Monument Maker, page 22
I asked him about this same movie he was after and the words he used were much-rumoured, that’s what he would say, this much-rumoured movie, he would say, these much-rumoured movies, as there was more than one, though only one mysterious one that his tall friend had starred in, his tall friend who must have been at least six foot two and had the unfortunate appearance of a mad sombre giraffe, a mad sombre giraffe with an awful human face grafted on it, a giraffe that spoke so slowly and with such ponderous intent that you would be forgiven for thinking it must have been recovering from some kind of head wound, some kind of trauma inflicted in the bush, in the dark of Africa, which is true, but with the dark of Africa standing in for the whole of the Mediterranean with its seas on fire in the final years of the war. Anyway, the way I heard it the movie was kind of a porno.
It was a sex scene. 9 ½ Weeks. Basically. But 9 ½ Weeks extended until all weeks forever. Because of the scene was on a loop. What scene, the sex scene was, on a loop. On a loop, where the woman is under him, he is on top of her, on a loop. A raw sex scene. But not that sexy, it seemed to me, on a loop. On a loop this guy enters this girl, on a loop, forever, and that is the full story. On a loop. This guy enters this girl, what of it, on a loop. Not stylised or anything, not stylised unless you think that brute frank boredom, on a loop, forever, is artful and deliberate, which I do think now, let the record show. But then I thought, frankly, this sounds rubbish. And I said, what else do these two do, these two occluded lovers (that’s the phrase I used, and I winked, and I grinned, and I stuck my teeth out, my goofy fangs, and I could tell that he loved me being goofy in Edinburgh), what else do they do, these lovers on this, loop? Plus, I said loop like I was slurping Heinz spaghetti; I meant it. You can see the woman’s face, he said. She is looking towards the camera. Big deal. So what. And now I’m pouty and irresistible.
But he didn’t know he was being filmed. This loop, this loop came back to him, Max is saying, and when it came back he recognised it as himself and that he had been filmed in secret making love to this woman whose husband had been a director and when Max said that to me I didn’t think straight and I thought he meant someone who moves behind the scenes like a puppetmaster and I thought that her husband was a professional at making things happen in the world, an orchestrator, and I remembered Max orchestrating me and I thought about my gammy pins and I thought, who’s zooming who, you know, like the song?
They make love and at one point the woman wraps her leg around one of the man’s legs in a sign that Maximilian—I will use his full name here—said was occult. The man’s face is never seen. Only his neck and shoulders, his legs, the back of his head. The director from behind the scenes is supposedly dead. Supposedly; but there are theories, but who knows. They make the sign known as The Hanged Man, the lover whose back is to the camera, the woman who is beneath him, and now we are back with names, and with numbers, which according to this film could not be further from the point, is my idea about it, as I think of it now, as I think of the films I eventually did see by this man from behind the scenes, films that were screened against a white tablecloth in the beautiful garden that led down to the River Loing, whose word my mouth just wouldn’t fit, I kept trying, the River Loing, in France, where I saw a film of a black stork walking slowly through a murdered zoo of animals and it gave me such a shiver like it had walked right out of the past and over my grave, which has a location now, on earth, as I’ve only gone and bought my own little plot recently, at the other end of the street in which we lived in wonderful Grez-sur-Loing, despite these haunted pictures.
And Jim, the camel-with-a-head Jim movie star Jim, would sometimes cross through the beam of the projector and it was like a fayre, an English fayre where everyone dresses up like monstrosities in order that they can prowl the night and set to terrifying themselves and everyone around them. But what does the woman wrapping her legs around the man mean? That is how I became to believe myself become a movie.
True names. Maximilian Rehberg’s true name is Deaf Boy Looking Up And Pointing, which sounds like a tribal name, to me. I asked him how he became a religious, that’s the term I used, I was killing him, basically, a religious, I dropped it, and he laughed and described to me the figure of his heart which he saw in a deaf boy long ago, a deaf boy looking up and pointing is the figure of his heart, believe me it’s true, in a plain old shop like John Menzies, with toys on high shelves, and a deaf boy pointing, a deaf boy pointing and making that sound that deaf boys make when they don’t even know what sound is, that terrible sound of deaf boys trapped in a soundless universe, deaf boys muffled in a sleeping bag and deaf boys smothered with a mattress and, let’s face it, deaf boys buried half-alive, is the image written in the heart of Max, and the deaf boy is asking for something, in his heart the deaf boy is pointing towards a toy and asking for it and doesn’t he deserve it for God’s sake, a toy to sit with, silently, surely it isn’t asking too much, but truly it is asking too much and like Nietzsche saw a horse get punched in the face or Dostoevsky caught the eye of some strange idiot peasant, Max breaks down, he stands there in this plain old John Menzies at the start of his career, at the beginning of his adventure, and he weeps for a deaf boy whose mother wouldn’t buy him a toy, some rip-off piece of plastic from the top shelf of a plain old John Menzies was all it took, all it took to fill this terrible void of silence this deaf boy lived in, and to cease the sound of his terrible language, his body speaking for him and without regard for him either, is terrible, and the mother barely looks at him, she ignores the sound of his groaning in this agony of this soundlessness that he doesn’t even know he inhabits and she takes him by the arm and she drags him, out the door, and into the oblivion of memory. And this is the atomic pain of the world, is what Maximilian Rehberg said, back then, at the start of his career. And I intend to kill my feelings for it dead, was how he put it, back then.
And now it sounds like a movie, on a loop, a movie the likes of which we would watch on an old tablecloth in the back garden at night in Grez-sur-Loing, strung between some washing poles, in Grez-sur-Loing, by starlight, we’re all out there, Max, Pierre, Big Jim the Giraffe, and me.
Moments are atomic, are building blocks, of course that’s true. But it’s like the wiring has been exposed in these films we used to watch. The atomic nature of each moment seemed underlined, heightened.
And silence, too, the profound silencing of deaf boys, is necessary to our order. It says that these are the soldiers in the trenches, the sweethearts that never came back. Which is Africa, and the trip we took there.
We left Edinburgh for Africa, first. There were no films to be found in Edinburgh, except of course the usual art school fare at the Filmhouse but spare me, so as Maximilian gave up. I am going to take you back to Africa, he told me one night, and at first I thought he was going to fuck me back to the origins of the human race where it was just two protoplasms going at it without a thought in their heads, which actually happened on top of us travelling to Africa and getting off the plane in Ethiopia and immediately getting sick, and recovering, and me lying in bed all day in a miserable apartment while Max made calls sitting at the foot of the bed and then we hired a boat and it almost sinks in these crocodile-infested waters, but we pull up at some encampment, some weird village, where we get the boat repaired and where the food is basically dead animals, which I know is the case with meat everywhere but here there was something especially carcassy about it, maybe because of it was not long dead and was not frozen. I ate a chicken’s gonads; I think I did.
I am the Lion of Judah, is told me in a dream. In a dream on a boat on a river in Africa, which is a dream speaking inside of a dream. I am the Lion of Judah, and it is a game of nots and crosses, is what I said to Maximilian on the boat. He grabbed me by the arms. We were lying facing each other in our bunk. Some exotic fern hung over the window. There was the buzzing of malarial swamps just like in a zombie movie. What did you just say? he said to me. And I said it again. I am the Lion of Judah. I just thought it up, I said. The Lion of Judah is from Africa, I said to him, isn’t it. It just came to me, I said. What does the Lion of Judah say? he asked me, but now I was getting creeped out and was fearful, because I was starting to get gripped by this Lion of Judah and wondering how ideas come to you, and why. But the thing is the Lion of Judah spoke exactly like me. It’s not saying anything, I said to Max, what do you mean, it’s just me, if anything it’s just saying what I’m saying right now, but it’s true there was a feeling there, a feeling that I had been occupied by this idea called the Lion of Judah and that Max was looking at me differently and also that there was a Lion inside me now, a silent lion, pointing, and I thought is it deaf, is this damn lion deaf as well.
Then things get weirder. I start hallucinating signs, or maybe signs only appear for a fleeting second and then they go, so as they are unverifiable by anyone outside of who was in the moment of them; yes, that’s it. A dark animal with black leather skin and with two small legs and brown hairy wings exposes itself to me in the strange yellow dawn rising over an African river; disgusting. One morning there is a pyramid of quince fruit on the prow of our ship, seemingly arrived there, piece by piece, in the night. And I know, and with the certainty of which I am overwhelmed, that it is an entire fruit tree, all the fruit from a single quince tree, that has been removed, one by one, throughout the night, and brought here, one by one, and piled here, in an ornate pyramid, one by one, in an attempt to get whatever it is inside me to speak, by way of psychological violence, or else.
Then it sang in African; then it sang in African a song I could not understand but that felt like it was sung from the furthest ends of myself, with words that seemed to speak of boundaries, and the overcoming of them, which was me. It is me, I am the Lion of Judah, and I admitted it to myself.
When we went up on deck there was a monsoon coming down, or maybe it was just a storm. We had broken loose of our moorings and now we were drifting down the stream. Max took the rudder and attempted to steer us back to the shore, but we were borne away with the tide like a soldier into war.
We came to a town with a name like Chandelier, Pirouette, Crystal Fountain. Max would bathe underwater, in the tub, we had a tub on the boat and Max would submerge himself completely, for minutes on end, in these waters, on these waters, his eyes open beneath these waters, as sure of his element as a trout seen clearly. Max was of the rivers, born of the waters, and could never be drowned; that’s what I thought. And we pulled up at these small villages where they welcomed us ashore. Soon we came to our destination. In the shed there was Pierre’s old motorcycle, still. I knew my calipers were going to look so good wrapped around that motorcycle so that I said to him so, I told him, you picked me to match the motorcycle, you sly dog, which of course he loved it.
I got on the back of this motorcycle and I’m sorry but there is simply nothing sexier than actual sex that is as sexy as riding behind your man on his hog. Your arms around his chest, your face in his hair. Across this inhospitable desert. There’s nothing but our tracks in the sand. We are just behind the wind, which is remaking everything new for our arrival. We pull up at an abandoned settlement, hard by a stream. There is a smell like a volcano. I feel as if I catch shadows flitting here and there behind the empty buildings, and there is a chattering sound, like a terror in the air. Max points to an old well all welled up with stones and it is a little deaf boy pointing to a toy on a high shelf in some John Menzies somewhere. I found a disembodied head that talks, he said. And I buried it here in this well. I thought he was going to make a song out of it. Well, that sounds like the opening to a song, I said to him, and he said to me, well, yes, that’s the thing, this disembodied head was singing, and I said to him, Johnny Cash done got dark, I said, just for laughs, but then he said: at one point in his life Johnny Cash had to bury himself in a cave to stop himself going half goddamn crazy. I knew he was serious then, and that there was a head that talks.
Right then I saw the weird bat-monkey thing with leather flesh right in front of me like a picture from my mind, followed by a blue triangle. I shook my head and Max said, what do you mean, you don’t believe me, should I lift off these stones and let you hear it singing and before I could say, no, I was shaking my head to rid myself of this weird monkey vision and this stupid blue triangle, I actually said to him, but surely a pile of stones is no obstacle to a disembodied head that can talk, surely the laws of physics are no longer enough, but he said instead, but it has no arms, he said, and he shook his head as if it was obvious, it has no legs, he said. Well, won’t it have drowned, I said, in that case, if it has no hands and legs at the bottom of this well? But even as I was saying it, I was thinking of him in the tub, in the bath, in every river of the world, and I knew that it could never drown. But wouldn’t it have starved to death? I went to say to him, but then of course I knew that the answer would be that it had no stomach. The head told me it was the Lion of Judah, he said. I told you I was the Lion of Judah, I said to him, but I was just saying it like a quote, I explained, not like a statement of me. Who were you quoting? he asked me. I don’t know, I said, it’s a famous phrase. Only with Rastafarians, he said, are you a Rastafarian? he asked me. I’m not a Rastafarian, I said. Okay, he said, then why did it come to you? It just came to me, I said to him. Well, isn’t that possession? he said to me. And out here, he said, possession is the whole of the law.
Let’s unstop the well, he said. Let’s do it, he said. And set lions on lions, he said. I’m a Leo, I said to him, do you know that. But he just sat there and waited for my response. Okay, I said, and I went first and lifted a few small stones off the pile. Then Max looked at me, with those eyes of his, those eyes of his that were always receiving and never projecting, so as you had no hope of getting insides of them because, girls, the depths were endless, you would need one of those diving cages, one of them midget submarines, and I thought, whatever is at the bottom of this well is something I believe in, is what I said to myself, and I started dragging bigger stones away and helping him with boulders until at last, finally, we had exposed this endless tunnel into the ground that stank like a dried-up pond at the foot of a block of flats where everybody urinates out of their windows, it was noxious, this head is gone rancid and dead, I sang to Max, and he laughed and then he said, so you’re singing now too, and I said, you can’t count songs as being signs of prophecy, songs are in the air like mosquitoes.
Then we sat there, on the lip of this volcano, I almost said, this deep well into blankness and stench and nowhere and I said to him, call for your head, I said, though bear in mind he might be mad at you, and justifiably so, I warned him. So he called this head. Lion of Judah, he said, and he called him some other names too that are lost to esoterica. All the time I thought to myself, it’s me, he is calling me, the head is responding in my head, and then I thought—crazy thought—what if this well is like a strange entrance and exit into different parts of the story, what story, this story, I said, this unfolding story, I said, which right now is echoing down a well and the voice is travelling, and speaking words, who knows where else in the story these words are speaking, and I said to Max, I dare you, I dare you, I said to him, I dare you to lower yourself down there and see where it goes and he said to me, my three wives died here, he said, well, he said, my two wives died here, one of them may well still be alive, they died of terror, he said, and I said to him, a country bumpkin could die from terror of a homosexual, I said, it doesn’t mean the damn thing is actually frightening.
Now I’m laughing about it, now that I know your interests, and how the story is unfolding, I’m laughing about it; literary subterranea, there is a literary subterranea, down that well. I look at Maximilian and I know it. Drop down that shaft and reappear somewhere else in the story, I say to him. You taught me about poetry, I say to him, and I say it tempestuously, like a trial of strength in a tempestuous love affair, you pointed to the magic of an ellipsis, which is my cute-as-hell legs, I say to him, well, there we have it, that well is the perfect ellipsis, so get down in there, I say to him, and prove to me the magic of poetry, but before anyone could do anything the magic of poetry was revealed to us by this head at the bottom of this well which right then chose to reveal itself by the suspension of a single vowel, (a) single vibrating vowel of the type that brought down the Walls of Jericho, suspended, in the very mouth of this well, which was better poetry right then than simply disappearing in and out of (a) text, but there’s that too, and we’re coming to it.
And I lower him down, I hold his legs as the top half of his body disappears down this well. I have him by the ankles, his cute little socks, he has a grip on the sides, and he is shouting, and I am holding him still and now I have let him go:
I
have
let
go
of
him
and
now
my
Maximilian
has
disappeared
from
sight
( )
.
4. PROCEEDS FROM THE SECOND SYNOD
