Category Archives: Writing

The dark birds are still hovering over us, X tells me. They’re still alive, still starving. They’re just waiting for the order to swoop, like in Lord of the Rings or something. We need to work together, he tells me, I need your help.

These words invoke their own absence. Thus I’ve written them before and will continue to write them, the form hardly matters, write and erase, combine and recombine, fruitlessly as they say of certain searches, that they’re ‘fruitless’. But what of a search that’s known to be fruitless from the start, what of the search that’s a search for itself?

One morning I awoke and knew with inexplicable conviction that I was ready. I walked into the living room, sat down before the television, pressed play on the recorder and drew up to the screen. I studied her face closely, closer than ever. I saw her face on the screen, I saw my face reflected on the screen, I saw our two faces superimposed on one another. Then my face moved back and I knew. I knew what people mean when they talk about compassion. I saw clearly what it was like to live in his world, and I felt compassion for him, mingled with joy at the realisation that I had found a way in. Cate’s grace flooded my mind like an undeserved gift. I understood that I had found my true home, that I had at last entered the mystery and left behind the wretched life of the flesh.

— From an old story

X and I sit in my room and nod with tiredness, look around at the walls, at each other, at nothing. We’ve reached the point where only black American roots music will help us, I tell him, sitting up. Sit still and listen for once, I tell him, as I look up Alan Lomax Archive. We sit and sip, smoke and sway as I put on song after song, from field hollering to prison chants to call-and-response preaching. Pure music, I tell him, the most moving music ever made, the voice of the body and mind in deep pain and joy. Country blues played on homemade instruments in raw recordings. A capella gospel. Shouting blues, soft plaintive blues, piercing harmonica blues. We go back and forth, listening to various versions of Cocaine Blues and Stack-O-Lee. I put on Appalachian songs and bluegrass, but return to black music. Black music conquers all, I tell X, it’s as powerful as a bottle of whiskey, if this doesn’t help us nothing will. I put on Leadbelly, Robert Johnson and Lightnin’ Hopkins. I put on the blind bluesmen, the ones who couldn’t work and learned to play the blues instead, the few who got recorded, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, Gary Davis and the great Blind Willie McTell, and here we take a detour to Dylan’s homage song and his two great cover albums from the 90s as I read the liner notes of World Gone Wrong aloud to X, neither of us understanding them. We go from The Mississippi Sheiks to Skip James to Tommy Johnson, the tortured Robert Pete Williams, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.  We go from Son House to Big Bill Broonzy to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Willie Brown and back again, then to Ali Farka Touré who gives us a glimpse of where it all came from – tomorrow it’s African music, I say, tomorrow we’ll sit here all day and listen to African music… Then back to Robert Johnson, the greatest of them all, the one who transcended the genre once and for all, the one with the purest cry, and we feel buoyed and even allow ourselves a smile. What was it about the Delta? I ask X. Was it the heat, the swamps, the suffering?

Do you remember when we walked up Mount Sinai? X asks me. In the middle of the desert? How long ago it seems now. Woken up in the middle of the night by our Bedouin guide who’d forgotten his torch because they can see in the dark? Trudging over desert rubble in the deep black except for the lights dotting the surrounding mountains, which our guide told us were the hermits’ lights? You almost shed a tear, didn’t you? You told me you could have been one of those, and I told you you were an idiot. And then you were bitten by that camel you got too close to in that pitch dark, weren’t you? And I laughed. That was the best part of the whole thing. We stumbled into a group of Bedouins we couldn’t see until we’d bumped into them. Calm people, the Bedouins. Maybe just bored of taking people up and down a big rock day in day out. But they must make many times their average wage, you said. We trudged uphill for hours to get to the top by dawn. No way old Moses could have done this without these paths and steps, you said, this is hard enough, and I laughed at you and told you you were a fool. How old was Moses anyway? you asked, and I said what does it matter, he obviously he never did it. So the whole tribe is waiting for him down there, you said, that must’ve been a bit stressful. You haven’t even read the book, I said, what do you know where they were?  The bald German woman who’d brought her poor uncomplaining little girl and who blanked you when you smiled at her. What kind of help was she expecting at the top? What were you expecting? Some great revelation? No, even you were beyond that by then. What were we then, tourists? I felt ridiculous. I hated you for getting me out of bed, for dragging me into the desert in the first place. I half expected you to start mumbling the Jesus prayer. Christ, I would’ve pushed you down the mountain. People wound their way up the mountain from different directions like streams of ants. Are we all going the same place? you asked. Where did they come from? and I laughed at you. The sky getting lighter as the climb got harder. Strong tea brewed by the Muslim Bedouins at outrageous prices, about the same as Caffe Nero. You started whingeing about vertigo. And when we got up there, do you remember? It was cold and overcast, not much of a sunset. I was bored and cold and tired and hungry. Well just think how those poor people felt walking through the desert, you said. They didn’t, I said, they wouldn’t have survived. Where did all these people come from? you said, and I sniffed. What the fuck am I doing up here with this asshole? I thought. Grey-faced Europeans singing their dreary Protestant hymns, drowned out by a group of exhausted old South American Catholics chanting their erotic prayers and waving their arms about: Abra tu boca, Seňor, dame tu lingua… They’ve probably saved up for this trip for years, you said. A few pale Eastern Europeans leaning on rocks. And the bald grumpy German woman with her child, giving you the evil eye. How you worried about that! And then, in the morning, knackered and dusty, after we’d generously tipped our Bedouin, eating breakfast in the monastery and taking a photo of the burning bush which the Orthodox monks still lovingly tend. Remember? The photo that came out bleached by the scorching sun, which you take everywhere we go? Ah, that was actually moving, wasn’t it, it moved both of us, didn’t it? It moves us both each time we look at it, doesn’t it? he says.

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

— Jeremiah 8:20

Tomorrow I have to call the electricity company, get an extension for the washing machine hose and do the shopping, can you help me remember that at least? I ask X. Coordination, I tell him, when we’re coordinated we can do anything. But in a free moment, in the briefest fall out of time I sink into my armchair and look around at my new flat, my orderly possessions, and wonder how I even got this far in life, how I managed to organise even this tiny corner of reality with him around. How do other people do it? The closer I look, I tell him, the more it all dissolves into mist, and the closer you come, with your rank breath and your poisonous whispers.

You’re a sycophant, X tells me, a toady, a toadstool, a stool. Who are you trying to fool? You’re the kind of man the police look for when they need a stoolpigeon. At least I’m honest, he says, at least I say what I feel. What are you hoping to achieve out there, smiling at those idiots? Why do you want everyone to like you, why do you want to be like everyone? Take a page out of my book, he says, stop being such a yes-man, at least say what you think. I used to be like you, he says, you remember, I used to need you to like me, until I realised you were my problem.

They’re looking at you, X tells me, they’re talking about you. What do you imagine they’re saying? Want me to tell you? No? You’re better off with me, he says, at least you know what you’re getting. Time to call it a day, he says, get a bottle and let’s have a quiet night in.

Shut up for a second, I tell X, can’t you see I’m busy? A house move is no joke, there are a thousand things that need doing, let me concentrate. You should be helping me focus my mind and energy. Instead, it’s like having a beggar tramping around with me everywhere I go. But at least when I’m busy you talk less. That’s what I should do, stay busy. Busy, busy, busy, then maybe you’d fade away and bother someone else. Isn’t that what people do, I say, think up some project and then another, call someone and then someone else, stay busy all day, then go to bed and wake up and do it all over again or think up different things to do, isn’t that how they get through life without topping themselves, without taking up with the likes of you in the first place? That’s what you should be helping me with if you really want to help, I tell him: staying in time. It’s when I drop out of time that I’m tempted to listen to you, watch you, as you breathe your rotten breath in my face and tug at my sleeve… Just stay with me, clean yourself up and be quiet if you really want to help, I say. Do as I do and shut up for a second, I have to assemble the bed and call the council.