Goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight, goodnight…
Burning-Time
Do I remember the burning-time? Of course I remember the burning time. What else could one remember? I lived it as fully as one breathes the air, as one thinks at night, as one is conscious of themselves at the climax of the night. I was fully within its body, its embrace, its grasp. Those times shaped me — I became history, in a sense — and all I am now is a reflection of those days, a mirror into the past. Look here, my left palm tells of July 7th, but my right eye tells of December 17th — you tell me, do I remember burning-time~!
Of the fires.
I remember. There were so many little fires, appearing here and there, skirting between the edges of my mind. One could look through windows and see a blaze on the top of the neighbor’s head as he drank his blood-orange tea. Everything, I tell you, everything had a little fire going. There was a fire in the way one would hustle about, a fire in the music which everyone spoke to each other, a fire in the ways the trees danced in the gale sunrise. There was a fire of the lighthouse on that old, sandy, shore, illuminating the irises of many who had been moon-wrought for so long. A lighthouse, a workshop of fire. A sea-man, a workshop of tears.
At times the fires would diminish, hide away, run. We would be left with only little candles in our grasping arms, reaching out in the cold for the hearth. I remember the winters when we would trudge along by some old bagpipe, a song from some ancient land — each of us holding a drop of hope, a little flare of what might come. There was the hill we would stand at, overlooking the darkness below, and the belfries above. There the ravens would make castles, walking to and fro like night watchmen. What a peculiar world, a peculiar time. The ravens never did respond.
It was all burning, and it never did stop. There was a fire in the way the busman tipped his hat to you in the morning, in the way the sunlight would shine on a broken column by the long-vacant shipyard. The fire was in the masts of the sails, rocking to and fro like the tremors of an ancient giant unchained. The fire radiated our lands, centering us and yet pushing each one away from the truth within ourselves. Fire from fire, light from light. This was the motto we lived by, we, the children of the embers, of the shattered teacup, of the unrung telephone. In each alley lay an undiscovered blaze — illuminated for whom? — waiting.
I remember the fires.
Of the men.
They were so long in coming, I do recall — and their faces -! Yes, their faces, each like a white clapboard wall. Some men were concrete-eyed, others were wooden- but those who had the fire, those who were burning had the faces which reflected oneself back. We used to shine little beams on their faces at twilight, taking shards of mother’s mirror, reflecting the gleam of a little lamp back on the whole neighborhood by the illumination of my father’s face. He could light up a whole block just like that — a real fireman!
My father was the lighter of the town. He would slink among the streets at night, forging refuge out of the tumid air. Here a little chapel, there a little respite. I believed he was a god, for his constellations protected the whole town. “Here I go!” I remember him saying, once — “Here I go, I, the unknown, I the maker of civilization!” That was his motto every night, as his blackened hat would bump the door-frame on his way to work. He was only partly right. The town would never be safe under him. Did he only light the candles for himself? Or perhaps for another? Civilization! What a ridiculous idea. In reality he lit the candles for nobody. The windows had already closed on him long ago, the eyes had already fallen heavy under the blankets of snow which caressed the whole of existence. My father merely fought against the snow in vain. Not for man, not for civilization — but for what? Purpose? Warmth? Truth? Justice? It does not matter now. The snow has long since swept him away. He is beyond where I hope.
I knew father never lit the candles for others because he never lit them for me. Our house was always terribly cold when he would return from his pilgrimage. The mice would scatter between the ivy which grew under mother’s dress in anticipation of his return, chanting such phrases, hieroglyphs beyond understanding. It was always a blizzard in our house, house of cobwebs, house of what-ifs. Here there was a blackened spot, a broken board, a rusted tie. We did have candles — oh, so many candles, so many lights! Our house illuminated could’ve been an opera. I would scurry between the empty passageways, starting the first act in the garden, the second in the shower, and the third when my eyes closed to the invisible sound of a dagger plunge, an empty fall, a coarseless tomb, a broken king. Night after night, darkness after darkness. Father never lit the lights, so I lit them in the depths of my mind.
I never did see his eyes.
Of the women.
The women — oh yes, they were far away. We never saw them so much. I believe they were behind the walls. My mother was always away somewhere, cleaning or cooking or simply being — we never really knew, to be honest. We saw only suggestions of our mothers, of the cleaning-lady, of the actress at the local theater. They always suggested, and we always accepted. Sometimes, on a red afternoon, I would enter the kitchen and know my mother was there by a scratch in the wall, a whisper from the drainpipe. There would be a pie on the windowsill, of course (always freshly baked-!), but mother was never so proud, she only spoke through the mice, through the cupboard, through the creaking of the floorboards. My mothers. I knew they were there, and yet, perhaps not.
Of the Olden Ones.
They would grow in the back garden, and with the seasons they would mould themselves into our lives. I would leave grandmother as a beautiful little thing one moment and return the next week to see her veiled on the garden fence, held up only by the will of a single stem (a whole garden of brain-stems, one might say). Grandfather slithered along the ground by the house, croaking breaths of steam and ash along his way. At night, the guitar would come from the attic, and I would know he was smoking his pipe which heated our whole house. By winter they would be gone, were gone, are gone. In the end they were only suggestions as well, only mirrors unto themselves. Their funeral, I could only afford a single wilted lilac. Their grave? The knot of the old tree which had fallen a long time ago, perhaps in some ancient empire — now only a suburban tract (how the kings have fallen, I thought!).
There were many stories that they would whisper from down the vine. I would lean close to the trumpet-beans on hot summer days and listen to a ballad, or a sonnet, or freshly picked ode. In their inconsistency I saw only myself reflected through their age. The Olden Ones knew how to tell, for they had seen so much — and thank god for the dirt, thank god! It was the only attachment we had to reality, to the fires, to the world itself. I would find myself slipping down the well, down further into myself the more I let the winds wash over me. The more I was with them, the more undone I became. It was as if the garden made me a long bundle of wool, the seasons and stories unraveling my string into an indecipherable enigma of strands, faces, strings, stories. The Garden is a dangerous place. The Olden Ones knew it well.
Be careful, they said — Be careful, for the fire is fading. For it is burning all around, and yet — for whom?
Of the dark.
Burning-times need quiet spaces, and so there were. There were little holes in the fabric of everyday everywhere. They would appear here and there, like old friends which drank from the wellspring of existence, spreading out as an inkblot does on an unfinished page. There were holes everywhere — children were always falling into them, running from the fires, running from something, god knows what. We were always running, it was madness. Running to where? Perhaps it was already destined that we should’ve fallen.
I remember the hole in our house, that little black spot at the foot of our endless staircase. The other children said it arrived on the day I was born (perhaps with a suitcase and a business plan too, I imagined) that it made its home among the floorboards, waiting for just one wrong step, just one false word, before it would swallow me into the icy colds before, the dissonant void where we knew so many had gone. The ivy would reach up and bring me down, just as the sun was about to break. I never knew why. But I always believed.
I avoided the hole like a one does the thought of ends. It was uncomfortable. It was both a friend which I knew would return each morning, and yet an enemy which was there specifically to end me, to end my being, to end this. And so I would step around it, jump over it, walk by it a million and a more times before I realized, before I stopped, before I really came down to it and walked up to its face, putting mine to its, and saying to the floorboards in the quietest of quiets -
Why?
And it responded,
…
There is a romance in oblivion. Holes are there for all. There is a hole from which we are all born and there is a hole into which I shall die. This inkblot of a million years shall follow me forever. This inkblot of a million eyes shall be with me till my final fire expires on the grasshopper night, when midnight’s kiss arcs cross some unexplored sky. The hole from which I come, and unto which I return. The nameless horseman. Childhood knows it. Men try to forget it. I have only returned to it now, at the end of everything, at the littering of my past upon this page.
It comes, it goes. But for whom..?
Of the wars.
There was always a war, there were always be a war, there always has been. For, as long as we were burning, there was a need to put it to good use. I remember those haggard faces behind window after window, chanting on and on, like mad dogs, about the bullets and the bombs and the demobilizations of the industrializations, and of the blood which was spilled, and of the fires which were started. Oh, yes, we started so many fires. There were a million little fires all across the town, all across the world I imagined, coming from our men, our women. To fire is to make the new world. To become is to burn.
There were so many posters and plasters, placards and places. Each day new slabs were erected, each bleakly reading the names of a new list of whoever and what-could-i-cares. More plinths reading off rotaries, for which only gift-shop flowers will recite. Each memorial a new weakening, a new sunrise. So many names taken from faces, so many eyes doused from their fires. And yet, everything continued to burn — hotter still — I knew it among all that the fires continued, that despite the names we would go on.
I remember when they raised the black-stone, the stone of a million masks, the stone of the grand triumph. Oh, yes, there were men there in tassels and uniforms, parading around as if the enchant our tragedies with some kind of neolithic pride, and there whistles, and bassoons, as if they were trying to shake the dead from out the marble itself. And all I could think about was that each name was my name, and that each sunrise that story they had told had been told a million times before, and that I was only seeing the sunrise in the same way as the stone-men had, and how pointless all of this was, how useless the pomp and circumstance, how trivial the nighttime celebration. I remember the sickly-sweet carnival air, the roller-coasters blazing right through the tombstones, the merry-go-round under the arch of mourning. This black scab in the ground birthed only fake faces, horrible creations. The smell of sugar-fries made it hard to make out the names by the dings, the clashes and the clangs of the racket of absurdity. A clown with a soldier’s helmet. A pony with a bullet-hole. A man with a open eye. Such things I do remember, the jungle of the heartless carnival, the wilderness without tranquility.
I turned. The wars burned bright outside of men, but for whom?
They were cold inside.
