by Dionne Brand
VERSO 40.5
Summary. There is a photo of Monk and Nellie and Coltrane. It is not possible for me to describe the five centuries it took to record this image.
VERSO 40.6
M sent me a photograph by Daguerre. It is of the first human being to be photographed. Someone is cleaning the shoes of someone. All descriptions of the photograph claim that the first human being to be photographed is the figure having his shoes cleaned. I see first the figure cleaning the shoes as the photograph’s subject. Secondly, the event of the shoe-cleaning. From this immediately I saw the state of the world.
VERSO 41
Tonight my brain is full of beautiful things collected over three weeks: the ring around Jupiter in the southern hemisphere; three flamingos dancing brine shrimp to the surface; the mirages of harbours only I have seen; the lithium salt desert; the rush for the local train at Ollantaytambo; a frantic scramble for a bundle of goods left behind; the electrochemical sky. The silence was the best thing.
VERSO 41.1
This is what I am saying, the blue clerk says, violet begins. There is this about my job, the day is a bright one, the sea billowing. Today we are on the Pacific. We arrived last night by the grey and violet sea. The bales drove us like old sails. The aphids dove in the shape of anchors. I smelled twelve thousand desert flowers. We were joined by one million bees, they slept in the folds of our documents, the oil barges watered in our eyes, the wires braceleted the great music of the ocean.
VERSO 42
I am not really in life, the author says. I am really a voyeur. But the part of me that is in life is in pain all the time. That’s me, says the clerk. You watch, I feel. I’m sure that some philosopher has examined this, assures the clerk. I am sure that there are theories about it, the author replies, but I don’t care. I know all about it and knowing that a philosopher has written about it gives me no peace. Knowing that it has been gone over in many languages gives you no rest. In fact, it gives me even more pain, because it means there is no remedy. I need a pill for this, I need an antioxidant. Even philosophers have it. Pain, I mean. Once, in my twenties, I knocked on the door of a philosopher. He was a scholar of Habermas. I knocked on the door and he did not answer at first, so I knocked again. He opened the door as if he had been asleep; the room was dark with his papers and his research. They gave off a dust, a gloom where I thought they may have given off a light, an illumination. He appeared disturbed, then looking at me he said, sorry, but he had been meditating. I was shocked. I was in my twenties, I could still be shocked. I had tried meditation to no avail. I had thought philosophy would give me peace. I was shocked but I also felt a little superior. Or at least suddenly we were on the same level despite his far superior grasp of such theories as instrumental rationalization. So I thought if he is meditating what is left for me.
VERSO 42.1
I went to the door of the philosophers too, the clerk stutters.
The crisis at the heart of modernity is, you asked. I cannot find my presentation, do not introduce Kant and Blumenbach here. Their romance. What fictions. Their skulls. Violet terminals have appeared in the violet hours I have spent, the violet bookkeeping has been done, violet officials have declared the violet kilometres’ violet shoulders.
VERSO 43
The clerk covers the faces of every clock in the room in Miraflores. The author uncovers them. The clerk covers them again. I cannot sleep with all the clocks lit up like daylight, she says. And why are there so many? I’ve lived with the energy of clocks, the author says, they invigorate a room even in sleep. I’ve lived with them in all my rooms, among piles of paper, the new construction of shelves, between bricks and plastic crates and wood and imaginary numbers. The clerk is sleepless with clocks, she hates the red glow or the blue glow or the green glow of clocks, especially at night when they beam out their increments of time and time and time and time; they shatter the eyelids. I had no dear house where I always went, she said, only screaming apartments and rooms, moulting. I was thrown into the world nuclear and nautical. People have no idea the effects they have on other people—everything shatters, everything breaks to the touch. Wisteria this summer, the green job of the wisteria I watched all summer. The early feathers of the smoke bush, and the open mathematics of the weeds, nameless, and the insecticideless lilacs and the multiplying sparrows.
VERSO 44
In the author’s world, every aspect of life is an emergency. The body is an emergency. I think you’ve said this many times. The clerk disappears into the belly of paper on the wharf, searching. The clerk has filed all the paper in block stowage. Sometimes the author comes here and things become misplaced. It is usually when the clerk is dozing, that is not often. The air on the wharf is as full of oxygen as a casino. The clerk knows where the emergency is, where the anger is, where the salt, where the sugar, where the flowers.
I am washed in this emergency, the author says. I wake up in emergency. Perhaps if you can be more explicit, says the clerk, returning overladen and invisible behind a four-foot stack of leaves. These leaves are heavier than they look. A word is not an easy thing, it is not a light thing. Others would think the clerk is magical, the tonnage doesn’t seem to bother her. You would sink under its weight.
If I have said this many times, it makes it no less true, no more understandable, the author continues. If I were to take this body outside this minute, outside of where you and I live you would see the alarms it sets off. Then I am flooded with adrenaline, this adrenaline is killing me; my system cannot take it to be always flooded in adrenaline. At times it runs down my left side all day, then every skin cell vibrates with pain. You understand, this pain is physical but I know it emanates from the sirens that are turned on, that come alive whenever we step outside, you and I.
You and I, the clerk says, after pausing for a moment, after feeling the full weight of the tonnage. But this is not something the clerk can feel, the clerk tells herself; to feel this weight would be to misinterpret the archive or to dispute her responsibilities in the archive. Here then, she says, going back to her job, here I have it. 1955, you first recorded this emergency. ’55? the author questions, I wasn’t writing then. The author peers knowingly at the clerk. Has the clerk been infected with this emergency too but in hindsight? I wasn’t writing then, she puts her hand tenderly on the clerk’s inky shoulder. But I was collecting, says the clerk and reads out the gradatios of the decades of emergency.
I have here the sense of orange, and the sense of distances, then a sound of a window falling shut. There is great blinding sunlight and a wall of air to your left, then the smell of flour in oils. The records begin with these. There is a river and a lost shoe. There is always, of course, an ocean, the songs of volumes of water and scuttling sand. And here the escarpment of a yellow house dividing the world, when you understood the word but, and here your face caved in when you ingested the thought. Stop, says the author.
VERSO 45
Who is this fucking Horace? Someone you once studied. Was forced to study you mean! Whatever, forced, made to, obliged, irrelevant. It’s all part of you now like so many gut microbes. You may be sanguine about it…For once the clerk laughs into a blood-blue hand, Sanguine, you might say that, like blood. Anyway you have a note from Horace somewhere. The clerk is only playing, she knows exactly where. She flits wraithlike, wrath-like, brushing gnats away, a new infestation of snakes slough off their skins to make twine when she approaches. She traipses to the very back of the madrepore. The author hears her humming—a variation of irox, red oxide, sombre, rubia tinctorium. The clerk, despite the weight of things, loves her work or, one might say, because the clerk is a creation of the work she is indefinable from the work or, one might say, the work is indefinable from the clerk or, better still, the work is the clerk. And so the clerk, in this sense, when she is challenged or called upon to produce some misstep of the author, is happy. Here deep in the bales of paper she blows a sand of indecipherable-ness from a crumbling pile and skips b
ack the long wharf to where the author stands. Rage, she quotes, Rage armed Archilochus with the iambic of his own invention. You used to love that line.
VERSO 46
We are in the age of nerves, the author quotes in reply. Yes, yes, Huidobro then. Here he is, here he is, the clerk soothes, Estamos en el ciclo de los nervios. This is closer to the language. The author breathes, Invent new worlds and watch your word. The clerk translates, Inventa mundos nuevos y cuida tu palabra. So the clerk goes on with her humming. Violet toll roads, freezing violet, museums of blue, violet turbines, blue visas.
VERSO 47
Why do you talk like that? Where did you get that voice? It is evening on the wharf. Crepuscular, as in Thelonius Monk’s “Crepuscule With Nellie.” I collected it, said the author. Gathered it. From everything, from the walks to and from schools, past funeral homes, past dumpsters, past canefields, past ladies selling flour; from gazing, from listening, kicking surf, being tumbled in sand, being cut with nails and broken shells, from running barefoot on hot asphalt, from quarrels, in noisy bars, in suicidal quiet, past gloom, with sugar, past trees with rangy leaves, pierced ears, with sour cherries in the throat, wasps, ants, scraping ice on a windscreen, past water, cutlasses, sewers, after Wednesday, after spoons. When sleeping I collected the end of breathing. Then salt, then oranges, light switches, farine; from cemeteries, from little streets, past long grass, razor grass, fever grass, brilliant muscles oiled in sweat, from water, from work, from hearing, donkeys, bananaquits mostly, from the loneliest most poisonous smell of Cestrum nocturnum; from the sound of shaved ice with red syrup, bottles, broken bottles, green broken bottles, chairs, peppers. Stop. Why? You and your endless lists, why? I don’t fully know why. Must I? Why don’t we take it on the face of it? Lists exist and they may be consecutive or serial or alternative on the other hand they may be important as exquisite objects on their own or as an alternate spelling of everything. As you say. I thought you would like the idea of lists. To continue then, why do you speak that way? Because of water, the reef out there, the Fregata magnificens, look at the boiling turquoise, the sea’s albumen. Because the throat fills with thick reeds, drowned fine pebbles, because of stairs’ gradient, the way corn is disappearing, steep terraces. Grapheme teeth, on the cold walls and the stringy aortas, a thousand musics.
It is morning on the wharf, the author has gone on this way well into the night and now it is morning. The author and the clerk speaking in their sleep. At times nouns were hunted by prepositions followed by an adjective. They sat up suddenly like the dead, then lay down with the anxiety of the thought that they were alive after all. The dock creaked, the papers bloomed blue letters. Their sleep was the jittery sleep of birds. They had long arms. Long, long arms. If only. Alphabets were used up and used up and lay flat and slumped, and dishevelled of their normal shapes.
It’s useless to speak any other way, the author says in a morning voice. Useless, says the clerk. The night passed in more nouns.
VERSO 48
Violet. This is what the clerk thinks. Violet hand, violet notes, violet metre, violet hammer, violet bed, violet scissors, violet management, violet speed, yes with violet speed, violet washers, violet sleep, violet percent, taken violet yesterday, violet incarceration, violet ambulances, immediate violet, violet labour, intended violet, violet transcripts, suspended violet for now, violet cancels, blind violet, violet schemes, reply violet
VERSO 49
There were two kinds of books. Books of discomfort and books of discomfort. The books of discomfort said the “you” that you think you are is not the you that you are; and the books of discomfort said you are the you that you are, though, you are also the you that you think you are, which is not the you that you think you are.
VERSO 50
When I was small they lived over the hill and over the highway and down some stone stairs. They lived in a house with our grandmother. And they were eight of them and they were my sisters and brothers and cousins. I lived in a room over the hill with my mother and two brothers and my father. The hill was steep and the road had to be crossed before getting to the hill. The road was busy with cars and I was small. The stone steps were steep too but the house made them easy. When I was small I lived on my mother’s hips and in my father’s long arms. And they lived over the hill with the highway between us and the stone steps. They seemed happy. They were the big ones. I lived with my brothers with my father and mother. We were the little ones. They were the lucky ones. We lived on our mother’s hips and in our father’s long arms. Our mother and father tore each other apart sometimes. They fought and fought and spilled drinks on the floor until they fell asleep. That is how they loved each other. At the beginning of each week they were calm and at the end of each week they were angry. The beginning of the week we were noisy, the end of the week we were quiet. My sisters and brothers who lived over the hill and over the highway and down the stone steps hugged us when we arrived and cried when we left. We cried too when our mother took us away. Our mother and father lived in a room beside a field.
VERSO 51
Those aphids I put in an early verso or two, they appeared in my real garden. All summer I sprayed them with soap, they haven’t left. Then I made out their writing. The Wire is the latest version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. An old fable, digitized for the age. Vonnegut said there were only so many plotlines. Whose plotlines are these? Well, not ours, of course. On our side nobody gets out of the hole, nobody gets the girl. There are only rags and no riches. Those aphids I put in an early verso or two, they appeared in my real garden. All summer I sprayed them with soap, they haven’t left. I made out their writing.
VERSO 51.1
“We are now crossing the Andes,” the pilot said. There was a dry riverbed running through the bare majestic buckle of mountains, the dust snow, the dry barren inclines, folded, brown clay silt, the wealth, the rage of mountains, then a green lake. We are crossing the Andes, please fasten your seat belt.
VERSO 52
In the Museum there is a gallery of erotica of the Inca Empire. How long the fascination with the sexual body and how common. Did the king collect these like today’s pornography in a footlocker or is that the judeo-christian-islamic thought that warps the body’s pleasures. Yet the king was the king. Can the body be free of power. The body is never the body, the author says, and we are always referring to the female body. Why the eternal fascination, the clerk wonders, perhaps like all power it must be kept, held, battled for, there is an antagonist, the war is never over. I do not know what to do with that first sentence, says the clerk, I did not know what to do with that sentence, says the author. That is all that I wrote in my notebook that day, the day when I took the taxi from Miraflores to the Larco. The gallery of erotica is tucked away from the main galleries, as if it contains something incendiary. And so, strangely, when I entered it I giggled. The bodies were arranged in pairs for the most part, reclining or standing in some representation of copulation; most were of a man and a woman, a few of two men which the museum labeled as a man and a woman. None of two women. There was one of a woman alone, standing, her vagina open and large as the surface of her body. All of the bodies were thick, substantial, asymmetrical, real.
VERSO 53
Most days the clerk herself is quiet. What with the constant noise of the author, that is the quiet of the clerk. When she arrived on the bank of the Chao Phraya River, the author found everything as she had imagined. The fortuneteller said, “You are a teacher, you have been married, you are not good with that; it is very bad, you shouldn’t be married.” She sat by the food-seller and watched the irregular monks go by, the monk she had put in a novel strolled along in his tattoos looking as dangerous as ever. He didn’t even look at her; he went on with his life where she had left off and where she could not imagine. The food-seller brought fish and rice and she sat at a low little table eating in a satisfied and happy way, the food seller smiled at her as if welcoming her home. She sat there am
ong the broken-down tiny shops in the lanes at the back of the river and it was as if she was home in one of her pages. The dust of graphene covered her hands like ornaments. Ointment.
VERSO 54
The clerk is noiseless, intent on the marsupial sighs of each letter of the alphabet. A cyst in the floor of the mouth, a ruptured salivary gland. The marsupialization of the ranula, cutting a slit into an abscess. Allowing the sublingual gland to re-establish its connection with the oral cavity. This is how the author explains when the clerk tells her of the marsupial sighs, of the alphabet. Ah, she says. Within the letter a, for example, a perfect pouch for adipose, for aleph, for amen, for ah, for water.
VERSO 54.1
The troop of buyers has arrived; the loaded boats slip out to the Mediterranean. A slow night. Floating.
VERSO 55
When I finally arrived at the door of no return, there was an official there, a guide who was a man in his ordinary life, or a dissembler. Exhausted violet, the clerk interjects. Yes, says the author. Violet snares. He arranged himself at the end of the story. Violet files. Violet chemistry. Violet unction. It was December, we had brought a bottle of rum; some ancient ritual we remembered from nowhere and no one. We stepped one behind the other as usual. The castle was huge, opulent. We went like pilgrims. You were pilgrims. We were pilgrims. This is the holiest we ever were. Our gods were in the holding cells. We awakened our gods, and we left them there, since we never needed gods again. We did not have wicked gods so they understood. They lay in their corners, on their disintegrated floors, they lay on their walls of skin dust. They stood when we entered, happy to see us. Our guide said, this was the prison cell for the men, this was the prison cell for the women. I wanted to strangle the guide. As if he were the original guide. It took all my will. Yet in the rooms the guide was irrelevant. The gods woke up and we felt pity for them, and affection, and love. They felt happy for us, we were still alive. Yes, we are still alive, we said. And we had returned to thank them. You are still alive, they said. Yes, we are still alive. They looked at us like violet; like violet teas they drank us. We said, here we are. They said, you are still alive. We said, yes, yes, we are still alive. How lemon, they said, how blue like fortune. We took the bottle of rum from our veins, we washed their faces, we sewed their thin skins. We were pilgrims, they were gods. They said with wonder and admiration, you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen.