LAST NIGHT IN MY DREAM Last night in my dream I saw our newly born Christ as cows blew on him their hot breath. His forehead was like the sun though the manger was so poor and each of the magic gleams shone brighter than daylight. The Magi leaned over his feet and the star up high above looked like a crown ready to place upon the hair of Virgin Mary. Shepherds and shepherd girls knelt reverently before him, blonde angels stood and sang Hosannas round him. Yet of the angels and the Magi I never felt more envious than of his mother’s lips and her warm, her so warm kiss.
The Sentence to Oblivion Who would estimate for us the sentence to oblivion?
Stop, passer-by, before the still lake; the curly sea and the tormented ships the roads that surrounded mountains and birthed stars everything ends on this immense surface. Now you may watch the swans calmly look at them, they are white like a night’s sleep without touching anywhere, they slide on a thin blade that raises them slightly over the water. They are like you, stranger, the still wings and you understand them while the stone eyes of lions look at you and the tree’s leaf remains uninscribed in the sky and the slate pencil pierced the prison wall. And yet the birds that slaughtered the village girls weren’t other than them the blood turned the milk red on the street’s flagstones and their horses noiselessly drew in the troughs illegible shapes like molten lead.
…she died of consumption, God rest her soul. Flynn was well up in his teens by then and already working in McGuigan’s quarry. But he grew up with a chip on his shoulder as big as a boulder and a fierce hatred of the English that he’s nurtured for years.” “He needs to learn the lesson of forgiveness,” Padraig remarked. “Forgiveness is a rare commodity in Ireland, Padraig,” Mother Ross said. “Irishmen never forgive and never forget. That’s their nature.” She paused, staring into the hearth. Then she asked, “What about Caitlin?” “What about Caitlin?” Padraig repeated with more feeling than he meant to show. Mother Ross looked suspiciously at Padraig, but gave him no inkling of the thoughts that rushed through her mind. “Is Caitlin ready to be married in church?” “She is now, yes,” Padraig replied with a touch of petulance. “Finn didn’t know, did he?” Padraig walked across to the door and leaned against the wall beside it. His shoulder and his broken ribs were painful. “Oh Finn knew all right,” he said, but his face had an uncomfortable, guilty look. Mother Ross made no comment. She felt that Padraig and Caitlin together had indecently betrayed the man who had been closest to both of them. And yet she could not see how anyone but Finn MacLir himself could live outside the Church. She was happy for Caitlin, but disappointed at the same time. “Then they won’t have to wait long before they can be married.” “They have only to name the day.” Neither Mother Ross nor Padraig spoke, and they were still silent when voices and footsteps were heard outside, and doors opened both in the front and the back of the house. “I still think we should have buried his wine alongside of him,” someone said. “Yes, think how happy he’d be if he woke up one night and found it there beside him.” “He wouldn’t want to get out.” “Not till the bottle was empty at any rate.” “Bottle be damned; he drank it by the barrelful.” “What an old sot he was.” “Ay, but you don’t find his likes below every hedge.” “I’ve heard many a woman between Iceland and the Isle of Wight say the same thing about him.”
In any case, she suspects that in recent months he became bored with the whole techno consumerist thing, because she no longer heard the all-night jingle of marathon game-play with Doom Wizards of Gorm, he abandoned his painful experiments with sampling and sequencing old guitar riffs, he now longer nagged her for a loan to buy a faster modem or a bigger hard drive. And he’d play the drawling media philosopher over breakfast, displaying a growing impatience with the digitised world-picture. “The trouble, you see, with Virtual Reality, Pauline, is that it will all be designed in Tokyo. You’re going to walk around in a Japanese executive’s dream helmet . . .” She’d ignored such performances—typical of his late night TV manner, which she’d found so irritating when she was trying to cope first thing in the morning with lesson plans and job applications, an overdraft and and mental overdrive. But discs and cartridges are littered all over the table, the floor, the bed, as if he’d tossed them away in disdain, packages of memory that had somehow failed him. His books are stacked on the sagging shelves behind the bed. Many were actually hers, donated to help him with A levels, like all those Pelicans on sociology and history. Of course, he never opened them. And he’d only done half the literature coursework properly, and then perversely he’d concentrated on a few obscure corners, like symbolism in Yeats, while flippantly trashing George Eliot or Jane Austen in random bursts of invective, not for any clearcut ideological reason. Lucas wouldn’t read systematically, he’d rather drift around CND jumble sales trawling for dog-eared things like Colin Wilson’s The Outsider or those poems of mad skinny Patti Smith, or coffee-table books on Salvador Dali.. Here’s Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. ‘These metaphysical detective stories take the reader through the forking gardens of Time and Space!’ Forking hell . . . She sprawls across the bed for a closer look, across crumpled paper tissues, yellowing vests, that horrible black shirt with eagles on the buttons, his broken sunglasses . . . She never bought an ex-library copy of The Rosicrucian Mysteries. Or The Ufo Encyclopedia. And what’s this disintegrating edition of Morning of the Magicians doing in her flat? A signed copy. ‘Nick Beardsley, London, 1966’. She can hardly bear to touch it. ‘The black tide of occultism.’ That’s what old Daddy Freud called this yuck stuff. This is a residu, a glistening slug-trail excreted by Nick, and it looks as if it’s sticking to Lucas. She’d thought she’d got rid of all Nick’s ticky-tacky rubbish. And here she goes again, hurling it across the room, any moment now she’ll find some more lurid trash. They’re all the same, stupid schoolboy men.
…farmer’s crops in preparation for a lean winter. We would spot coyotes loping across fields or chasing down field mice. The magpies became even noisier and the crows would start bunching as they began their preparations for the long flight south. But most impressive was the sight of waterfowl as they flew overhead, the geese in their perfect formations, noisily announcing their over-flights, and the ducks, less organized but in even greater numbers than the geese. They came by the thousands, and when low, we clearly heard the flutter of their wings. School classes lasted forever and it was difficult to get serious about homework when there was serious activity waiting for us outdoors. We would hurry home to see if threshing had started and to head out to the threshing site and watch the activity. After the harvest, the days quickly shortened and the fall season intensified, with the cold rains of mid-autumn inexorably turning into the snows that would blanket the earth for the next six months. The first morning after a major snowfall was an exciting time, with new winter clothes donned and new pathways made to school. We would be careful about these first paths, taking shortcuts but also keeping to areas sheltered from cold north winds. These paths were followed all winter and we would walk single file, occasionally backwards if strong head winds were blowing. The school was directly east of our home and we often walked facing a rising sun which, pleasant as it was, had no warmth radiating from it and frequently had a pair of sundogs, the harbinger of even colder and stormier weather to come. We noted all such phenomena and asked our parents about them after school. After major storms the winds cleared the softer snow away, leaving the packed snow of the paths exposed and raised in the open fields and pastures. Elsewhere, through woodlots, the new snows covered the paths and we made new trails to follow. After major storms the banks of hard packed snow at the edges of woodlots, where the wind swirled and piled the snow, would tempt us to climb and explore before moving on towards school.
A few days later, Demetre and Hermes departed for Athens. As they got in the taxi for the trip to the port of Souda, Hermes Dragakis looked at the village, at the square with the puddles where children played. When the taxi drove farther away, he turned and looked again from afar and suddenly had an inexplicable fear for his people. He was leaving behind a part of his soul, here, in this village where he was born, with all the rocks and ruggedness, the simple people, the brandy and mushrooms, and Uncle Gerry’s openhearted warmth. Hermes promised himself that one day he would return to stay longer; to live with them, to be reborn among them, just as every living being is reborn. Then again, this fear overtook his heart, and he turned to look at Demetre, who was absorbed in his own thoughts.
Before we existed the Earth lived, before it spread its plains it was alive with its knowledge and wisdom; in the primeval days water and fire fought many wars over the soft body of this earth, and the two enemy elements made peace and lived together and the world shone its joy and purpose; you, oh harmony, and the seed of the great father stirred in the womb of the endless sea which gave birth to us too and when the verdure of the forests glowed with life the world assumed a joyous, unimaginable beauty. And when man walked upon the Earth his mind shone like a new sun that fogged the heavens.
Protect yourselves from the panic that spreads soon after blood stains the asphalt protect yourselves from the club of the cop the accusation of the informer from the indifferent crowd who will fill the streets again protect yourselves from the spring, the following summer the travel arrangements and personal reveries from the two future husbands who argue where the dead people were laid protect yourselves from the poets who steal verses from graves of the unknown.
‘Susan, that’s unkind.’ Clifford considered Susan rather trying at times. ‘It’s also unkind of you two to get on to shop-talk when we’re out enjoying ourselves,’ Susan countered. ‘Ask her to join us. Let’s give her a good time.’ ‘Maybe I will in a moment.’ Clifford took a thoughtful sip of his brandy. ‘I suppose Liam’s looking after the children,’ said Fiona. ‘Or Nora’s mother is,’ Clifford suggested. ‘You mean that pretty girl has children already?’ John could not conceal his surprise. ‘Two of them,’ Fiona answered. ‘A boy and a girl.’ ‘She didn’t waste any time,’ Ian remarked. ‘They’re young, of course,’ said Fiona. ‘Four years and two and a half, I believe.’ ‘Don’t look now, Ian Anderson,’ said John, ‘but Clifford has just gone to get you a woman: a dark beauty of black, remorseless tragedy.’ ‘You’re drunk, John Simpson,’ Susan said. ‘How many sneakies did you have at the bar?’ ‘Listen to her, Ian,’ John said. ‘Not a month married and she’s nagging the hell out of me already. Are you sure you really want a wife?’ ‘Very sure,’ Ian replied firmly. ‘I don’t imagine that you would be nagging Julian, Catriona,’ John said, ‘when you are only a month into your marriage.’ ‘I’d wait for two months,’ said Catriona. Like Ian’s, her voice too was richly seasoned with Fiona’s lost ‘oats and haggis.’ ‘You’d better watch that one, Julian,’ John warned light-heartedly. ‘What Clifford didn’t tell you,’ Fiona began, leaning forward to speak in confidence, ‘is that he delivered that young lady—at her birth, I mean—when he was barely two months into his internship. It was a very difficult placenta previa delivery that required a C-section under the most primitive conditions. He almost lost the mother and the baby too.’ ‘Good old Clifford,’ said John. ‘A born surgeon and one of the best we have in the country.’ ‘But the sad result of Clifford’s first major surgery,’ Fiona said, ‘is that the mother was left unable to bear children. Clifford blames himself for that. Unfairly, I think. Given his age and inexperience at the time, he did well to save the lives of both the mother and her baby. But he rarely talks about it. He has received both high commendation and strong condemnation from the local doctors in the area.’
I walked to the far ends of the world and talked to the northern and southern races about elegance and freedom that enhanced the ultimate perfectness for self-discovery and acceptance and they all laughed at my face such a selfish man I was that they called me names foolish and a laughingstock of my days and when I stood guard at the western borders I was taken as a lunatic like all other defenders of our ancient traditions which appeared through cracks of my mind past, forgotten days and discarded months to unforgettable years when I talked to the dead soldiers and became merciless when I stood at the far ends of the world as time was allotted only once and only once I had the chance to turn injustice into justice.
Manolis Aligizakis 