‘It was Monsieur Derrida, I think, who coined the term hauntology, in mockery of the philosophers’ penchant for ontology,’ explains Salvatore. And we learn that hauntology is to do with … smartphones. We’re invited to get ours out. A forest of phones waves in the air. Mary types an email into hers. Jarvis offers us a winegum. We learn that smartphones discourage commitment to the here-and-now, fostering a ghostly Presence-Absence. The web has brought about a crisis of over-availability that, in effect, signifies the loss of Loss itself: nothing dies any more. Everything returns on YouTube or as a box set retrospective.
‘Ah, this grave loss of loss! Could anything be more harrowing?’
Salvatore looks round at us as if awaiting sorrowful confirmation or correction on this point. And – the way he’s standing – looking round the room, throws me further off-kilter. There’s a tremendous wobble of time. I recall, as if it were all passing before my eyes, that strange crossing of paths in Manchester. For the more Salvatore denies our haunting by ghosts, the more mine come swarming. Justin crosses the concourse, holding himself with conscious grace, with his dark blond hair and his loveliness, beautiful and mortal. The Geek with his acolyte in the library stacks repeats Goethe’s deathbed plea: Mehr Licht! and is answered by a sudden beam of torchlight. The scholar with the Che Guevara look who has come in search of a son stands in the foyer beside the spectral printing press, with its screw like an instrument of torture.
‘What’s up, Seb?’ whispers Mary. She nudges in to my shoulder.
‘Nothing. Migrainey feeling. Ignore. It will pass.’
Yes, that’s all it is. The old trouble. The mindmelt. Nothing to be done. I let the deranging light shock my right eye. It will pass. Everything will pass. The lecturer is still lecturing. On and on. It’s what they do. Wind them up and they go off for an hour until the battery wears out.
He’s saying something about Aristophanes. Fleas’ footprints. He can’t really have said that.
I’m falling. Into the mindmelt. Nothing for it but to sink my head on to my hands. Some door in my head opens with a pang. Someone steps through.
Is he coming for me? Am I dying then, I ask myself. Who will care for Elise? Who will tell Jesse how dearly I loved him and bless him for the road? Nothing to be done. Occasionally, I think, Jack took time away from being Jack to be just your dad. You woke up howling and in he came, still warm from sleep, tying the cord of his blue and white pyjamas. Lifting you up.
‘Are you not well, Seb?’ Mary whispers. ‘Seb!’
‘I’m OK.’ I wince.
‘We’ll escape when we can,’ she says and lays her hand on my shoulder.
Shush.
Where was I? Yes. He holds you but the nightmare remains below, waiting in the troubled sheets of your single bed. So you cling on hard and cry, he shows no impatience but accepts your fear, for hasn’t he known fear and loneliness? He murmurs things to you, of strange lands he has visited, and the Inuit throat singing of Ungava Bay that goes like this … ha ha! yes it does! – and the Tibet Om Music that goes like this … yes darling, isn’t it lovely and soothing – and you drift off, knowing … this was real. Occasionally.
‘Let me quote from Nietzsche,’ says the big noise at the lectern.
‘Oh, please don’t,’ murmurs Mary. ‘Spare us. Seb, you are worrying me, let’s go.’
What is clear is … this. Truth occurs in moments. Only. Sandwiched between the lies and duplicities. These moments, they make no difference. They are void of consequence. Having happened, they can neither be confirmed nor – please note – undone.
‘Seb, let’s go. You look awful.’
‘Aura. It’s passing.’ I raise my head and squint. There’s the old fraud, quoting Nietzsche who was himself quoting Montaigne who was quoting Aristotle, for there is nothing new under the sun. And what Nietzsche said was, O my friends, there is no friend!
‘I wanted to tell you a story about a friend who died. For him I nourished a contrarian adoration. But when the Third Lobe kicks in – my friends, loss is lost; the abyss sinks into the abyss. End of story! The mother of all tumours is growing in my brain. The thing is so big now it’s a third lobe, an organ of thought.’
He pauses and passes his hand over the right side of his skull. A huge gasp from the audience. Rhys grins and shrugs, and says with cynical detachment, ‘Where was I? No idea. Anyone tell me? Of course you can’t. Oh the terminal tedium of the academic merry-go-round. Frankly I think I’m dying of boredom.’
He gathers his papers together, shakes them, switches off the lectern light and departs. I let him go. It’s unimportant. There are just the moments. Hang on to this thought. But what was it? I let Mary lead me out like a blind man.
*
‘Don’t cry now, Sebs,’ Jesse says gently.
‘I’m not crying.’
‘You are. What a shock for you – the terminal illness of an old friend.’
‘It’s not that.’
‘Come on now, love,’ Jesse says. ‘You can’t be blubbing on the train. We can talk, of course we can. You can tell me everything. There’s plenty of time. Sebs, are you there? Listen, we’ll always be friends.’
My train comes in and we end the call. I’ve left Mary with Elise at Colomendy, explaining there is something I absolutely need to do, which can’t wait.
The train loses pace; crawls to a halt; backtracks. No voice explains. Someone cracks open a beer can.
‘Oh God, my connection!’ says a woman. ‘What about my connection? – I’m supposed to be in Lübeck first thing tomorrow morning.’
I close my eyes. There’s no hurry. I’m going nowhere. With Jesse I should have learned better. Our Lübeck idyll returns poignantly. We were just friends. I recall the train journey from Hamburg Hauptbahnhof between forests of silver birch; crossing the River Trave and drawing into the glowing ochre of the medieval city. All kindled by intimations of the unsaid, as we made our way to that peculiar labyrinth where we were to lose ourselves and find one another.
In hot sunshine we walk past the Holstentor, locating our hotel on a quiet side-road: small, clean, serviceable. We have brought along a travel kettle and brew up tea in Jesse’s room. How moving it is to visit the fallen bells in the Marienkirche. In the Thomas Mann Museum, we spot a youth who’s a dead ringer for Mann’s enrapturing Tadzio in Death in Venice, even down to the sailor-suit.The child looks into our eyes, one by one, with an angel’s unfaltering gaze, and turns away. Afterwards we wander in the muddling miscellany of dwarf passages, remains of the mediaeval Lübeck, where the poor lived crammed on top of one another, for the city, constrained between rivers, could only expand upwards. Squeezing our way along, we enter an intricate maze, each Gasse darker than the last, and chillingly cold – for no sun reaches in except, briefly, at midday. The narrow dwellings are now elite pads, with tiny courtyards. It’s like being trapped in a pleasurably sinister fairytale.
Squeezed breast to breast between cold walls, Jesse and I pause to kiss. Nothing has been spoilt; it is the pristine morning of our time together. Which is, irrevocably, over.
*
Ava’s translation of Hafez slides from my briefcase. There’s a tipping point, her Introduction tells me, when absence becomes presence. The mind can only wait and abide and be open. This is the only way.
When have I ever waited and abided and been open?
Leafing through the poems, I think that Hafez’s ghazals have passed through my half-sister’s mind, diffused through her consciousness like the wine they sing of. Ava has spent her adult life brooding on the gap between languages, seeking correspondence between two closed and ambivalent systems. To live in the company of Hafez is to appreciate the slippage between words, between worlds. The poet’s meanings are profoundly equivocal. Or rather: profound in their ambivalence. Erotic ecstasies are also images of mystical love. They are both, they are neither, they are untranslatable under any system. It follows that whichever language Ava inhabits at a given moment is haunt
ed by the ghost of the other.
Iranians have a tradition of using Hafez’s Divan for divination, Ava writes. Try it! Ponder your heart, my reader, and silently put your question. The first words your eye alights on will be Hafez’s mystical message to you.
Why not? I close my eyes and consider formulating a question. What should it be? What exactly happened to Dad? Is that too coarse a question for Hafez to answer? Probably. The thing to do would be to put a question in a language that acknowledges Hafez’s own. It should be a question about love, or wine, or roses, something capable of resonance within the murmuring body of the lyrics. Like a note that arouses a musical instrument.
I hold the book between my palms and search inwardly for my question. When it comes, it surprises me. The question is tender and just. And it has issued from deep inside me, the temple where my love for Jesse took up residence over a year ago.
I ask my question aloud. ‘How can I best love Jesse now?’
Beloved, you are dawn, I the candle in the night.
Smile, and I burn away my soul’s last light.
The couplet resonates across seven centuries and thousands of miles, travelling across the gulf between languages and, as it flies, morphing, until it becomes an echo of an echo of its original. One loves, but the condition and cost of one’s love is personal annihilation.
To be himself, Jesse must outlive me. Yes, I think, I see that, my darling, I do see it. Hafez has answered. It is strangely comforting.
1 Homer, The Odyssey, Book II (‘The Kingdom of the Dead’), 520-4; 528-9, as translated by Robert Fagles (Bath: The Bath Press, 1996).
2 Demosthenes, Speeches of Æschines against Ctesiphon and Demosthenes on the Crown, as translated by Henry Owgan (Dublin: William B. Kelley, 1852), p. 92.
3 Egyptian spell reproduced in A. G. McDowell, Village Life in Ancient Egypt: Laundry Lists and Love Songs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 118-20.
4 Hooman Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran (New York: Random House, 2008), p. 1.
5 Aristophanes, Clouds, 423BC, as translated by Ian Johnston, (Arlington, Virginia: Richer Resources Publications, 2008). 380; 830.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Parvin Loloi: all quotations from Hafez are taken from the translation from the Persian by Parvin Loloi and William Oxley, Poems from the Divan of Hafez (Brisham: Acumen, 2013).
Any mistakes of interpretation, or liberties taken with verisimilitude, are entirely the author’s responsibility.
I am grateful to my agent, Euan Thorneycroft of A.M. Heath, for all his support, and to Richard Davies and Robert Harries of Parthian, for their exemplary work on the manuscript.
I record here my debt to the late Nigel Jenkins, in gratitude for many luminous conversations about shorter fiction and poetry. I thank my friends and colleagues at Swansea University, Anne Lauppe-Dunbar, Francesca Rhydderch, Alan Bilton, David Britton, Fflur Dafydd, Liz Herbert McAvoy, M. Wynn Thomas, Glyn Pursglove and Neil Reeve, for their help, humour and encouragement. Thank you to Andrew Howdle for decades of conversation about Greek mythology and literature; to Julie Bertagna, Rosalie Wilkins, Helen Williams, Rob and Sue Leek, Stevie Krayer and Frances Hill for their constant support. My loving thanks, as ever and for every reason, to my children, Emily Davies, Grace Foster and Robin Brooks-Davies.
Parthian, Cardigan SA43 1ED
www.parthianbooks.com
First published in 2016
© Stevie Davies 2016
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-1-910901-48-9 (epub) 978-1-910901-49-6 (mobi)
Editor: Robert Harries
Cover design by Robert Harries
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