by Ed McWhinney
If a camera followed my movements as I went about my business, in the den reading, smoke curling over my shoulder, or simply staring through the streaks of builder’s glue on the window down to the sea, it would record an excruciatingly ordinary existence.
I stand and shuffle to the open door, you can hear my sighs and exhalations. I move slowly now, the fervid days of hot pressure are gone, the frantic search for a wallet or a tie before departure into reality.
Now every moment is poignant, and I know why. I can spend time in a downstairs room studying a beat-up seagull on the wall and the water of a full tide chopping about behind him. There is something eerily human about him. Uncle Anton might appear in a doorway and say that he thinks he is dying. You are dead, I say. Then to show that he is still very much alive he might let rip at some criminal institution while tearing up a summons to appear in court. Lady Macbeth washed the imaginary blood from her hands every night; Uncle Anton tears up a summons to appear in court. Uncle Anton begins to shimmer like light in the doorway. In the old days a good piece of ass was the solution, a straight-forward afternoon session of torrid carnality could change everything.
Now as the camera is behind me I smack my lips and feel the tobacco burning my throat, trying to ease out of the grim, gluey, glutinous thoughts exhaling like a vapid, little old lady, fretfully wringing her hands, bothered because everyone is not nice to her, oh the nasty men.
The camera sneaks up on me. It catches me eating through the wood like a worm, leaving a trail like a grub, a louse. Then I stand again and then I shuffle again towards the light, towards the doors, towards the windows and muttering to myself as I move: Alexa, what wonderful times we had. Life with her was pure magic, pure theatre, difficult to capture it now in just words.
Even a simple afternoon in a backstreet restaurant, light flowing in the door off the corner, white walls with paintings of old rustic places out in Galicia. We’re at a little table in the back, quiet and peaceful and far away from everything. It could be magical, though more often than not it was a magic ruined by me. It takes a long time to understand simple things. Even then I don’t understand them.
Suddenly I stare smack into the lens and ask: How do we know what is happening in the world? We don’t know what is happening in the world. We neither know the shape of the virtues or the style of the ills. The peace of that backstreet restaurant was then disturbed by an arrogant customer who tapped the timber counter hard with the flat of his hand every time he wanted something; a nasty voice, and an expression that invoked master torturing slave. Tea, slam, flat of palm on counter. Tea, the nervous foreign waiter replied? Tea, slam, flat of palm on counter. Sugar, slam, flat of palm on counter. A hard, disdainful look. A threatening, lean-forward of head. Milk, slam, flat of palm on counter.
When I appeared agitated, my pupils dilated, my fists clenched, Alexa said: what’s the matter now? She had not even noticed the swine at the counter and she will never notice him.
But for the fatalist, fate is divinity and only a divinity can possibly deal with the massive cross-current of desire emanating from the billions who inhabit the planet. To one a serious sporting victory can be an end, to another a bowl of porridge. Fate manages all in a mysterious way. The high leads to the fall. You have a little part to play. If you insert your fat head into the lion’s mouth, expect to have it snapped off. If you jump into shark infested waters…
When I try to outguess fate it merely drives me into this kind of writing with a sense of desperation. The old elemental poets falling like leaves around my ears, making me feel better, momentarily dealing with the intransigent voices of fate that roam like Ghurkhas in the midnight of my soul.
Ah ha, try and get away with lines like that now in this modern era of pragmatic, materialistic minds. That’s how they will laugh you out the door, so I say it again, in the midnight of my soul, I sing it, in the midnight of my soul, ah, ha, ha, ha…
Once I recall Alexandra, naked on a beach, saying to me, her prudish, twentieth century lover with Victorian values, that Hell does not exist. And I recall her, fully dressed, under a beautiful, starry sky. Then I am here at the window, disturbed out of this reverie by a heavy rumble. The sound of something heavy falling upstairs makes my heart skip a beat because I know there is no one up there.
How lonely.
And the immediate, never-ending wait for death, everything reduced to short durations, the shadow barely touching concrete, the cartwheels of joy on busy streets so profoundly ridiculous. And nothing for it but this writing all the time and smoking and drinking beer. Art and beer…sing it, the song of the lonely man, the song of Black Jack Ketchum; Art and Beer. The whirring tune of the camera draws my attention. I turn to face it, and walk slowly, menacingly, towards the lens.
