itself together. I understood how change, transition,
would create itself, piecing itself together like the
most difficult puzzle, like the summer that must be
arranged by the sun and Earth and orbit at the proper
time. I saw through the glares of sunlight in to the
coming of my hour. I saw the seasons years ahead and
a moment after, and I knew I was doing something to
assist their coming. My life turned on its axis as the
world and its moving orbit rolled my season closer.
I was now understood to be a great artist. I was
understood by the work I had created. I had the
reception who continued to appreciate and celebrate
my art. I had my supporters who stood by me, and
praised the praiseworthy, discussed the disastrous
with passionate enthusiasm, and celebrated the new.
Those who believed. And those who were themselves
inspired by connecting with my work.
As I rose in fame, a silhouette of misunderstandings
circulated around my new name. It propelled,
haunted, and crazed my career. It became a great
horse; powerful and uncontrollable
Millions of people knew you and suddenly you felt
to have two friends in the world. I gained the attention
I wanted for my work, but somehow hoped to lose it
all over again. I wanted to be known and left alone all
at the same time to be a crystal that could hide from
light’s reflections.
Even from my new reclusive spot, I was sought out
to be brought back. Occasionally a mysterious visitor
would arrive at my door, asking to view my work, to
learn from me, and try to coax me back to returning
to London, telling me about new scenes that sprang
up, whilst I prepared a lunch for ourselves. I still had
a studio with my mattress as I had in my younger
summers where I worked endlessly. The pleasure of
creating never left me, and I had no loss of energy for
embarking on new works. But I knew when I made
work it would be known, it would be discussed,
celebrated by many, even if it was critically dismissed
by the older academies.
Just as with tears, an immaterial force of emotion
manifests in to a physical form, just in this way,
unknown invisible forces flood to me and react in the
material force of art. Out of this unknown inspiration
I created unimagined new days.
All my harshest days had been my strongest, when
I was at my most doubtful, there did spring up the
fountain from the deepest well of me that overflowed
with happiness and positive thirst for my abilities, a
renewed nature, in that moment even pain was
welcomed as a stimulant for strength, with an
unparalleled return to joy at who I was and all I was
capable of. Remarkable things happened in spite of
difficulty. Even days at my lowest, by nightfall I had
made myself well by some chance inspiration that
helped me sleep well. And I awoke with a confidence
in my abilities as though I could create a second sun
out of the moon. A kind of peace had discovered me,
a happiness that shone from me, a perpetual gladness,
that I had greeted at no other place or time in my life.
Everything had returned to life. I had wonderful
people around me, who I cared about and who loved
me, and shared in my passions and dreams. My life
had reached its zenith.
Life became strange. Time seemed of much more
importance, as though life could no longer afford
imprudent experiment. It was as though everything
which had been pressing in my life now became
imminent and vital. All new importance fell upon me
from one important cause. I had fallen in love. I had
discovered a love which gave my life purpose and
measure. Now, suddenly, there was a reason why
things must “work”, there was a principle image of
life “working out.” There was no longer, a mystery to
that horizon. I made the most difficult decisions of
my life at this age. I was growing as an adult
terrifyingly fast. And more terrifying, I was growing
up with someone. The experiments in my life, I had
undertaken on my own back. Now my mistakes
would impact another person, and I wanted us to rise
successfully together. I was making some of the
greatest decisions of my life.
Many works which caused me exhaustion,
exuberance, sleeplessness, and physical burden, there
produced my best work. One has to give up
something to produce beyond oneself or to make
something new of oneself. I felt to be physically
deteriorating like winter foliage, but a week rest
cleared it once I had finished the work. I had never
become so healthy as when I was required to lose it
and regain it repeatedly. In those years I experienced
the greatest weight of burden, whilst simultaneously
the lightest serenity and most refreshing ecstasy.
When I produced what was innovative at the bottom
of the pack it seemed I faulted, when I did the same
at the top I was called innovative. When I made many
of my work in the past long ago, I was sneered at, I
now created things hailed as masterworks, considered
so because of the echoes they caused to ripple
through the lake of the art world. Fame seemed a
hollow thing that relied on nothing but the echoes of
others. But they understood that I could manifest my
innovation. I could make something special. There
was something within me that blossomed open, like
the rosebud in summer that created whirls of petal
after petal and fragranced the air, I too, born out of
my summers gradually bloomed in to the artist I am
now. My deepest joys, my pains were all given
electricity to spark and find their new language as I
approached my canvas, there I gave everything I
loved a new life, I delighted in everything I was, I
could not have experienced pain and strife without
delighting in it, my joys too I took higher than I could
ever have articulated, I felt to live in closer
connection with the world, gradually in my bloom it
spoke back to me as if in a language which only I
understood and I created a relationship between my
life and the world like it was an intimacy I shared
from some voyage a long away from my known
surroundings, where I took great pleasure in every
moment. There I discovered uncreated works that I
felt deeply connected to that needed to be created.
They found me, rather than I found them. They
discovered me as though they knew I was their artist
and I simply accepted. I did what I could, grasping
the work, and hauling it from the ground, then
throwing in to the air. Now I was the artist I had
always dreamed to be. I felt to be a conjurer as though
light beamed from my skin along my hairs. In this
light I could create anything, I knew the meadow
where my creations were discovered.
A new spirit welcomed me, I rose as if the sun that
rose in the morning rose from within me. As though I
had all the energy, filled with profound enthusiasm
which made me wish to travel at great speed to drive
upward in to the sea-deep pool of sky that demanded
all my senses, experiencing a victory like I had not
experienced in life. The air became cooler, a more
gentle warmth wrapped me, colours became more
pleasing, I had a found new pleasures, and I
experienced weeks without the least turmoil. All
turmoil seemed unreachable to me. Happy in a way I
had rarely known. A kind of rare recovery of great
height and health. Excessive spirit, excessive health,
excessive perfection, excessive energy, excessive
peace, excessive stimulant, excessive confidence. I
had managed to rise up, to float higher in the air with
the clouds, I rose, rejuvenated in a new altitude. Only
the highest leaves knew how I felt to be rushed upon
by the summer breeze.
And you were there through the whole journey, you
were with me through the new moments, alongside
my strife and my pleasures. And I yours. You were
with me whilst I tried and failed, and you encouraged
me to try on. You made all my failures important to
me and glad of them. You made every moment worth
the difficulty. You were my sign that it all turned out
well. You encouraged me to feel proud and gave me
extra roads where I thought there were none left. You
were my extra strength that snared all my worries,
eased all my pressures.
I remember the first night, when we were brought
together. I went to see the ballet in the great theatres,
decorated with glimmering gilded detail. Tall rising
columns that supported balconies and box seats like
city apartments brought indoors, with people facing
the stage like summer balconies in the city. We
gathered in the stalls with the commotion, as guests
stood from their seats, throwing their voices a few
rows back to talk to familiar faces, the aisles were
trodden down with footsteps as ushers escorted
guests to their seats. There you were in the box seats,
a young women, left alone, whilst her partner
ventured somewhere off in to the building, you gazed
at the stage curtain, the orchestra tuning their
instruments, with your head rested in your arms. And
I stared at you as though you were the evenings event,
as though the curtains would be drawn across my
gaze. I starred at you like I had never seen anything
like you before. And you lifted your head, turning to
me, and stared without breaking your gaze.
You were remarkable. You seemed only
accustomed to friendly kisses and light breezes that
all seemed employed to radiate your character, that
shone brightly out of your appearance. You seemed
so strong in yourself that you needn’t appear strong
because you were seemed strong enough to overcome
your obstacles and smart enough to avoid them. You
seemed at peace in your own world, and at times,
untouchable to the vulgarities of life, which seemed
so irrelevant to your life that it was as if you had
evicted them from the Earth and all that remained was
the charm, sweetness, and beauty of life. The idea of
belonging to that world made you immeasurably
desirable.
I found you in the hallways in the intervals, I don't
know what courage brought me to approach you,
what language floated in my head to utter my first
words, I only know that I had to, as though I was at
that moment prepared to leave everything from my
life to be there with you and talk to you. It was as
natural as a leaf that leans in to the light.
It was befitting that one like myself, who lived with
blood and tempo, and a lover of beauty would fall in
love with a dancer. You, a dancer, the ambassador of
music, arrived in to my life. Dancing on stage you
appeared beyond being human. In the rhythms of
silence you moved on currents of music that I could
not see, made visible by the dance. You who gave
everything and all your expression to movement as
though some secret rhythm was able to be caught and
grasped and transformed in to its new expression of
dance, where even silence held a melody. You
transcended the manner and movements of everyday,
I now saw some new ability untaught to man. Beauty
and inspiration was again discovered in dancing.
Expressive and powerful movements, with the
fluidity of water, and with a power of nature as
though the energy of all our ancestry had returned
with verbosity.
The arrow had sunk. Past the formal blushes,
glances, smiles. Past the sweetness of conversation,
the pleasure of laughter, and the passion of intimacy.
Through all of this, I fell in love with the parts of you
that never changed, the real core of you, knowing
always everything else will with time. I loved all that
was purer of you than ability and appearance.
I
only wanted to see myself as she saw me in her eyes
and in her thoughts. I wanted her to be a woman, and
she wanted me to be a man. And in this way, we
guided, supported, and raised each other. Lovers like
best-friends, like siblings. We were like twins;
identical of soul, yet with a different manner that
complemented and completed the other, as though we
were not meant to be identical because we were
meant to complement and complete the other and be
whole.
All past loves faded in to obscurity, as though I had
never experienced them. I fell back in to being
childlike, unhindered by hesitation. I leapt in to
pursuits with youthful impetuousity. Without care or
concern for any other matter. I lived to keep love
ignited and burning. Love is blind, and as we lost
sight of our peers and former independent lives, we
experienced things fall away from us in the rapture of
the process, and although it was sad on occasion, we
felt life the richer for it.
You were interested in travelling and finding those
secret secluded hideaways on the stretches of
beaches, the type you find if you go searching for
hours in the rocks, where you climb up the slippery
wet steep rocks that hid secret nests of sand and sea
where the tide still nestled low, you find a beautiful
untouched beach with its own private pool, and
unspoiled plants, but if you stayed too long and the
whole beach was covered in water again and your
rocky exit is swallowed up by the tide, like a pearl in
the closed mouth of the oyster.
When we travelled to Columbia, the smell of
vanilla forests we lived by soaked in to the air, their
ivory coats of petals dotted the green vines, and all
the pleasure of my life in the season was scented with
vanilla, all my successes and triumphs so bitterly
sought for and painfully won, were enraptured by the
sweet fragrant air from the vanilla pods, that
decorated our surrounding, You always spoke of how
calm you felt when in the forest whilst the sun dried
the rainfall and the sweet vanilla scents rose in the
humidity.
I was embarking on the most beautiful and
adventurous course in my life, and my most
handsome self. There were difficulties and delays, but
I had a confidence in love that made life’s struggles
rush upon me no more afflicting than a summer
breeze.
France brought with it altogether different skies.
The rainfall made the clouds at sunset blush in
peached pinks. We sang and danced through our
summers in Provence. We all got up with our drinks
in our singing whilst Goncourt played on the piano
the American songs we learned when we were
younger:
Callin' for you, baby, do you see the road?
Livin' with each other is living in hope.
Time won't change the leaves.
Through life all my pains have been thrown on the stack.
I take what I've been given and never looked back.
The day is kept for wasting and I'm not staying for the
praying 'cause the rooster's calling up the new morn'.
Callin' for you, baby, do you see the road?
Livin' with each other is living in hope.
The storm began a breeze.
I never thought I'd know you like I know you now,
An' never saw you coming up over the brow.
But you hit me and I'm spinning, there's no slowin' down
so I learned to dance the rhythm.
(But tell me that you love me now and then.)
Callin' for you, baby, do you see the road?
Livin' with each other is living in hope.
Your smile sets me at ease.
All this dreamin', oh, and oh, I see it coming.
All this screamin', oh, and oh, I hear it calling.
Listen to me, baby, I am forever in an hour.
When I'm with you, I'm no longer my wrongs.
(But tell me that you love me now and then.)
Callin' for you, baby, do you see the road?
Livin' with each other is living in hope.
She dreams and still believes.
That was the month the storms came, we'd set out
in blinding sunshine. The water ran down our faces,
for every drip that fell two more fell to us. We
grabbed what we could, laughing, stuffing it all inside
the hamper with your shrieks as the cold rain kissed
your back, and fled to shelter under the empty boules
stands, catching our breath and laughing. And an old
man sat at the far end of the stands, with no
expression, just an empty look within a silvering
beard.
"I think the food's ruined," I said, turning back to
you.
"I think the picnic's ruined," you said gleefully.
I laughed.
"Do you have the wine?" I asked.
"Oh no," you gasped in bubbles of giggles.
We looked out on to the field and saw it nestled in
the grass getting beaten by the showers, and then
looked at each other, laughing.
I said "I'll go get it" and I ran in to the field, with
the rain coming down on me without a care of it in
the world.
Life sends me women, like winds experienced on a
high cliff. Some they come and hit hard, some I feel
not at all, and on rare occasions one hits me to lift my
feet clear off the ground. You are my rare wind, and
me, without the force to stop you. You gave me hope
for myself. Do you know that I am speaking to you?
That these words are your words?
We were married the same year your father died.
We would have arguments when we would need each
other, but express ourselves in detest and hurt each
other, shedding thin emotion like shaking feelings
that didn't belong to us. You shouted at me in French.
And I laughed. You shouted more. I couldn't
understand a word. You laughed. You shouted in
English and slammed the door.
We laughed so much, we were a distraction to
everything.
The first day we took our children to school, I
missed them, the moment they left our side, I could
still see them, I said goodbye, have fun, and God I
missed them already, they were still in front of me
and I missed them.
I gave all my work to this city, it was in all events,
my home, it was where I belonged, and where my
work had always been trying to return to.
Sometimes I hated that we lived by the mountains
and the sea, near so few people, It conflicted with the
chaos of London I had grown up with, but the
mountains and the sea, that distant space I see now I
needed it. Those yawning plains that suck the
noonday sunlight, and pillow white clouds that mould
and remould themselves in the hands of the wind. The
shoulder, hip, buttock, of the lying green woman that
makes up the landscapes distant hills. You who lay in
bed nude in white sheets when I awoke, reappeared
in the same hills as I travelled. Some Rodin
masterpiece was made in cloud forms, transient,
perfect for a moment, lost in the wind, my eye caught
it before it unfurled slowly in the hurry of the wind to
recreate anew. Perfect for a moment like the mystic
shadows of some ancient stone circle. I imagined I
could put my fingers up in to that blue sky and stoke
them like the water in a bath; the clouds, your
bubbles; your curved figure, the hill.
White birds danced in pairs above us, to us the size
of a pocket pin, like paper taken up by the wind, as
though without wings they travel on a current of air,
like a warm summer heat that rises and takes up the
lighter contents of the earth, in graceful flight they
danced above our house. I do not know where they
come from or where they go. Whilst the leaves
seemed to murmur amongst themselves.
We have an intimacy that is dangerous. I look at you
and I don't know what is happening. Sensations
flutter through me, my breathing cut short. I am out
of breath. I have done nothing but think of you.
All I can think is where are you and what are you
doing? That's all I want to know. I don't know why I
want to know, but it pleases me to know.
What can I express in this tone this feeling for you?
I feel somewhat I have always loved you. It was
always there tucked away somewhere in the heat of
my mass of atoms. There you are, merged with me in
a way I cannot express. I have not deceived myself to
feel for you. It is a shadow of itself in the elements of
my soul. I have known new intimacy with you. Of the
more subtle and delicate kind. Of the kind that no
explosion of attraction that we demand in our
interests of social relationships desire, an attraction to
come bursting towards us undeniably, we want to be
sure, to be taken over by our love as though it comes
to us in convictions. But you, from the start,
delicately, subtly, a rain drop that sinks through the
length of the glass at my window, that is how you
arrive. And in its very weakness, arriving with no
force at all, I am taken.
I feel with you. I feel what you feel. Like those who
in their religious ecstasy wept at the sensation of their
icons. We too let tears fall when our lips meet.
To kiss you it is sore. Your kisses make my body
sore. As though your lips are lined with sharp blades
that shocks and tingles the body. Every time I kiss you
I want to weep. I want to cry, to let fall the tear from
the corner of my eyes that wishes to leap, like some
boy running to the cliff edge to jump in to the sea that
awaits in open arms towards his future life. My tears
want to leap from my eye - whom is to catch it. Or
will it run from my face to no frontier but to hang
from my chin like a raindrop on the winter guttering
to drop to earth to be forgotten.
With you I am better, I become larger, I am a greater
version of myself the moment my lips meet yours, all
the passion I have stored in me flows out in to you.
All my ecstasies and sensations are exchanges in
tongues, saliva, and lips. Every little delicate part to
touch you sends shivers, to stroke your lips with lip,
to touch your hand with hands, to stroke nose with
nose, and meet cheek with cheek, and brow with
brow. I do not kiss you with my mouth but with my
whole heart. I feel it exhale at our kisses in
satisfaction. I am overwhelmed the moment we meet.
When you are missed I kiss fruit in remembrance of
you. Your lips broken in to like my teeth crushed in
to an apple, sink in to a pear, with all the sweetness
of plums, and your tongue the tang of raspberries.
When I am with you, intimate, we fall together like
surges of water thrown together, like water pouring
over separate cliffs of great heights and meeting
together to mix in the fall to join in the lake below.
When I'm lying beside you I want our waters to mix
becoming one. That sets the world right. We are wiser
than all life, which has not yet discovered the blissful
workings of how we live privately and learned yet to
make cities in this way, make nations, and make
continents. We love as though we have uncovered
some profound discovery which would cure all the
miseries of mankind that has plagued it for centuries.
A plethora of people have described these sensations;
but they hadn't loved you, so I think I am describing
it in the most beautiful way yet conceived, because
no one has loved more or had the capacity to love as
I am required to, because I love you.
The populated world looks to us with innocent
curiosity; what is this on display taking place? They
witness to what we cannot witness. Like young
children looking to a neighbour's field at the secrets
hidden in the end field. We seem to call back in our
exultant actions: this is us. Uncontrollably us. Like
fire set to trees in dry forests, we are lit and burn
brighter the longer we are aflame.
I love waking before you, watching you stir, having
slept in one of my shirts, that hangs oversized and
loose on you like a thin cotton blanket. In the
morning, when your body has regained its softness.
In the morning when we feel lethargic and numb
restored with painlessness and energy and make love
all over again.
That blissful activity that just raised higher and
higher like the sun shot from the mouth of the
morning mist to peak in the noon day heat. We
reached our two o'clock heat, our afternoon ecstasy.
We leaped and bounced, throwing ourselves in to
each other, verbal language had fallen in to breathing
sounds, everything was communicated in breaths and
body heat. Our pleasure was the same, and rose the
same, and turned the same. We chased after each
other's higher sensations, throwing ourselves at each
other as though the meeting of our bodies were feet
that ran faster across open land running for the next
thrill. There was no end until pleasure met
exhaustion. We were like a Master on the fox hunt,
determined, using all sense and skill that with
experience had become instinct to hunt out the next
forward gallop. Our rhythms became entwined in to
locomotive mechanisms that repeated propulsion
without tire. We could not separate as though magnets
lay within our bodies unable to be brought apart. Our
physical bodies had felt to drop all skeleton to
become supple muscle and skin, like oils and paints
dropped in to water that twisted and stretched like
wax lava lamps. Breaths became moans, pleasure
brimmed to demand its overflowing, still we charged
on like speedboats that bounce the sea waves. We
were miners in the cave that came for gold and
wouldn't leave for the greed.
Our thrills met like two waves on a stormed sea that
threw themselves together, like the plates beneath the
earth that rucked up against each other and threw new
rocky mountains in to the world. We arrived at our
climax like we were the first to arrive there. And our
bodies finally felt to spin and twist around each other
in spiralling lifts that shot to the sky. Then the
earthquake, the whole shudder of our bodies like our
souls tore from our mortal flesh to be enraptured
together on some unreachable astral plane.
Then came the silence, as the whole world
reappeared and all that could be heard were our final
desperate breaths.
The end of our days always ended with a shower.
The tingled pleasure like beads of sweat that prick
and tickle the skin like thorny plants, like white pine,
like cacti spines, that needed steam and water to wash
away. If silence could echo that is the first sound
when you have left me. A reverberating nothingness.
The first sounds of the world without you again are
echoes of silence. A depth to the world where I cannot
reach for you, like mountainous glaciers I cannot
ascend. To live without you is to be enslaved to live.
Choral Ode 4
V
In youth life was possessed without concern
to its flight. Life now flutters by so fast and
seems to leave too soon, like sunlight through
the wind-spinner. Life clings because it sees its
flight. When life feels to be fleeting, it clings
stronger. So tightly does it wrap about me and
swim under my skin that I feel the vessel of my
body to be in a frenzy. I have had long ago my
last grieving. Our entire life is a youthfulness
that goes unrecognised
Things fall apart on the way to things coming
together. Allow things to fall apart. Allow things
to break away. Allow things to break apart. To
allow things to come together. We have not
learned until our pains and joys are united. There
is music of winter and there is music of summer.
Never, as the waters that flow the rivers are not
the same waters in each season, are we neither
in the same person in ourselves. We’re always
rediscovering ourselves all over again. New
music is within us for new seasons. One for life
in the early dark, indoors, and bitter cold, and
one for days of sun, outdoors, and warmth. No
one has the same life in winter and summer. As
the darkened hills and night sky promise the
rosey crest of shining morning, we are two states
that give up to the other.
We win as we appear to lose. We lose as we
appear to win. We sail life’s tempestuous waves
O success! A mirage! O mirage! A success! Loss
and gain entwined, life gives as it takes away,
tried and tired the journey, man finds a way in
all that is to be. Time brings all things in to place.
We seem to wander to ourselves, but the axis
turns around us, not we the axis. In the end we
were heading in a focused direction the whole
time.
How I would love to go back, knowing what
was all to be. The past in retrospect seems better.
When not in its present strife and the present day
of woe compared. It is for these high souvenirs
that we are so fond to remember that we live the
day in aim of, so tomorrow we may smile as we
think gladly of our yesterday.
I know truly that nought would have turned
out well had life turned by any other clock, not
earlier would the victory come, nor could it have
come later with such stars in their perfect place,
but all that occurred was the only way and best
of all. And I wish I could repeat it a second time.
If I were to go back and live it all again, I would
do no different but one thing, that now I know
what joy was all to come I would repeat the
course without a day of sorrow but gladness for
it all, for all that pained led to pleasure, and for
all my happiness now, I am thankful for all that
past. So all sad days are like some fruit that
when the outer skin is bitten, first tastes sour, but
then sweeter tastes within.
TPS
SIXTY-ONE
The morning was rising. The white mist spray of
the rising clouds streaked the sky, illuminated by the
rising golden bulb, rising out of the womb of the sky.
That was the colour of the world; rusted and ancient.
It was becoming autumn, and every plant seemed
tired, revealing tanning leaves from the summer
spent.
I was old now. The morning mist was not the same
now as the sun rises, white, like the steam in the sauna
of some great hotel. My eyes cannot see the view, the
sun itself too bright to see the ocean from a distance.
All in the distance is a da Vinci blue, and the boats on
the horizon before me are silhouettes. White lines
streak the sky from passing planes, the slow breeze
strokes my face. I cannot see the view for the glare of
the sun. Like police lights on troubled nights, like
hospital lights, like photographers' cameras on some
reception dinner, like unknown car lights on some
long journey across the country, like the sun that was
my only memory as a child.
I do not believe anyone in the world has tasted life
as I have bitten in to it. Has kissed, and fought, and
loved it as I have.
Life, what waters we swam. Our adventures made
many friends. What we accumulated in our roving,
whilst too there are names from episodes we cannot
venture back. Time has taken them, and held them to
the bosom of the past. Remember when we were
young, as new to the world as the ivory blossom, and
ran among the long grass in the abandoned fields in
the countryside. Through the grass we ran. All youth
is summer in the memory.
Here was the shoreline with its incessant rhythm.
These slow flowing waves I witnessed on the
shoreline, that roll in peaked crests towards me, these
were waters that drew towards me, under sunrays that
warmed and coloured my skin. The sunlight that
wrapped me as I returned to waves of the sea.
Wherever I looked there was water. I was not at the
shore. I swam in the sea, and the waves came right up
to me, sweeping my head, each time they gradually
approach, rose and fell, lifting me in the next lunge of
a heaving wave. I swam, sun-down beneath the
water's loose surface, in to the heaviness of the sea.
Underwater my ears stopped to the sound of playing
voices on the shore, of shouting in the sea's water, I
could see nothing but a vague blue, it was murky not
like the swimming pools of my childhood. All was
quiet except a slight rumble of sounds that could not
travel through the density of the water. I wanted to
hear the whole ocean in that sound, but it was only a
muffled rumble, a sort of started silence. I pushed out
my cheeks and came up for air. I was in the waves,
the sea, the waves, the sea, as they fold and unfold. I
inbreathed the sunlight on my surfacing body wholly
in to my chest and flowed a tan reflected in to the
water's mirror. The sunshine stayed on the water like
a buoy on the harbour, rigged up with chain and
anchor. The wind was keeping the waters rattled and
the sunlight made a glowing path out to tomorrow.
The great whales swam with the great ancient
mammoths. The dead and dying take their journey
with me, many of whom I've needed to live. In the
end, death it is not black. Death is transparent. Like
holding up a glass glazed with morning mist. That is
death, clean and clear as the stones of diamonds. I
hold up my glass and look through its transparency. I
cannot reach through beyond the glass, I cannot see
clearly, but look how it lives on, despite that I cannot
see, smell, hear, or touch what is within. Death is a
glass house.
I watch the sun above and it is already historic, an
ancient sun that is visible today.
Nothing holds, and even seas give up their dead. I
kept still, letting the waves brush away again and
again the sand from my skin. I let the momentum of
waves run up against me, being heaved through its
great movements. What the waters take with them
and what they leave behind.
Once the wave comes, like a shadow over a hill, to
close my eyelids, that wave moves on returning me,
in my contributions that are carried on that moving
wave, like the motions of the sea in which waves
leave and return, leave and return. And as it moves
these things mix with new born things. On and on in
the swells of the waves.
Everything passes from one thing to another. The
clouds passing from one form in to another. The ice
touched by the sun becomes the flowing spring. The
city too will fade and transform and change, its
costume will redress, and its sensational inventions,
like everything else with generations, and the breeze
comes through to announce the curfew, making a new
world out of an old one, not forgetting that all things
pass and even old things fade in to new things. But
everything happens at the right moment. Every
flower and fruit has its season. Travelling towards
some unborn day. Time, ever pregnant with new
things.
Life lives on and I must make a contribution. That
is the worth of life. That it is not in vain, not that I
look to myself alone, old, not that all is to be had for
my gain. Beneath my exit, there is continued life. I
live, and make my contribution during my brief
appearance, whether art, or deed, or child.
I now have a new liberation. I wake tomorrow to a
new journey, and as a new man. I wanted all the woes
I must endure over that space; all the battles and
miseries I must live through; all the pleasures and
joys. At that moment I saw a wave fold on the horizon
as a wave folds on the shore. Adventures have begun
which I may have barely even noticed. A new
adventure, and in my boast, now swings my heart
renewed.
The sunlight sparkled and glistened the ocean's
chest, and wherever light landed it bounced from one
wave to the next as little crests arose and fell across
its surface. The sound was a soothing hushing like the
sea tried to quieten the fading voices of children that
sprang from around the shore, rising up in to the thick
blue sky that grew white around the sun.
The clouds turned overhead, the sun moved through
the sky, I stared back to you on the shoreline, staying
the waters in the flowing waves, remembering
moments in my life through my ages, as though in a
mesmerizing dream.
Choral Ode 5
The world is continuously blossoming and
transforming; all the seasons in one day. The
year will pass its movements, handing over
tomorrow from today. All things in place are
moving at once, and each finds its own room,
allowing each season In its turn to bloom. A leaf
falls. A sun dies. A hand cups a water that does
not stop to be dammed.
Time. Timeless age of the city street; footsteps
through the stone steps and the markets, citystreet chatter that flows through passages and
alleyways, not known but in their hour amongst
men and women to be known forever. They pass
and pass through the city streets, talking in the
dusty heat, mere phantoms of time. Lives a
million ages have seen before; faces that Time
remoulds to make again; and in Time’s
inspiration invents new men, and new women,
unknown to us before who belong both to their
time and to all time; whom that brief hour of
their life would name a century.
Time: takes lives, heals hearts, brings the
seasons and the tides, turns the constellations in
the sky, brings fortune and glory to men, and
drops them to wretchedness. For time doth come
to test our toil. In change we must not be rigid.
We walk through life blind-folded to paths naïve
and we must go by ignorance to what we have
not yet been.
I stand in passing sunlight, In flutters of
passing shadows… When all things turn to
ashes, all things at their appointed hour, through
the ever flowing present.
TPS