In My Way / On My Way
from Hotel Lautréamont (1992)
Pardon my appearance. I am old now, though someday I shall be young again. Not, it’s true, in the near future. Yet one cherishes a hope of being young before today’s children are young grandparents, before the gipsy camp of today has picked up and moved into the invisible night, that sees, and sees on and on like a ritual conscience that bathes us, from whose dense curves we know we shall never escape. We like it here as the trial begins, the warming trend, more air, even the malicious smile in the prefecture garden— would we like it as much there? No, for we only like what we already know, what is familiar. Anything different is to be our ruin, as who stands on pillars and pediments of the city, judging us mournfully, from whose cresting gaze is no turning away, only peering back into the blackness of the pit of water of night. Once I tried to wriggle free of the loose skein of people’s suggestions chirping my name. One can do that if one is rich. But for others a bad supposition comes of it, there is more death and pain at the end, so that one is better off out of the house, sleeping in the open where chiggers infest the lilacs, and a sullen toad sits, steeped in self-contemplation. By glory I had better know before too long what the verdict is. As I said I was changing to more comfortable clothing when the alarm bell sounded. Which is why I am you, why we too never quite seem to escape each other’s shadow. Perhaps drinking has something to do with it and the colored disc of a beach umbrella, put up long ago against the sun. Yet even where things go wrong there is more drumming, more clatter than seems normal. There is a remnant of energy no one can account for, and though I try to despise my own ways along with others, I can’t help placing things in the proper light. I aim to exult in the stacks of cloud banks, each silently yearning for the upper ether and curving its back, and in the way all things seem to have of shaping up before the deaf man comes. O in a way it is spiritual to be out from under these dead packages of the air that only inhibit further learning and borders, as those these too came to see the sea and having done so, returned to selfish buildings enclosed by walls. Their conceit was never again to be quite as apt as that time that is remembered but no more, on a quilted sea of pylons and terminal anxiety far from the rich robe, imagined and unimagined, as far as the pole is from us. As around the pond, several rods away, the liquid performance starts and repeats, endlessly. We live now in that dust but no one shakes it, to finish is yet prized, prized and forgotten. As when we bumble, maintaining steadfastly that there is no life in the truth of us, no bearings in the grass, and who cares anyway, why the salt on his fingertip is life enough for us under the present circumstances, something always focuses attention on all we have done since school, how we were naked, and fell, and those coming up behind dutifully picked us up and presented us as evidence and the court in a major shift decided to hear the arguments and all was sadness, it was decreed, for a while, till pregnant passes were abandoned, and miniskirts returned, and with them a longing for a future of fashionable choices, dotted earthworks in the comforting desert, various fruits to assuage thirst and the almost maniacal voice of your leader reminding us of practical solutions so out of date they were all but forgotten. Far from fear of crowds stumbling, what ought to incite you is a new hunger for all the angles of whatever day this is, placed against the sandstone of undoubted approval from many different quarters. True, all that we hurled returns to visit, and true too that the bayoneted clock recovers, that composure is a gift that sometimes the gods bestow, and sometimes not; their reasons in the one as in the other case remaining inscrutable even to apple- scented mornings where the light seems newly washed, the gnarled trees in the prime of youth, and the little house more sensible than ever before as a boat passes, acquiescing to the open, the shore, the listless waves that distract us out of prurience and melancholy, every time. Yet something waits. I can hear the toad crooning. It’s almost time for intermission. The guest register awaits signing. It’s another, someone’s, voyage.