Part One: Never mind that for now

Valid twenty-three hours April eighteenth to twenty-three hours April nineteenth. Wind westerly force three, bearing southwest, good, three miles, one thousand and four, falling slowly. Around twenty two hundred a depression will bear westward carrying bands of rain with it to snake and smoke on the asphalt sideruns, clearing southwest and disappearing twenty two fifteen, wind increasing four to five, poor, one mile, nine hundred and eighty four. It is alleged that the rate of absorption of a cylindrical mass is swifter than that of any other shape; this fact alone might explain why she went down so fast, straight into the dark block of water. She woke then from a dream with music in it and felt that recovery was at hand and nothing after all had to be forgiven, because the music continued, and he would be here soon; he was, but that perspective, from a different place, was of a lifeless lump with glass eyes and hair twisted like pondweed over its porridge (pastry, dough, plaster) face. That image was one he couldn’t efface, and so persistent was it that finally the transition it marked, the point where dissolution of what was still recognizable set in, was all that came back when he made a conscious effort not to remember until, from a volume where he not ready to throw it entirely away had hidden and forgotten it a picture spun out, landed face up, looking at him. That was the night after his release, which he spent in search of words that might, a conceit that once would have pained him, help fill the blank page which he was content to feel in his head and somehow prod to fill the real white space arching from the typewriter’s mouth to the desk. It is to be suspected that the impulse was less to create something than to fill at least some of the blank abyss his medicated demon kept saying was swallowing the world.                                                             Gladly I was born from the water and, not to sound ungrateful or negligent of any sacrifice involved, am not ignorant of the inestimable advantages accruing from sentience, despite the apparent inability of qualities of the perceived to match those of the percipient. First thing I remember is a day of earth newly piled, clogged and made musty by rainfall, a miserable gathering clustered and scattered in black and punctuated with useless umbrellas at a pit torn randomly in space poised to cast themselves down, a sickly sun’s ray spattering in fragments behind clawing branches the fire inside a diamond, a breeze vaguely warm and clod-scented seemingly carrying a rumour of something in the oven that would blow in the eyes, stop to ponder and to emphasize on its redundancy and then throw itself again like a reminder of the onerous task that no one could remember. Landor standing away, pretence of an accidental conjunction his purposes with theirs and not concerned with them a’tall, the air of stranger stumbling on the incomprehensible ritual and remaining there betimes thoughtless and embalmed of mind. I thought to speak with him knowing that it might take infinite time to reach a distance where my spidery old-man’s voice would be heard; but aware however that posterity or transmigration becomes the rich reward of all human endeavour the new exercise encouraged by an austere obstinacy of mine (possibly a trait of character, though I due to my eccentric gestation couldn’t remember enough yet to decide) kindly lessened the effect of creaking joints and crumble-bone so that I could in fact bring to myself scenes I had once fondly marked through smoked glass with the loneliness resulting from all excess of communicative zeal. Strange friend, sez I, how come you here and in what place, and it seems a question the staggering evidence of whose answer will overwhelm you as soon as you hear me, by way of self-expedition I must say that only recently having seen and taken air I cannot use the eyes that even when grown blind with time memory can lend. Tell why therefore I find you here, since I feel certain (not mere semantics, because not aware yet of the division between thought and feeling which thinking feels too well) we have met before this and more brightly, or that once you spoke me in uncustomary confidence. If my brain is not turned to the wrong and I can see at least laterally in spacious time there was a certain something maybe dreamed of in the infinite aeons before I was born there was a short work “On Thomas Landor and His works, with digressions on the Influence thereon of his Best and indeed Only Friend, together with Opinions on her own Efforts in the direction of Immortality”, a few pages anyway in Phoenix autumn edition one of them or the last one. In any case sure enough not to feint too pointed a point on it if I’m not wrong I delineated fairly accurately all your shortcomings, misapprehensions and lacks of reflection on many various matters from narrative judgement, philosophy and the writing of history, up until those concerned with the simple detail that not everyone is bound about with an oil-coloured doom or grounds his being in the terminal station, spittoon of no return. I have no doubt but that you will not take offence as, if, you hear such criticism on this day, now, for the first time, but as an educated man you will naturally have kept alongslide the national intellect’s every contortion and in the spirit of the true artist be grateful that one at least understands the aims of your work completely not carping over matters such as betrayal of the verismo or the zeitgeist or whatever geist they keep behind curtains I sez but his sole response cynical (if that’s it) bemusement and truncated repressed gesture of one bothered by the importunings of an unseen hungry fly. Well sez I as they say to myself I’m new to this game, and was maybe over-presumptuous in expecting this needling voice of mine and such a dialect and accent supplementing as it must I sympathize your epicurean annoyance to reach beyond my auditious circle to that belonging those who are able mysteriously to make unto themselves life and speech through the mutual compaction and friction of words.

            The person that passed him by now I am sure was not his mother, for whoever she is does not come into the compass of my perceptions and my economy cannot extend to afford her employment. Somemother surely and I could have listened unbridled had not another obstacle decided I looked a likely tree-prop and, worse, that I have nothing more to do than utter banalities and receive indistinguishable words in turn. Don’t have a great memory for faces but sez I this one if not already gone is near to it with that skull of his and might learn something of what it’s like since I’m not going that way once given I’m not letting go of it. I asked himself what the bother was and do you know he circled about the obvious and never even answered what I wanted to know and instead started trying to tell me about someher hehhh ad tried to - take away from - she hhad I cant I cant been reading it that time and from then on was gone. Do you know this Judith one, sez I, interrupting him in the middle of a strangled, no airless, utterance the sense whichof was dubious, but I think it was accusing the burier of having stolen from him the buried leaving him with no choice but to continue his already modestly headline-making activity and sez I if she looks anything as bedraggled as yerself I wonder at all the bluster about her. She duuuhhss, asseverated he with a near ruptural effort, causing me in squeamish sympathy to disregard the filthy curtain of tears and clotted mucus that he fought against in vain, but now I duuhn’t think she cares I uuuhr she was just if she only, and interrupted I who’s that with him there talking and sez he why else are you here iiif you dzzzoont know what really, and went on with stuff I didn’t care to hear about how he had liked her and was ready to develop her from the Landor-entrapment but now too late since all she said now was that’s a nice frosty hand let me warm it for you. I forgot in the end to ask him what he used to be called when he was alive but mayhap its true that they don’t remember things like that after the fact - recalling the names of those hated and lost is a privilege since it permits the vanquished to suffer in other ways than hellfire provides for. After a time, and I was not even looking so I did not hear any thanks of his for entertaining his blather, he sloped off among the stones and was lost to the sight of that someone who in bad literary convention might have been watching that way. I presumed then because of what I presumed that the person Landor was talking to so tragically and black mourned the dead who lay now in the ground. Talking in fancy, for she had already snubbed, cut him, I think they call it.

            ‘I don’t remember asking you to look after her.’ The onlookers drifted apart, and not many of them either, thinking to leave in haste for the after-event entertainment, or the after-entertainment event, relieved now at no longer having to feign tragedy. Landor had never seen them before, and wondered with becoming vagueness whether any of had bothered with the study that had cost him such bother. ‘You should have known then that I was not capable of doing that. All I saw was -’ Myself, but at that point it rang too banal to carry conviction. He did not look at her, partly because of what they reminded him of but otherwise that he had little use for eyes anymore. See! I can see! Landor knows that too, and will not admit that soon I will take the place of eyes.

            ‘Don’t imagine I am blaming you for what happened, or anything.’ Strange that this always says the opposite of what it says. ‘She never could be just like anyone else. There was always a certain horror she would keep reminding us about, and that she could not stop looking at, as if with satisfaction. I believe now, regardless of what I said before, that you’re not to blame, you couldn’t have known that she would react- that she could be selfish enough to-.’

            ‘Meaning that I should not have left her.’ The bitter herbs were interesting, implying that if you continue this good day, a threat because he knew she wanted information. ‘No, if you’re talking about the stuff she retailed in her notebook and represented as prophecy. She would say that she had an advantage over me, in that everything she wrote was true, not in the sense of having occurred but certain to eventually. That’s horrific enough for me.’ Blast again, balm to those willing to be balmed where there is a world that consists of orderly excursions to a dull compartment in some mile-high cliff, but to others just the aggressive empty fume that in fact it was, lacking even the conviction to sustain itself. But I don’t know what he was talking about, just saying anything that came to him the better to discourage a conversation he did not wish had begun.

            ‘Whenever I saw her she had nothing to say about herself, even though I could see that - It was always your work, how much she loved and admired it, but I knew that wasn’t it at all, there was a sickness in that fascination, displaced as it was.’ But look, he had said nothing; she was continuing the before-speech of her Judith, who was different from the one Landor knew or else hypocrite-Judith and the same, and the incoherence was therefore suitable.

            ‘Yes. That was partly the reason that I, she, that. It was what I did that moved her; the vehicle could matter to an extent, but in the end it was not enough. She came to know me by that trifle I stirred up in a few months and served myself when I was not invited to the banquet, without which she would never have read within a mile of me.’ I hated her. And hating her cannot speak without conceit. It was June. The day before that had been one day nearer May and the anticipation of school’s out, cleanlier weather and frothing blue waves on quiet strands which tried valiantly but rarely amounted to much beyond a rippled fingerprint or a solitary set of footprints straggling left and right, filling with effort, steadily emptying.

            ‘I think you knew a different person from the one who was my daughter. So tell me: why did she do it? I mean,’ well I mean you know I sez he must after all be in close contact with the motivations of the invisible force that drove her to the lonely place that fine morning of dew and lapidary slants of early sun forever still and lighting the casting dust between the trees. Why I mean she sez did Judith not pay her devoirs to the me previous to extinguishing the only me open to her, when if she did not want it she might have handed it to another who might have templated it more regularly to the march of ready use... this question very rightly ends without inquisitory punctuation since she refuses to answer. Landor in his answer intended only to hear himself, but was never convinced that she had not also: ‘The conclusion she arrived at was that it was not enough to tell things to happen, that sometimes agents needed to help them. She even managed to convince me.’ He nodded courteously, smiled one of his pointless smiles and took his leave, not venturing to meet her eyes to make sure.                          

            But to understand what was the matter with Landor it is necessary to go right back to the last time I clapped eyes on him, which was a long time ago and well before the event that makes me chuckle most. Landor respired in a panelled tomb with a bed, a desk, a lamp, no fixtures from which to hang, wistaria encroaching on the clear green picture of a garden on one wall and some but not too much air; outside the room a damp corridor where one always heard muffled footsteps and wails of despair disguised by circumspection as delinquency, outside the corridor a compound into whose custody Landor had committed himself of his own volition some time ago, that is before the present stage of his degeneration was achieved. I was not of course misled by the room’s self-effacement and liveable veneer, and once perceiving the distance that held apart the friend I preferred to have before my eyes in monologue with another from that one reading the floor in that place of formic acid and pedestrian gardens, it was due for me to leave and seek other ears. He answered to none of my attempts to prise apart the shadowed folds that now were his mind’s only meat, a spiralled tangle that composed joyous rounds according to the stye-honoured principles of dodecacophony, which is as was exampled to me based on the twelve bad words of the language, shifted and laddered according to the whim of a die-casting that tinkles sourly in the ear but is contrary to anticipation a mere refiguration of common currencies; though capable of no more variation than these provided, such sounds must have sufficed to remainder him where he was. He spoke nothing in my hearing except for a sentence I knew well but understood less for that: “the morning was an opening book for those who stepped across the red-seeming stones between other towns, unordinary in the way towns are ordinary, and this, an allegory realized and the ultimate manifestation in physical stuff of the philosopher’s perilous dream of plutocratic harmony, except in inverse, stood, a crescendo of architectural extravagance, gleaming like wet slate fresh from the most important of its chapters, the museum where preserved lay” which must have come from before (or if you like, after) the time which I remember as inhabited by my own me. I had nothing to answer but questions, and received virtual silence for my overly literal attempts. I might call it a sad end at the risk of being termed self-interested, but it must not have been so to him even were he aware of his madness since the categories he possessed through which to observe phenomena permitted objectification and therefore content. Content is important. Pity only that his phenomena remained such instead of being the noumena we all know and every day admire. I speak as a writer myself, of a certain kind of course, when I say that his work displays a similar tendency.

            Competitive in the department of biography is Cynthia, by her own confession a strong admirer of his work and a friend besides. I don’t know her otherwise than professionally, but a review in some otherwise sophistical issue at the time of publication denounced it (the) in laudatory terms that concur with my own in other language. In the first part she sought to alienate herself from the object of her adoration and pretend that she was strongly antipathetic and generally uncomprehending, a pretence all the more intriguing in that she assumes the role of antagonist with a conviction that convinces one of her existence. The skeptical bystander is bound to interrupt here with carping about bertolt russkind and existence is not a predicate but let’s make a good head of it and say it is, because it suits our purposes. I know for example that my being is not just a tag that adorns my lapel that when absent from the waxen corpse would disqualify me from admittance to the house of sentience, but all things being equal its not just part of a sentence that affirms the difference but the very definition of what some would have you believe is just a shade stalking the solidities of present life when I ken it is at least as real as the affirmation. Cynthia told me once (I never spoke to her in person, but) that the difficulty with being Landor’s biographer was that there never was one less willing to be biographed, but short of consultation with her subject there was no method of aversion of this problem, which was a problem since as far as she could recall though not very far she had never spoken to him except on one occasion which is tantamount to never, and if he knew of her intent he would permanently have effaced all possibility of consultation. Which is the reason, I think, though I find it in terms of fictional narrative quite a lame excuse, that the closest she approaches to his twisted mind (I have been closer) was only to permit her a third person, and since that is an avoidance of responsibility in this case she may as well not have tried. I need not say that the review like all such spawn of the stunted mind overlooked this and contributed therefrom in no small measure to my admiration.

            But this was Cynthia years later, after Landor had decided to fold up and become dust. She was older than she must have imagined herself to be in the fictional book (though why I ask is the life-writer thus preoccupied, if not that the ostensive topic in hand is a valve by means of which the writer’s breath seeps in and patinas all it touches) and I not awake soon enough to enjoy the prospect of course far younger (and as time advances I become younger still: evidence of this being that my memory of my past old age improves apace and inclines to recollection), as she stood just as Landor stood a moment ago in the place where people stand as if there is anything that might be done to bring back or hear the great words ground away in the death-rattle; such hearing is a faculty of narratives and not the narrator who in the spinning can let the weave unravel into a different ravel to a murky extent. I spied then on Cynthia’s thoughts, permitted insofar as my parent said I was not old enough yet to offend: she stood still while other things moved and darkness advanced among the clouds, a  page part-covered where the ink-bottle upset pours its soaking contents into the memoriam whispers, standing beneath the trees which answered by darkening their murmurs in the wind that cooled as does forgotten beverage on a deserted table among many at close of lights. I became confused then where the pictures intersected and imagined that Cynthia and Landor stood there in speech even though the latter lay quiescent and mouldering under the quaking mud, but the point of history was what mattered. The narrator’s purpose after all is to mould conversations to his purpose while remaining bound to the true reporting of motivation and mind. That I have with all my best heads achieved when such dreams mesh with my own intentions, and when they do not so I can always change them. But I always sez that when one wishes to draw the stupid reader’s attention to a similarity of circumstance or better dilemma it is always good to come back to the place you left not remembering you’d have to. I’m not saying that the place where Cynthia provided food for speculation was the same as Landor’s where Landor was alive and his optimism stunned dead; but truth is I don’t know. I siphoned that Cynthia blamed Landor for his death; happen he had deferred it some times later there would have been so much potential for things that might have happened, narratives where to exhibit her strength of wit, character to assassinate, conversations to imagine.

            There was little else to say beyond the cautioned apostrophes they had cast at angles to each other, eyes watching each other’s aversion and jumping away with feigned guilt when their scrutiny intersected, and as the show was finished and the dotted lines pursued their courses in appearance various but all certain to terminate in the public house it amused me to witness these emerging again from the door, rarely before night, and intersecting as though trying all to become one, towards dawn thinning in vitality and in concourse fading as the dark in fact does when the milk and water early morning shoulders it aside. Landor remained no longer than it took to see that there was no further ceremony to expect but the returning of clay to itself, a brief hillock becoming with unforeseen speed briefer. I, small demon of many-footed toes, crookback with useful carrybag perched thereon and the meandering staff where an old man likes to lean, followed him to see his seeing. Not a description but an analogy, you must register, since there is nothing the peruser with walls of paperback likes better than to fancy shape where the word is inencompassant of the full truth, me and my ways in this box representing the application of this greatly small abstraction. Description will not apply itself to me you will understand because so soon as a mirror approaches my field of visions elements tend to scatter. Doubtless everyone in this class will be aware of the ‘mirror trick’ (this being our first definition), cliché more detested in the observance than the breach, where for no clear reason the person who up to this point has poor creature had to walk amid a haze of indefinition gains insight and a physical form only so soon as the mirror comes by, that implement mundane always, matterless how the professed atheist tries to make of it a revelatory vehicle; reason this that I will not interpose a less metaphorical delineation. Landor disappointingly did not take the day’s key event as spring for his unmistakable talent (here anecdotes about mahlerjugend might take up too much printer’s ink,  all in days of delusion knowing how misappropriated is the guild’s policy for allocating this desiderated substance) but lapsing into the mode slack of work, which is no existential being-towards-anything I recognize and in which everything visible became elemental shapes tinted with the cloying sepia of old photographs, and, anathema to the poetaster, pursued its own in the kingdom of ends, he refused to acknowledge that his own life and the events therein were there for the writing.

            By a gradual progression of steps Landor floats upward through an imaginary city (since all good cities wind upward, sensibly sited in the first place at the side of sea lavish with a thickness of ships and thus with extensive dockside crammed with the best unloading facilities where nevertheless undaunted by the stench of rotting fish one can stroll pensively on grey pulsing days with vague bilgewater thoughts mitigating the chessboard regularity of life) above the dross and fug of common life to the higher spheres where stood the crumbling edifice, the byzantine book-house with frowning arches thrown into sequence, an overabundance of columns yet scarcely able to fulfil their designated purpose. Every monarch of calling commissions elaborate library buildings in the belief that he will thus be remembered in regard, or cursed, as the patron of learning and art even if the connection between these  notions is often strained, where even the pages of the books bear old bloodstains and the bones of recalcitrant workers line the foundations; this warehouse of deservedly neglected pedantry was no exception, and it consumed Landor as if he were a willing sacrifice to the cult of its upkeep. I hazard that like to the manner in which certain classes of parasite (the insect kind) are drawn to the suffocation of damp leather bindings and yellowed pages flaking their precipitation onto shelves, this Landor sought a complex oblivion among the vast multitudes of impersonal bindings some of whom no doubt by statistical inevitability would hide contents of some consequence for him to seek out, by turns confident and despairing that some unforeseen conjunction of one of these works with his own would become hypostasis in the minds, or collective world-mind, of the great, resulting in the beginnings of a sapling that would one day become a great tree among others in the artistic forest. None such was the article that came to his hand at this time, but whether he split the lucky volume open or not made no matter, since the same narrative even if in other words (I am guessing, since he only tested the resources of that arbitrary victim) would obstinately assert itself in the face of the need to be new. Stamping the flames of an earlier conflagration I read the ruins of that story; with the benefit of my more than ordinary intuition such ashes still hide their fire within them through a persistent soul that is possessed by all memories, whereby they fade only to rekindle independent of the voluntary at the impossible return of even a single one of the original concatenation of impressions; and thus it was that now events poured into the present, events with Landor in them, among others.

            From the much-annuated library in this imaginary place we see another and different, not much, one, a happy library with plasticized sun supposedly shining through the windows and making scholarly sparks in its wake but being of no use except to drill unrelentingly in the eyes regardless of which way one’s window looked (and that view was almost always either of an oblong pastiche-Venetian heap of blackened stone with dark windows ranked like the soldiers it might have housed or a mutated wooden agony meant to be sculpture, or the angle of hegemony that had once been an innocent green swathe), but made reading no easier except that it meant it was not at the moment winter and so no frostbitten victims taking advantage of the shelter that was its most valued asset. Here was the resuscitated manuscript of Teh Thurgataum discovered mouldering but intact, not unfortunately the typescript, which was unavailable by default since it had been destroyed some time before in a tragic conflagration which also claimed the life of a drowned egocentric psychotic who had if the reports are correct refused to accept the limitations imposed by such a radical change of state so far as to emulate my propensity for noctambulism, but the primal manuscript from which the machine-made version derived. Access to Landor’s - in this respect - unerring memory served as a guide to the changes he made to this raw material, structured by the confidence behind placing the work in typed format and modified by the dictates of hindsight and artistic instinct or whatever it’s called, in the production of the final shape with the threads which had been left blowing in the breeze many a month now wound up together in a patchwork of mutual ecstasy. (I knowing nothing of such matters doubtless simplify in my attempts to compress in the least possible space the facts of the case but a book is a product like any other if more complex (some would have it less) and less straightforwardly honest in its epiphanies).

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