Wind on Water
They say ‘wind on water.’ It sounds like God, moving on the face of the waters – a spirit, you see, something ineffable, and something light but full of as much power as exists in the world – held back out of love. And Rahab’s corpse must be underneath it somewhere rotting away.
And above it, there are hotels and their barely-there balconies, and there are people walking hand in hand, and the movement of the wind on the water is almost illusory – they are away from the shoreline, away from the black body lying prone in the sand, away from the mystic reality of things. A machine roars and repeats itself, and feeds off itself – taking the human stock into its gaping Metropolitan mouth. Someone carves sandcastles on the beach with landscaper’s tools and the resulting structure looks fit to house a cowering king.
And there you are. And I wish I could be wind on water, too.
You don’t appear to fit in a place like this. It’s altogether too sunny, too exposed – and exposure is more dangerous than anyone on the beach realises – and there are very few birds about. And yet you are there anyway, unmoving and never leaving.
Why do you remain invisible? Like the wind. Touching the water that comes from my eyes. One, two three. One, two…calisthenics in the summer sand. Splashes distant and a sense of days never ending, only oscillating between a bright summer and a dark summer…
Evening Star
After a battle there must have been the point where the last soldier standing picked up his broken armour and waddled back home, clutching a dirty helmet under one bruised arm. He must have journeyed, safe, nearly totally exhausted, but alive, covered in blood under the stars, and he mustn’t have been able to take the armour off – it took a page to put it on, after all – and so he would rest wearing the mail and plate in the crook of an old dead oak tree, the shadows and the dirt and blood hiding glinting silver. And yet birds would have flocked around him. There would be little time to return, and he would sleep sparingly.
Something might have run over his leg as he slept and laid against the cold comforting bark. Removing his helmet, his hair would fall – dirty, awkward – and the back of the head newly covered in bark after an hour’s rest. He would have heard – from a village to which he didn’t belong – music in the distance, and the smell of dust and iron must have permeated everything. Footsteps, staggering.
All his banners would be left behind, and not regretted, for what is a nation but an expression of its people, and when the people change, do they not need new methods of expression? New keenings in the night? A doubled choir of voices begging for peace. Nothing survived the battle, save this one man.
Mud would grip his feet, still weighted down by metal boots. He would long for the return of his horse, which he left on the destitute battlefield – a pile of evil memory long behind him, to which he would never go back. And he would have remembered his home and his love and his duty. And, to return to them, he must have followed the evening star.
Evensong
New York. A concert, some Broadway production. Teeming. Every silhouette a soul in the fluorescent dark. And lost – so easily lost in a sea of cheap goods. Where’s your child? Over by that stone bench there. Central Park is different in the dark. The subways are still just as loud – and the streets aren’t much different, but a little less calm. This is the city that…
As all good cities. Expression at its most volatile and violent, and creative and full of opportunity too. The human wave washes on the shore and pulls all the shells with it into the sea.
Annabelle the actress didn’t wait for me.
Wind on Wind
Scraping metal the captain cries. Over a mug of rum. Over a keelhauling tuppence-bet. Get me the first mate. Get me the log. I need to write and check the scores from yesterday. I could swear you’ve flogged me again boy. Yes sir I will be back sir; here’s the book sir let me go sir. No, no, no. On a steam engine you go when you’re told not when you’ve asked boy. Have a drink. Yessir. Good. Those two red spots on your cheeks tell me you can’t hold it, so stop. Two red spots…I was your age once. Yessir. And I couldn’t hold my drink either. And now look at me. Only missing a shipment for the Dutch. The Japanese will be furious. And Loyola wouldn’t be happy if he were here. I can’t remember him anymore. I only met him once, as a young’un…
An Index of Metals
The light comes on slowly. See the light?
Just barely there up on the left. Well, I say left, but I can only say that because it’s given meaning by the light. You get it?
Ahh, how do I explain this again? Look, Basil Brush. Wagging his tail through molasses and melted wax. And Cousin Mortimer swift as the wind. Puppets and illusions. You need them gone. Only light, only light, only light.
Now you hear it humming? That’s the electrical current. And we’re now waiting for you to read this. And this, and this here. And sign this?
Some kind of punishment? I wouldn’t say so. It’s merely life. So accept it while it’s here and you’ll miss it when it’s gone. Life on earth, an index of…
Plasma floats in the sky above Constantinople, five figures in blue aprons drink whiskey above the city. They are readying a centennial celebration and they are not sure what to do, but the drink is there and the people do not know – well, there is a humble fruit shop outside, and there is a son working there who is a political troublemaker. And the owner has sometimes seen the men come out of the building staggering blind with the veil of care around them. Some would call it drunkenness but it’s merely life…
An index of…
A butcher is shouted at in a crowded kitchen, his hands chapped and bloody, and a young lady admires him surreptitiously from a distance. In a function hall, a man in a green suit contemplates suicide surrounded by a furore of noise.
Twelve dancers are holding swords. Six are dressed as pirates. They go, two by two, one pirate to one man, and clash swords, twirling about low, then high, and then the pirates raise their blades like rods and block the tough downward strikes one, two three for five and six…then they reverse and the pirates gain the upper hand. They go in twos again. Clash! Clash! Kill him! Kill him! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill your children!
A pirate dies in a torrent of black blood. The rest have their throats slashed like goats, one by one. Snip. Slick. Red. Dirt. Snip. Snip. Three four five six. The bodies are empty sacks and they are strung up on pikes and displayed above the hills, banal crucifixes. What remains for their children? The taste of liquor and must. Dark cellars and the master’s quarters. Crowns behind glass and crows pecking out the eyes of civilisation. A Minoan could have done no better. And a Mycenaean would have done far worse. Aesthetics drives cruelty – they even look for beautiful deaths for themselves. Best trust crudity. Artistry is incapable of honesty.
The youth who summons the assassin god and the wise woman does not have subtlety within him, cannot perform the rites – he cannot kill for himself and this is why he needs to summon the god, and yet the god is summoned with a kill – and yet, the lack of ability to kill is why the god comes to him. A thousand tired hierophants roll their eyes at the empty altar in frustrated silence, and contemplate removing the veil.
I’ll kill your children!
Can you trust wind on water? Can you trust a ship approaching? A messenger, a cripple in the masked dark? Someone who can act on stage can act offstage. We don’t remember that. Snip, red dirt. Gum. Flavourless gum in the brown-red mountains. And sap, leaking into the shouting earth. Can you hear it?
Do your senses work properly? You should be able to see a light, infinite, in this senseless darkness. And you should hear a screaming, wordless and senseless, shaking everything. You should feel the need to stand up and stomp your feet and smell iron and rusted fetters. You should know a thousand years pass by in a second, and you should smell sex, sweat, sweet death. These trees cannot bind you. They must be watered with blood!
Everything is watered with blood. You sacrifice your skin for the earth. You can hear what it tells you to hear and see what it tells you to see. You are otherwise blind. The system does not work; Asterion the administrator of the maze has given up tours and now hunts those who try to visit, even if they have a season pass. He does not care about society, he does not care about what others say. He runs around in the labyrinth eating his critics. He is all of us, and we all live in a thousand mazes being led about by a thousand blind princes of Athens. We are at once Asterion and Theseus, the thirteen remaining children and Minos, and Ariadne awaiting our own mind’s decision.1
Asterion decides to turn off the computers and look at the waning stars. His sister is among them. He bleats sadly for he has no strength to roar.
Asterion needs to go back to work tomorrow. The computers will be turned back on – the thing Daedalos left him to play with, which someone thought marketable, which became Asterion’s job. A fairground attraction.2
He also lets them leap over him for twenty bucks a buck.
And how many obnoxious plays?
And Ivan Ivanovich the censor is reading a manuscript. He doesn’t like it. It has a dark undertone. What appears to be a staunch defence of socialist realism is in fact a harsh and terrible criticism. Ivan Ivanovich rips the offending pages away and blacks out offensive words in the rest. As he does, he feels his sense of self returning. This was always his goal – to be an editor, an artist, a writer. Look at what he and the author have made together! A perfect storm has created a classic, an example of their universe between two covers. They will be hailed as genius for centuries to come, as the Soviet machine calms itself and eventually allows itself to look back at the early days. But only if these few pages are shredded promptly.3
Where’s the machine?
Does your world have a lot of colour? Does yours have a lot of wind on water? Mine once had a lot of friends.
An ecofascist with two children who marries royalty.
Another thing, too. But it does not do one well to avoid waiting. One must know when not to write – when to remain silent during the creative act.
Music is the cup that holds the wine of silence he said.
And a moment of silence followed.
…
It felt like wind on…
St Germain in his mystery chamber, contemplating his symbols: his black Kaaba, his feather called this, his vial called that, his bunch of grapes never to rot and never to eat; Faust with his pesticides and colour theory and ancient reaching fantasy…St Germain the alchemist, with an index of…
Scraping the ship against the bottom of the drained dockyard. Where’s the flood when you need it?
Look, look! Boron! To add to the index…
1 I wrote this before I read Pelevin’s Helmet of Horror.
2 I wish to stress the above again.
3 And before I read Generation P as well.
Sometimes I suspect time moves backwards.
verso folio 