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opinion
The screams of the land
A drunken
reverie, the obsessive letter of a madman, the crunch of love or
loneliness, a clear-sighted view from the edge of reason, a literary
sprint. By Victor Paul Borg
It was pitch black outside, not the usual comforting night-time
black, a painted black, but a hollow smoky darkness, an unfortunate
darkness, as if hell had engulfed the earth, while in here the walls
are the dull red of dried blood, a choking redness that dripped
down the walls as I contemplated this green slimy drink with its
bitter medicinal taste, which I knocked back, my fourth absinthe,
the elixir for lonely hearts, It makes the heart grow, and I could
feel the cute girl's gaze slipping over my bald head, but how terribly
ominous the circumstances were playing against us, this girl, this
vagrant who had chanced into our little family of lost and lonely
souls, which presented the problematic situation, which was why
I had snapped out of my meditative state, which was why I had lost
the tentative peace I had so painstakingly achieved after an hour
staring at the sea in the bay, the swell of its black and shiny
body rising and falling in a timeless quality that lulls one's troubles,
that makes goals obsolete, it even makes intent sound like an absurd
anachronism of the impoverished self, and I was telling this vagrant,
If you lie sideways on the beach and watch the swell in profile
it is like resting your head on a lover's chest and watching his
stomach rising and falling, but no one was listening, not the cute
vagrant, nor the lost souls who were suddenly agitated and alert,
because everyone cackled at once; we puffed our chests, we sipped
our drinks, and the message to be conveyed here is that her voice
sounded like yours, in its nuances and cadences, in its punctuations
of smiles, and that's how I realized that the voice I had considered
so childishly illicit in its sexiness was not your monopoly, which
was another problem, this burden of remembrance, which is why I
was drinking absinthe to roam the land of clouded visions and sticky
thoughts, the same reason the bartender's wattle was flustered and
erect, why he spoke about aesthetics, When I see pure beauty…he
winced, understanding that beauty is the prognosis of insomnia,
beauty is for dreamers given to silence and reverie, while life
slips past inexorably and unrepentantly, while our eyes burn, while
we loiter, while we're gagged yet animated observers whose vision
of heaven and reality becomes the addiction of self-absorption,
which is another problem, this plot of self-gratification, this
child of sloth and greed that writhes with intense suffering before
it could transcend life's promises to understand the fragility of
life, the map of suffering inflicted on the face in deep lines,
and I mean no irony in the fact that an appreciation of suffering
is the first sure step to sainthood, suffering is the source of
all enlightenment, but beware the trap of martyrdom, because torment
plus the self are the chemistry of martyrdom, and martyrs are trapped
in this self-destructive persona of a glorious and uncorrupted self,
and I know all this because I am at the deep end of it and I desperately
need to step out of this shell, dump this shadow, which is aging
with blasted weariness, so I shuffle towards the door and the voices
behind me sputter, the vagrant saying, If you want me to argue with
you I can argue with you all night, and he replies, I am good at
that, and he's dug himself a little deeper in the moshpit of perplexity,
he's definitely ruined his sleep now, his voice jagged with impatience,
his words gibberish with anger, his anger turning into a whip with
which he beats himself in self-mortification, so I tottered outside
because I was too tired to swagger, snuffling the whiff of drying
hay in the air, turning a face to the wind that was vital and docile
on my stark head, watching the water in the bay still swinging in
its timeless quality, now hearing the screams of the land, the rising
of the death, the broken dolls whose shrieks of anguish curdled
my stomach and threatened to erupt its contents, and I hollered
into the wind, Love, like God, manifests itself in strange ways,
and I cracked the code of beauty, He considered beautiful women
like the mountains erupting on the horizon, breath-taking but unscaleable,
when I spotted the full moon, a lurid white, radiating all the wishes
that has been cast upon it, but instead of gazing at its roly-poly
face wistfully it occurred to me that if I stand on this beach and
hurl ten stones into the blackness every night I will built a mountain;
now that's intent for you, do you understand that intent and the
self are relatives, the former being the gasping engine of the latter?
…in the darkness I invoke your erect posture dancing with disjointed
jerks like the rest of us, because our stories are cumbersome with
frustrated intent, we chase our own shadows, we go round in circles,
coming and going like the sea in the bay and perhaps you, my darling,
do this in the spirit of timelessness too – I don't think my
mind will ever die, you mused once upon a time, and that line is
the antithesis of intent, that little voice is imaginative self-obsession,
which is another problem, because imagination is like a seed buried
in the ground, latent with intent but oblivious and inert, because
its intent can only be measured when it sprouts out of the ground,
its mission is only accomplished when it bursts into foliage and
branches and when birds seek its refuge, when it sucks the earth
in greed for its own idea of fun, so now I decided that intent has
to be accompanied by action, by moving limbs, by a downturned head
pushing into the storm, by dashing words, and intent can break through
the spiral of life's impossibility, if and only we snap out of the
theatre of imagination, if and only we realize that loneliness is
claustrophobic, if and only we realize that most things in life
can be described by what they are not instead of what they are,
if and only you ignore the bartender behind me who supplanted soulhood
with antagonism, and when he said, You're full of shit, his disembodied
voice dished his own epithets, the goddamned fool, his smiles unable
to masquerade his snarls, which is another problem because tomorrow
he'll pace along the seashore with his thoughts ambushed by an aesthetically
pleasant vagrant who possesses a wrenching flicker in her spontaneous
gaze and whose smiles make a child somewhere choke on a bone, while
the vagrant will pace another seashore contemplating enlightenment
and spiritual balance, and skipping countries, running, running,
running, on the road to nowhere because she can't escape her shell,
slough her shadow, and it doesn't have to be like that because if
their intent wasn't thwarted by their self's stubborn pride they
would fuse, they would walk one seashore and self-replicate like
one organism, but my darling reticent friend, our biggest tragedy
is erroneously believing that to know oneself is to know the universe,
which is why you and me have a problem in our joint ventures, which
is why my ultimate aim in this short voyage on this soil is to abandon
the needs of my joker self, to be servile in the needs of others,
because tonight I could see the moon luminous with needs surrounded
by the stifling darkness of unfulfilled needs, unrequited love,
unconsummated love, but suddenly it occurred to me that I am thinking
about you and you're thinking about me and those thoughts are as
futile as messages scrawled on a sandy shore, which is why we wash
up on the same shore again and again, the silly and fussy self that
never grows and never knows, dancing in tonight's smoky darkness,
using one's latent energy to burn oneself, so now I could stare
at the timeless sea all night or I could hurl pebbles into nowhere,
who knows what I could do with all this intent, but I turn back
to my family of sleepless souls, playing the tune of anger, because
anger is a quarrel with this self, and anger is the grim sobriety
that transforms a wasted life into dazzling art, but the bartender
does not know this in his march towards martyrdom, so I clean another
glass of absinthe, and another, and another, because there is no
better antidote and no salvation for bloody fools like us.
Victor
Paul Borg is a freelance writer based in London and can be contacted
at victor@borg.tf. His column
appears here weekly.
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