Origin of Life The origin of life starts from the mythical zero and the death of the enigmatic God before the immenseness that I am an escape from the unheard-of authenticity I learn to grow old by stumbling, by searching for my life in the Beginning of Time light isn’t the exclusive property of the baby who vaguely remembers darkness and knows that greediness exists in the innocence of things in the whistling sound of water beyond the shadows over another land each being a goodbye that floats over the flattened time over the foggy skull of the old man tightly held by the net that signals to the water verses that once it tried to discover in the origin of kites.
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School Days The Colson district had a small schoolhouse situated in the corner of a farmer’s field, one and a half miles northwest of the Fielding farm. When it was built in 1920 the children of the district almost filled the thirty seats in the one-room learning establishment. According to the registers stored at the Department of Education in the capital city of Regina, Benjamin Fielding attended school there up to the end of the seventh grade. Had anyone investigated those old records, they may have noted that it was not uncommon for the formal education of a boy from the districts to terminate anywhere after grade seven. Seldom did a boy’s name appear beyond the ninth grade. The McNeill brothers were the exception. Their grandfather, Andrew McNeill, had a healthy respect for education, a characteristic he passed down to his son and thence to his grandsons. And although Dave, being the eldest, did not have the advantages of his younger brother, he did manage to complete the tenth grade with excellent marks, before his services were required full time on the farm. Alan, on the other hand, was one of the few country boys who went on to high school in Bradshaw, graduating in 1939, only months before the onset of the Second World War. Dave, like his father and grandfather before him, was committed to procuring the best possible education for any offspring he might produce. So, even before his son was born, Dave began to take an active interest in the Colson school district. Two years after arriving home from overseas he became a trustee on the school board which, since 1947, had been chaired by Arnold Johnson. Sarah had been inside Colson School only once, shortly before…
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4 Therefore I sit and contemplate: what man has that is truly his since my life assumes its importance when I narrate it to someone like daylight that is important to the blind who, at least, need to be seen thus I sleep in peace knowing that someone else risks on my behalf, the one they know, only that each morning, just not to betray myself, I have to gather the broken pieces of the nightmare and Uncle Elias, very old, powdered with talc, since he lived humbly, returned each Christmas and spent his evenings making birds, not real ones, just to make sure they wouldn’t lift up the house again; in fact, one night I retried, and I swore with such empathy that the few cloths I had placed in the room almost dried up, yet just that, and the bed, Judas the Iscariot, betrays me to them every morning I therefore preferred to walk aimlessly, a true delight to my kind of people, and then I truly found myself close to my life, like the very sick who love the next fellow and who stand absentmindedly under the trees or wear old pyjamas or die fast like honeymoons and Mr. Such and Such was very joyous when he made money though that didn’t stop him from slapping me two or three times a day so that my poor mother’s milk went bad and we had to exhume her so other seasons wouldn’t be in danger; Besides, how can I learn new tricks at my age? In fact I’d like to stop here for a moment as it happens in old transcribed glorious documents or like the drunkard who stands in front of the icons for a while before he goes to spend the funeral money on drinks and then the expulsions from parish to parish, short affairs with the handrails, mysterious way of wearing the same hat all the time and this woman at the end of the road, so forgotten that her steps are heard from inside all the fairy tales; then there is always a sorrow for ourselves in all our illusions like our true residence that lasts as long as a song.
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…“I’m going out. I’ll be back in two hours. I don’t want to find you here when I get back,” she said in a stern voice and left. He sank into his armchair in a world that had collapsed around him. His wife didn’t want to see him again. Where could he go? His life was a big question mark. His life was so arranged and well set up until this morning. His life of order and security has suddenly become chaos and disarray, a gigantic open mouth ready to swallow him. His orderly life has turned into a disorderly one. How could he live now? How could he face his co-workers on Monday? Could he talk to someone? Did he have anyone to talk to? A quick thought flashed through his mind, and he felt shivers travelling through his whole body. He walked upstairs to their bedroom. Everything seemed to be in place. Then why does his life feel upside down? He stepped into the closet. His clothes hung orderly in it. On the top shelf, he groped for the box. He took it down. Went to the bathroom. He placed the box on the counter. He opened the box: he looked at his service revolver. He hadn’t cleaned it in a while. Like a zombie, he loaded his pistol with ammunition. He stared at himself in the mirror. The code. Yes, he remembered the code they all followed, their protocol. That dark thought ran through his mind again, and this time it didn’t make him shiver at all. He felt peaceful. He felt better. The code was what he had followed all his life. A code, a protocol, the secure way of a CIA agent. It’s the same code he had to follow to the bitter end. When everything goes into disarray, and everything becomes nothing but chaos, the code must come into place. Tears flowed down his cheeks as he stared at his face and then faced the pistol in his hand. Suddenly, a euphoric sense of well-being overtook him as if someone was protecting him. He felt strong, good, and comfortable. Heroic. He smiled at himself. He winked at himself. What would she think when she found him? Would she cry? Would she laugh at him exiting this way? His eyes filled with tears, and somehow, he felt an inexplicable warmth, as if in a different state of mind, in that dimension that various books described. He put the barrel of the pistol in his mouth and, following the example of so many others before him, Bradley pulled the trigger.
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…Emptied is the golden barrel the sun became a rag with a middle-aged woman’s neck whose cough never ends; she grieves for the end of summer with its gold on her shoulders and on her mound. Oh woman who lost your light hear, the blind man sings. It got dark, close the windows; make flutes from yesterday’s canes, and don’t open no matter how they knock; they shout but have nothing to say. Take cyclamens, pine needles, lilies from the sand, sea-anemones; oh woman who lost your mind listen, the water’s ghost goes by… ‘Athens. Events occur rapidly, the people have heard. The minister declared. There is no time left…’ ‘…take cyclamens…pine needles… lilies from the sand…pine needles… oh woman…’ “It is definitely stronger. The war…”
“I bet none of your sons’ll be fishermen,” Sweeney argued. “You can’t make a decent living at it any more. The whole industry’s gone mad.” He reached out and poured the formerly rejected half bottle of porter into a glass. “What did it cost to run a boat before the war? A hundred pounds a week maybe. Now it costs around three, four hundred. Even more for the big boats. You’re paying out more than you’re taking in.” “I’m not.” “Then you’re an exception, Joe; and I wish I knew how you did it.” Sweeney was staring at the pale, frothy head in his glass of porter. Then he looked up at Joe. “It must be galling for you to get tuppence or thruppence a pound for your fish at the quayside and watch the fishmongers in their shops rake in anything from sixpence to half a crown.” “And there’s damned little going for sixpence, I can tell you,” said Slattery. “In fact the housewives in the city are complaining because they can’t get enough fish, and the fishermen are complaining because they can’t get rid of it. I hear that whitings were so plentiful during Lent that fishermen couldn’t give them away. They had to send them to the manure yard. I think Michael was wise to sell out. Not that he’s a fisherman anyway.” “Speak of the Devil and he appears,” said Sweeney. “How are you, Michael? Come and join us.” Michael and Caitlin had just appeared at the dining-room door and looked in. “We’re going pretty soon,” said Joe Carney. “Don’t give us that impatient look.” “They’re not very hospitable, are they, Joe?” Sweeney teased with a leer. “Wouldn’t you much rather be surrounded with good friends, lots of food and plenty to drink on a miserable, wet night like this than stuck in here all alone with nothing to do and no one to talk to?” “I would to be sure, Sweeney,” Joe agreed. “Come on, you two, sit down, have another drink, enjoy the craic.” “I think we should take the hint and go,” said Seamus Slattery. “It’s getting to be very late. This isn’t one of Finn’s parties.” “You don’t have to leave on our account,” said Caitlin. “Oh, I think we do,” Slattery declared. “It’s been a long and memorable day for you two lovebirds.” “Well, your wife’s still gossiping in the kitchen,” said Sweeney. “Go and grab hold of her and tell her it’s time to go home. Come on, we’ll all go together.” Twenty minutes later the house was empty, and Michael and Caitlin sat…
III Our years were spent amid the bullets of friends, enemies, revolutions and wars bullets of official and unofficial forces killing bullets aimed at the back, neck, piles of dead people and others and others. You see them scattered amid the old metal pieces, silent bullets, cold, rusted you don’t realize that with such material we built our houses, that each wall, because of the bullets was our prison, our exile, our underground life. Yet sometimes we pushed the wall down, we defeated the enemy we were again victorious, then we found ourselves surrounded by other, bigger walls, while the populace always followed, and following they shed their blood.
Delphi Even this solemn remnant of the ancient temple standing like an anchorite in meditation on the slope of the tired hill even this they will defile remember it — I said half-breed men with wide shoulder-blades and hierodules with exquisite cheekbones swaying their provocative buttocks for the amusement of the winds and for the salinity of the smooth sea even this they will defile remember it—I said aimlessly before the innocent statues they will desecrate and life a whore they will call and with stamina and unyielding persistence they will bury the primeval beauty and after they exhume the ancestral hatred and guilt, they will imprison pneuma to be guarded by Herculean arms and theirs the wealth of the valley and my kin’s reward blood-shed in streets and neighborhoods where you and I once roamed and played making plans for exploits and deeds and you said — it would have been better if we stayed obedient to the holy and venerable half-truths brought to our lands by easterners at least they promised a gleaming Paradise
Transmutation What escapes through the windows to the night outside to an unclear dimension, that is ours, is carefully hidden in our pockets, along with the keys, in many drawers along with the correspondence, pictures, and newspaper cut-offs and stars that are the same as the chairs in a hall that visitors’ empties after the funeral. The chairs, mixed up as they are, remain in their lonely tidiness indifferent about a line, about a priority. And then you can sit on any of them, comfortably, in a friendly and no preconceived distance from this dead man or the other, and while you take a cigarette and you light the match, suddenly, you see your gesture aimed at you. You stop. You change your movement, offering the light to them, so they can light their cigarette first. For a moment, their shoes gleam in a new black colour, and the
…on the missing list, and despite the owner’s reassurances, Ken had a bad feeling. It so happened that he was visiting a home down the way on Nile Creek business and there, proudly displayed on the walls, were his missing paintings. He asked how long the family had them and was told they’d been purchased several months previously. They were curious as to why he was enquiring, and Ken explained the gallery had never paid him. They felt terrible. You can imagine what that does to a gallery’s reputation. When I asked the owner what was going on, he claimed the potential buyer hadn’t made up his mind yet. How stupid is that? At the same time he was telling people that I was the best thing ever to happen to his gallery. My paintings were generating 60% of his business, but even at that he was prepared to cheat me. Well, he did tell me he was a pathological liar—I guess he didn’t lie about that.
