Outside
View of the aimless lonely game of a schoolboy who is early awake and goes outside to throw a tennis ball against a cooking-apple tree and guess the angle of the bounce off the bark—
it isn’t very noisy play (if it can even be called play) but just the same perhaps it does disturb the elderly neighbours and if so do they make no complaint because they understand him being there like that on his own, making something out of nothing, and won’t risk depriving him of his tiny freedom?
Long afterwards all this comes back – the pity and the waste of time – when, at a church of middle-class euphoria some misplaced hope has led him to, a woman practicing what they call prophecy there places hands on him, breathes, closes her eyes and says,
I have this image of you as a boy in an orchard but terribly lost, it isn’t a tempting orchard, not a garden of delight, it’s a sort of gloomy blighted moon, no birds are singing, the wind is sharp and cold and worst of all there is no fruit
View of the aimless lonely game of a schoolboy who is early awake and goes outside to throw a tennis ball against a cooking-apple tree and guess the angle of the bounce off the bark—
it isn’t very noisy play (if it can even be called play) but just the same perhaps it does disturb the elderly neighbours and if so do they make no complaint because they understand him being there like that on his own, making something out of nothing, and won’t risk depriving him of his tiny freedom?
Long afterwards all this comes back – the pity and the waste of time – when, at a church of middle-class euphoria some misplaced hope has led him to, a woman practicing what they call prophecy there places hands on him, breathes, closes her eyes and says,
I have this image of you as a boy in an orchard but terribly lost, it isn’t a tempting orchard, not a garden of delight, it’s a sort of gloomy blighted moon, no birds are singing, the wind is sharp and cold and worst of all there is no fruit
He had just one friend, one clever friend who had steered him away from danger before; more than one pair of eyes looked at him with malice, sensed his weakness.
His love was his hope and his coat and his fiction. In this black hour his honour was his weakness.
He was losing his grip, he was heading for disaster.
In his dread and sorrow he dreamed he was a tropical steamship captain, an old man captain with a sailor’s beard, a skilled navigator finding secret routes out of every archipelago:
in the dream it is one of these hidden channels, you move through it like a minefield, the banks are overgrown, strange trees emerge everywhere, a shroud for the ship, a green and choking garment, a death coat drowning out the light drowning even this little splinter of sea
Attacks from the outside are different from attacks on the inside. At least the outside ones can be seen, even if there’s no time to evade, but the inside kind is basically poison, something bad (very bad) in the bloodstream—
you ask what’s wrong, you know something’s wrong, then you’re tired (very tired) and you need to find a nest.
*
This faded Boy Wonder has turned forty,
he remembers a love affair and other simpler sufferings. He has always worn his uniform (a golden fleece) but now it sticks and stings. He thinks his strength is being stolen.
He’s just a bag of nerves. He imagines himself nameless and alone. Is this his vertigo or his vision?
He remembers the old ovations,
pictures the ovations to come,
he must get back,
he would rather go on even a dreary commuter train than become a forgotten exile longing for reprieve—
in the mirror he practices cold business eyes
Pay no attention to the story that he was left in the dirt of the desert. No. It was higher up, in the humid and sloping woods—
branches crystallise the sunshine there.
It was in this shaded place that he was left, the predestined child who lies so strangely quiet in the patchwork light.
No cry of pain, no call for rescue; does he almost know what lies ahead, the horror and hardship? For he will be found, there is someone foraging nearby who will stumble here soon.
It is like a labyrinth where he is going, a walled-in world quite unlike this green and rustling shelter where sometimes there is the crack of a stem and always the camouflage net of light broken up in fragments while the child in the brief peace, and needing no company, waits in the home of the mountain god
SOMETHING
Letting loneliness speak doesn’t just come like someone speaking something in an ordinary way
maybe it has to be said by somebody else or it has to be said in a way that can’t be heard or understood
something can happen to a person, and maybe it happens a lot, and maybe it happens in ways that aren’t at all obvious – something can happen where a person gets cut off and they can’t communicate or they can’t be communicated with at a certain kind of level, and it would be an act of great importance, great moral and spiritual significance, to be able to cross that barrier,
not simply to stand on the other side of this cut-offness,
but I’m not even saying it’s possible.
It can’t happen in real time, in real life, in the actual encounter between two people because if it could there wouldn’t be such a thing as loneliness. For loneliness to exist, of the kind I’m talking about, it must be impossible to be communicated like that. It’s about finding or stumbling upon mysterious articulations on behalf of someone else, in some unreal space and time. Perhaps in such a way one person can remember and make sense of the unsayable loneliness and sadness of someone else.
And it’s too late
but still it’s something.
I live such a reclusive life now. I don’t see much of London any more. I don’t go on public transport often.
This sense that everywhere you look there’s social collapse, people obviously disturbed and unhappy. And then it just kind of fades away,
you get used to one sign,
the next sign,
you forget what it was like before.
...this beautiful sunset, or I don’t know what it is, not even sunset—
this darkening outside the windows
Letting loneliness speak doesn’t just come like someone speaking something in an ordinary way
maybe it has to be said by somebody else or it has to be said in a way that can’t be heard or understood
something can happen to a person, and maybe it happens a lot, and maybe it happens in ways that aren’t at all obvious – something can happen where a person gets cut off and they can’t communicate or they can’t be communicated with at a certain kind of level, and it would be an act of great importance, great moral and spiritual significance, to be able to cross that barrier,
not simply to stand on the other side of this cut-offness,
but I’m not even saying it’s possible.
It can’t happen in real time, in real life, in the actual encounter between two people because if it could there wouldn’t be such a thing as loneliness. For loneliness to exist, of the kind I’m talking about, it must be impossible to be communicated like that. It’s about finding or stumbling upon mysterious articulations on behalf of someone else, in some unreal space and time. Perhaps in such a way one person can remember and make sense of the unsayable loneliness and sadness of someone else.
And it’s too late
but still it’s something.
I live such a reclusive life now. I don’t see much of London any more. I don’t go on public transport often.
This sense that everywhere you look there’s social collapse, people obviously disturbed and unhappy. And then it just kind of fades away,
you get used to one sign,
the next sign,
you forget what it was like before.
...this beautiful sunset, or I don’t know what it is, not even sunset—
this darkening outside the windows