Category: Certainties

Mad Journal.  March 15, 2013. “For Brutus, only, overcame himself.  And no man else hath honour by his death.”  Did you say you had 18 rejections, ape?  That’s tragic.  Tell you what.  Why don’t you get back to us when it’s 180?  Maybe we can look into it.  The whole world’s in a terrible state of crisis, ape.  If it’s 18 it’s 18.  If it was a youth and not simply a record of your failure rate it wouldn’t even be able to vote yet!  So overcome, my simian friend.  Overcome!  You know what?  Maybe “Wilderness Park” ain’t so hot.  Maybe it’s not all you’re cracking it up to be.  Maybe it’s a disorganized, criminal mess and you don’t have the stones, like a real cop, to do anything about it.  Maybe you’re out there in that park of yours, yourself, lost.

March 16, 2013.  That’s right.  Mad Journal.  Upper deck.  Home office.  Five PM.  Get out of here.  A bit of breeze is rattling the glass in the railing outside there as I enter these immortal words.

I remember hearing that sound the first time I came here when we were looking at the place, that kind of lonely, lost sound, perfect for melancholics, that little rattle rattle rattle, like a lost ghost.  Because except for the distant sound of traffic on the bridge going downtown, this is a quiet place, which is why you can hear that.  And pretty private too.  And that must have been why we moved in.

The suite was an estate sale and the owner had ended his own life right here in this upstairs bedroom, apparently.  We never, uh, made too many enquiries, but that was the story.  Downstairs that afternoon I remember there wasn’t much furniture in the suite.  Most of it had already been moved out.  There were two large, framed paintings on the small living room’s walls.  One was a print of “Scotland Forever” and I can’t remember what the other one was. I think it was a naval theme, HMS Victory or some such.  I remember feeling proud of myself that I knew that print was a print of “Scotland Forever” and also that the original had been painted many years after the scene it depicts, the charge of the “Scots Greys” at the battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815), and that a woman had painted it, which has always struck me and probably a great lot of other people down the long years, as remarkable, considering the era, and that the original was much larger than this print.  That’s right.  The sun never sets.

The dead guy had been in his forties or so and lived alone.  You see what happens when you start to think about things, when something triggers a memory?  Do we get that we get it, mein apen?  We are sentient, living beings and we remember. Sometimes memory is all we have, which isn’t much when you’re stuck here, day after day after year trying to understand and I mean understand.  And what you understand is that, ultimately, there is no understanding.  There just is, and isn’t.  And it can get painful beating yourself up over it.  So stop that.

Ow as in now, where does the time go?  I wake from another literary coma and it’s g.d. October.  Experts say I’m supposed to write every day to ‘drive traffic’ to my blog.  No is driving.  Not even George Sand could drive like that.  And there’s too much traffic, generally.  As Sterne said, ‘I’ll g.d. write my blog (novel) anyway I please’.  Of course he was talking about Tristram Shandy.  We know that.  I love Tristram.  A good guy and hilarious and still around, by the way, after all these months.  He’s racked up quite a few.

So I’ve been thinking about C.P.Cavafy since our last post and, to tell you the truth, much longer than that.  Who in their right mind hasn’t heard of C.P.?  Don’t answer that.  Lived most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt, which should be enough to make him interesting to anyone. Nice little town, Alexandria.  Like to drop by there sometime.

C.P. wrote a lot of excellent poetry.  For a novelist I can tell you one thing.  I seem far too interested in poetry on this blog.  But I like iconoclasts, one-offs, people that haven’t been contaminated or tamed by any school or movement, who don’t play hockey and have never even heard of it.

C.P. was steeped in history and his work shows it.  He could also make stuff up with the best of them.  He is never tiresome or obscure.  He’s witty and knows what irony is all about, the type of irony that rules lives with an iron fist.

This sampler was first published in 1910.  It was translated into English in 1975 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard and published by The Hogarth Press the same year in the ‘Collected Poems’ and in paperback in 1978 by Chatto & Windus.  I’m writing from the second impression of the revised paperback edition published in 1990.  I don’t think old Chatto and Windus’ll mind.  They’re pretty laid-back dudes.  I think Chatto scored fifty goals in fifty games one year.

Ambition, frustrated ambition, not quite what you were looking for, beaming baubles not quite measuring up.  Who doesn’t know the feeling?  A good question.

THE SATRAPY  by C.P.Cavafy

Too bad that, cut out as you are
for grand and noble acts,
this unfair fate of yours
never helps you out, always prevents your success;
that cheap habits get in your way,
pettiness, or indifference.
And how terrible the day you give in
(the day you let go and give in)
and take the road to Susa
to find King Artxerxes,
who, propitiously, gives you a place at his court
and offers you satrapies and things like that–
things you don’t want at all,
though, in despair, you accept them just the same.
You’re longing for something else, aching for other things:
praise from the Demos and the Sophists,
that hard-won, that priceless acclaim–
the Agora, the Theatre, the Crowns of Laurel.
You can’t get any of these from Artaxerxes,
you’ll never find any of these in the satrapy,
and without them, what kind of life will you live?

There’s a lot of people out there who struggle sometimes for a very long time with a situation, and by that I mean a very unsatisfactory situation. There can be a lot of fall-out from this, and as those toxic fall-out flakes are floating down hopefully we take time to write something about our experience, confident in the knowledge this flake-storm won’t last forever and that a sense of truth, honour and decency will ultimately prevail. Here’s to Ultimately! This goes out to Helen Dye, a beautiful but tragically flawed human being who does a lot of damage but is one of my favorite works of fiction in my new novel-in-progress – Wilderness Park.

HEALTH SCIENCE

Why the weak, the mediocre, the lifers and fatties
The dopes, the incompetents, the numberless numbered?
Why the professionals, the experts, the champions of convention
The young and brilliant and beautiful
Why the intelligent, why ‘the record speaks for itself’
Why the prestige and the elite, the cruel elite in their brilliance,
Ease of manner
You open the door and enter the site
Look up at the ceiling and wide expanse of walls
Why the controllers, the compassionless non-empathizers
The robotic rote reaction, the cold, the incalculable
Why the merciless insect rationale the
Complete absence of the minutest decent impulse?
You can say goodbye to your wench
‘Perfectly justified’ never draws off the stench

Why the beast, the lack of remembrance
They’re wheeling him in now, the litterateur who bit it
The lover and conveyor unloved and degraded
Why the lies and psychopathy, the mean
Errant vacuousness and the disgrace
The ignoble dragging down, the callousness
The terrible unkindness of control, the paranoia
The emptiness of unreason and the stupidity (of the season)
The morass, the gutter, the lack of respect
Why the hideousness, the horrorshow horrors (let’s break her neck)
These are the professionals and before they go
Why the death? ‘I’m not afraid of being shy,’ the great one said.
‘I’m afraid of being morose.’
Go ghost, hasten to thy peace.
Did you think you lived to be treated like this?