Monument Maker, page 39
But before I can tell you more about them I have to discover a book and a photograph, and before I can discover them both I have to finish our tour, our first grand tour, which was interrupted by your man’s tale of the angels and of the grand sentences that only made sense with commas and full stops, a grand tour where we made a packet, quite frankly, a wedge that set us up for our own experiment in time, our own contribution to the Januists’ cause, in a way, though we were never officially affiliated or had any real connection with them outside of Mariella, of course, who had been married to a Januist herself, and from whom we could claim some kind of succession, if we were that way inclined, but really our project was much more personal, in one sense, although to label the Januist cause, if you could even term it a cause, as impersonal, well, that’s up for debate itself, as we will find out after I return to our great money-spinning trek across the theatres and well-to-do parlours of Greece in those years after the war, the years that, as I have said before, I have come to term the dying years for reasons that are not insignificant, in that they were the years of the dead themselves, they belonged to the dead, and they were the years when I became acquainted with them, when they started coming back, which is doubly odd, the dead coming back is odd in itself, I’m sure you’ll agree, but the dead coming back to someone who pretended, on a nightly basis, to be in contact with the dead, is odder still, it’s like God appearing to an atheist, a dinosaur appearing to a hellfire preacher, a beautiful woman giving her hand to a hideous old deformity, which in my case had already happened, but still in the towns and the cities that we visited in the dying years I kept up my dalliances with prostitutes in secret, it was my only indulgence, the only thing I spent the now considerable sums we were making on, and I recall some of them with great clarity and some with fondness and some are gaps in rooms or ghosts in beds or merely the missing detail of a morning, I can see the bed with the towel laid out neatly on top of it, the view over a courtyard with a mural painted on the wall that depicted a circle of children of different races dancing together, I can see a block of flats overlooking a bay, a corridor painted dull lime and cream, I remember a toilet across the way with no door on it, I remember a woman with short blonde hair who displayed her twat for me to examine, I remember another blonde woman, a blonde silhouette, an older woman, seen through a window, smiling and waving as I walked away, none of these women ever felt sorry for me or acted as if I should be treated gently or lovingly, the myth of the prostitute with a heart of gold is exactly that, prostitutes, as a rule, don’t care, they don’t care and that is the blessing and the mercy of the oldest profession and why it should be so ancient, careless sex, men and women meeting and parting without a thought, barely a glimmer, hardly a memory, goes back to the creation of the world, there are many kinds of sex, who can deny it, but silent, wordless sex with an unknown woman who you will never see again and who you pay for the pleasure strikes me as the holiest, there are holy whores in The Bible, we all know that, but there are holy whores in apartment blocks in Vola and Parga and in Metsovo, too.
I always liked some facial hair, it became, what do you call it, a tic, a fetish, when I would meet with a girl in an apartment or hotel and I would see that she was so careless as not to even pluck the hairs from her upper lip, I would say to myself, ah, no disguises here, and no thought too, and little care, and these women would invariably turn out to be the most passionate, by which I mean unselfconscious passion, which doesn’t mean histrionics but rather a deep secret enjoyment turned in on herself alone which would manifest in small things, the licking of the lips, for instance, the tonguing of her own moustache, the rubbing together of the feet or ankles, the arching of the back and, of course, the play of the eyebrows, the most subtly expressive aspect of womanhood, certainly of whoredom, a kingdom I spent much of the dying years in as an ethnographer, and not of faces and names but of secret body parts and backstreets and bedrooms, although names too, I can give you some names, almost all of which are now floating free from their bodies, unanchored by eyebrows, no longer tied to a pair of sad blue eyes or to a fragile tanned limb, not even to long flowing black hair or to the beautiful philtrums of the ladies of the night, again unconnected to names, useless, they tell us, an evolutionary holdover, but thank God for them as a place to rest your tongue while in ecstasy, philtrum, philtrum, what a word you are to me, and Daria and Iantha and Euterpe, whose name means delight, you too, and I would return to my hotel or to whatever theatre we were booked into with their names on my tongue, on my lips, their taste on my teeth or what was left of them, and sometimes I would walk straight on stage and summon the dead right then and there, I bring great tidings, I would announce, and they would appear and I would thank God or evolution or whatever force I was caught up in for my position at the crossroads, which is how I saw it, for my traffic with the dead and the disappearing and the newly crossed-over.
What’s he on about now? the man with the tattoo of the jail cell on his arm asked the young man in the denim jacket, rising from his bunk. He’s rhapsodising about prostitutes, the boy told him. That’s the last thing you need to hear about in prison, the tattooed man said, and he shook his head. Angels don’t help much either, the boy replied. Anyway, the boy said, where were we, what about the tour, how did it work out, what else did you spend all of that money on, and what about the book and the photograph? Wait a minute, the man with the tattoo interrupted him, what book and what photograph, have I missed something? Don’t worry, the young boy reassured him, it’s coming up, I hope.
All through the tour the dead return in their masses. Think about it, the legion of the dead all clamouring for attention, imagine that, if you will, all drawn towards this one speck of light that turns out to be a deformed man in a mask on stage at a vaudeville show. Some of them are insulted, some of them are angry, most of them will take what they can get. Often relations between the living and the dead are far from amicable, far from the teary spectacle of lost love returned. Leave me alone, some of them say, let the dead bury the dead, why all this interfering, all this mourning, all this inability to let be? Some of them are cruelly mocking, I never pass this on, some of them are angry, with the knowledge that death has provided them, well, can we even call it death, these are the still-remembered dead and the disappeared, they exist in a kind of purgatory thanks to the thoughts of the living, but in the release of the life force, or rather let us say the transmutation of the life force into another kind of force, in this turning upside down of everything they ever thought they knew, there is some resentment, there is a realisation, in some people, that truly they could have done anything, they could have lived their lives so differently, they could have done so much better, why did they put up with the narrow parameters that their wife or their family insisted was all there was, why did they chain themselves to that particular horizon, a horizon that seems now more like a bruise, a bloodied sun, an insult to a force that has turned their life inside out as easy as sneezing, and some of them do appear as angels, it is true, but deformed angels, ghastly angels, angels of silent judgement, angels that just stand there and say nothing, with no arms or with half a face or a great gap where their organs used to be, or in one terrible case with their own semi-liquefied organs gathered up in their arms, these were the worst, these silent cases, and they occurred more often than you would think, I would inform the family member that they were there, that these strange angels were there in the room, on stage with me, but that they were silent, and they would think that I meant they were at peace and had now taken up silent guardianship of all that they had left behind, but how wrong they were, how they misunderstood the rancour of the rotten dead, like the presence of a terrible fact, they believed that the dead had duties, that was one of their greatest mistakes, no, the dead do not have duties, my friends, it is only us, down here, or more correctly over here, that make demands of ourselves, the dead resent callings, duties, responsibilities of any kind, that’s what bodies are for, let me go, they say, for the most part, aren’t we done with this already, but of course, you ask me if the dead have regrets, yes, they do, they regret duty, they often, I’m sad to say, regret the very bonds of love that held them while they were alive, they think to themselves, unbounded love, isn’t that a more sane way to be, every life, isn’t that a greater goal, to live every life and love every love, that’s how the dead feel, in my experience, well, in many cases, let me say, there are more dead than living and it’s impossible to account for all of them, of course there are the sentimental dead, the dead that are scared shitless, there are even some souls or some spirits that long for narrow horizons, for small cramped bodies, for suffocating family relationships, I can’t deny it, and of course even as the faceless or limbless dead were drawn to the stage every night as if by an usher with a flashlight, my father too returned on a regular basis, not to mention the small black dog with a look of cosmic sympathy on its face, and that I took to be the temporary resting place of my younger brother, some of the dead are too far gone and have to resort to animal possession or synchronicity or coincidence, even, some of them operate by orchestrating our movements ever so subtly, look out for these ones, is my advice, it’s happening all the time, in the confluence of a street name, a song played over a cheap tannoy in a gone-to-seed restaurant, in an unaccountable signal from a stranger, in the uncovering of an object, even in the direction of a walk, if you let it take you, and the dog would take its place on the side of the stage or sometimes, brazenly, it would march down the central aisle, once even stopping to urinate on the side of a plush velvet seat (that’s like me at the pyramids, the man with the now oddly beautiful tattoo said), and then it would sit and look at me with pity and with understanding, which was quite uncanny, and sometimes they would catch me in a pincer formation and it was my very soul they pinched, let me tell you, my father to the side of me on stage, mercifully, for the most part, no longer dancing but still dragging his leg, his heavy chest heaving, his face fallen and slumped, and he would plead with me, a one-sided pleading unless you call the sad haughty silence of the small dog a sort of plea in its own way, in which case there was pleading on both sides to go home, that’s what they wanted me to do, go back home, they said, you’re still in the land of the living, leave the dead to the dead, it’s not me that needs you, my father said, it’s your mother, it’s your wife, you still have a life there, but there was no way of telling them I had one foot on the other side, that I had glimpsed what the dead know, or what many of them know, that there are endless lives and endless loves, and that I wanted a part of all of them.
Suffering had opened up a channel with the dead, but really a person isn’t meant to contain death, listen, I’m talking to you, listen to me, man’s lack of any real horizon beyond day-to-day goals, the impossibility of a truly cosmic understanding, his brain the size of a pea in the scheme of things, his nervous system reaching out all of a few feet in front of him, his sight barely up ahead, his constant distraction, his picking at himself like a monkey, don’t deny it, his need for a proxy even to experience anything that could remotely be termed religious, for a stand-in, or his need for drugs and booze to take him some of the way there, his petty obsessions, his rivalries and jealousies, his pathetic ambitions, his body’s constant cravings, all these, I tell you, are a form of mercy; man’s brain isn’t commensurate with the universe and thank God or evolution for it, neither is death something to be lived with, think of the stars twinkling up above, think of them blinking, prettily, in the night sky, that’s not a star, that’s not a sun, that’s a pinprick in your nursery-rhyme brain, that’s what that is, man wasn’t made to encounter stars, never mind terrible planets humming suspended in black space, never mind mile-long comets tearing through nowhere forever, mercy is a shutting down of the possibilities of the universe, mercy is to never fully understand death, to never believe in it, because who does except the dying and even then it’s never real, who hasn’t sat with someone propped up in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of them and their body pocked with sores and their breathing being done by a machine, their heart the sad paper bag that your man here mentioned, and talked about cleaning the house when they get back home, or the football scores, or a song they once loved, or wondered about the state of their garden and quite right too, if death were to relocate his kingdom—and I say he, it may be ownerless or under the command of a woman for all we know—but if death were to relocate his kingdom down here or more appropriately let’s say over here, then every one of us would be on our knees in the streets screaming to heaven, yet here I was, dragging around an entourage of the dearly departed with spirit animals sniffing at my heels, with death inside me, is what I’m trying to say, a death that even after all that I had been through I hadn’t truly believed in, even with the gift of precognition, that means seeing the future, boys, even with that death was more like a rumour, a possibility, but its kingdom, unlike the kingdom of whoredom that I mentioned earlier, never impinged on my body, never occupied me in the way that it did now.
By the end of the tour it was hard to put one foot in front of the other. I did what your man here attempted, I did nothing, for a span of time, it might have been months, could have been a year, I did nothing. I stayed indoors. Mariella fed me. We made love to a schedule, we had a routine, I had begun to horrify even her, although it was, of course, the nature of my horror, or the co-ordinates of my horror, the time and place of my horror, the way my face articulated my horror, that had attracted her to me in the first place, that had made her recognise me, were the words she used, yet now I spent most of my days in the mask, of course we made love in the mask, that was a given, who could really stand to have a half-eaten face like a gibbous moon hanging over them, I told you, who wants to get that close to the planets, really, but now during the day I would dress in a suit of her husband’s, a pale-blue suit or a double-breasted dark-blue number, and with this black leather mask on, a mask that constricted my breathing, my breathing that was already constricted, so that I would stand by the window and the glass in front of me would fog up and I would run my fingernails through it and draw signs in the hot, cold breath, draw signs over people in the street, spot them down below or across the way and sketch a quick cross over them or a zero or an out-of-control spiral or a grave, it’s true that for hours on end I would stand by the window and draw gravestones in my own breath over the bodies of passers-by and I would glance over my shoulder and often there would be a queue of corpses, an orderly queue, who would have dreamed it, waiting for me, standing in line for me to do what, who knows, more than draw graves in my own wet breath, that’s for sure, but aside from my father and my brother, the small dog, who implied both that I had to return, that there was unfinished business at home, and that I had broken some pact, perhaps, that’s how it felt, some pact that even I, as an emissary of the dead, had no clear understanding of, besides that the dead offered no clues, no instruction, not even a pleading half-eaten expression, they simply stood and waited and occasionally argued amongst themselves in voices that sounded like the black bubbling at the bottom of a pond.
Most of the time I read books, I read books in Mariella’s library, which was also her ex-husband’s library or her current husband’s library, even, just because he had disappeared didn’t mean they were no longer married, and besides, she was unclear herself and would fudge the issue, my long-lost husband, she would say, and I would say, well, is he or isn’t he, and she would reply, my long-lost husband, and it would go on forever.
I read books by people like Ouspensky and Blavatsky and people with names like grand citadels in the Himalayas and they would talk about their own contacts with the dead or sometimes they would call them the Ascended, which in my experience made little sense but even so they made me doubt my own experience, perhaps there is an up after all, I said to myself, perhaps it is possible to ascend, perhaps there is more to the brain or perhaps it is possible to go outside it or beyond it but what is the vessel that ascends and if there’s no way of experiencing it with your brain, if it takes blowing your brain up or storing it away somewhere else while you take the trip, well, what is the point in that, I had already proven, to myself at least, that there was room in the body for all sorts of crazy wonders but that it involved, as I have explained, a sort of going beyond or doing away with mercy, which is a small-scale blessing but thoroughly worthwhile, believe me, without mercy, it seemed to me, we were nothing but small white mice strapped into spaceships with ridiculous helmets on, but I read these books, these pompous tomes, excuse me but it’s true, these douchebag accounts, and somewhere, along the way, there was always an agenda, let’s make the world a better place by talking to the big daddies, they would say, and of course I’m paraphrasing, or, even better, the nature of the universe is love; that’s the brain of a mouse in a space suit talking right there.
One book was titled Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World and made claims of “beings of the higher world”: “Whether these consciousness in sections of the other than our exist or not, we, under the existing conditions of our receptivity, cannot say. They can be sensed only by the changed psyche.” Another book, entitled The Symbolism of the Tarot, was housed in an elaborate handmade paper sleeve, a private edition printed in Russia, in St. Petersburg, to be precise, in 1913. There was much talk of symbolism, of the triangle in the square, and this is where I came across the card that you had previously mentioned and of course I immediately recalled it from our conversations, The Hanged Man, who crosses his leg over his lover in the Januist feature I had mentioned, and which I had come to believe I had inadvertently starred in a remake of. I noted that it came between Justice and Death, these are the cards that surround it, and truly, in a flash, as it were, or as in the appearance of an angel, more appropriately, I felt something inside me orient itself. But there is more, much more. First, allow me to quote, from memory, what was written of The Hanged Man.
