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Across the years from the time he put them down, his words come on to
me with his memory of a clear day framed in pale blue with retsina and
olives. He mouths the words, pummels them, actuates the synaptic
reservoir with something of what it was like to be there, and perhaps
with a desire to arrest the self in that moment. I am left with the
integrated munition of my belief in these things; that it really is
Marvelous to be alive, and I am here thinking
that. Marvelous. Marvelous how he says it, how it is evoked from the
dry pastiche of the page, like he is talking in a language that I
understand vividly, that I can catenate into larger pictures
composited by the things I have seen. Christ, haven't we heard the
bells at midnight?
Marvelous in the way he writes Marvelous; I can hear him debouching
the word like a rotund woman with a large plate of something good to
eat. I look at the sun where it comes across the cold metallic craw
of a wasted season and I'm feeling that. I see that it is in fact
round and warm and about as coherent as a monomaniac in soliloquy to
a flock of stubborn sheep. The day is a projectile with nothing but
the stand of it's moment to rely upon, so I recall that it is a rule
of rulership to be present and to claim the responsibility of your
coherence, and I am remembered to all of these things thanks largely
to the words that stream out at me from his hammered-on page. I can
hear him writing this book to me as I sit here beyond his time; It
doesn't matter to me that now is a shared actuality, when the actual
realism of this moment doesn't exist to be measured or defined in the
quiet hiss of spectral chromatography. It can't be touched. None of
the moments that flow out of this crevice in space-time, so daintily
squeezed into the binding of those static pages, are actualized in
the present with any index to the magnitude of their reality.
Even as the light I am seeing now is slightly hazy with the brown sky
of a large Urban demesne, the sun is focused and unfettered, and it
can be placed firmly fourty years in the past with all the clarity
and heavy handedness of his monologue. I poke my nose up in the air,
expecting the heavy accent of Olive wood burning in the stoves of a
town in the crag of a sceptre, like a mountain. I am expecting to see
that in the course of waking up and walking down the street, this
Greece that I have never been to, has come alive. The truth of it is
that I see the people around me vividly, like the memory of a dream
in the thirty seconds after you wake up. I see the lines of the
structures of the city, I hear the compounded cacophony of the
vehicles and the clatter of cups in the cafe like a symphony of
everything I have ever heard. It casts me back to the sense of a
forest, to the shore of a sea lost in the myths of an unrecorded
poet. I am smelling the fresh bread of a well regarded bakery, like
the honey-brown promise of another second like this, glittering in
the present, the cold reality embraced as it is, without the
presupposition of consciousness, experiencing it as a light, a smell,
a touch to feel the sky with. This synethesia an ongoing enticement
so that, touched off, we are dancing about architecture, and painting
about songs; the tragedy never quite carried off except in the hard
and beautiful smile of a jester that knows it's worthless to record
it. In posterity it is only beautiful, and now it is transcendent,
now it was transcendent, now it is something else.
My jester never strong enough to defend me from the momentum of my
beast. I am cast up to the height of this intense and beautiful day
like a rag-doll caught in a cyclonic disturbance, and I am exulted in
the burning light where the sun irradiates my soul. So I am happy to
be Here, where I haven't been happy in months, and I am Happy to be
alive, where I haven't been living for years, and I am happy because
I am trapped between the dead words of a book from the past and the
hard light of a day I haven't lived. I am Happy because I know I
don't have to write it down, but content in the fact that I will. I
am caught upon the aviary of a scene I'm not responsible for,
watching from the shadows of the future as characters I have never
met work themselves into a frenzy to describe the exact significance
of the light as their Sun sinks into the Mediterranean Sea. I am free
of their plot, and I am hardened in the sense that it isn't me, and
that it never will be. I am free in the sense that these beautiful
people and this beautiful scene and the world that contains it has
never actually been, will never actually be, is abstracted from the
burden of another monster with too much to bear and not enough weight
to disburse it. In the resolution of this fit, I'm caught with the idea that there will be times like this as long as I am willing to see them, and that there will be olives and strong drinks and cigars to smoke where the meal has been eaten and the sun is sinking in the reality I can actually see, where I'm not just living it vicariously with the idea that I will truly live it. I smell the smoke, I take the drink, I lean back and enjoy the act of smiling, closing the pages of this book so they will continue to mark for me this day with that bright clarity of bells last heard at midnight, in the heart of an opposite season, in a different tone, the callibre of some Marvelous fortune, a future unfettered by expectation. |