A Preparation for Death

by Greg Baxter

  Milton had a true and daring love for Satan. He compares Satan’s journey out of Chaos, by perils, to Odysseus’s return to Ithaca: harder beset and more endangered. I hardly remember studying Homer, in graduate school almost a decade ago, but I see in Milton’s Satan much of Achilles and Odysseus: bie and metis, kleos and nostos. I am reading Paradise Lost for the first time since I was eighteen, when, as a student bound for medicine, I barely paid it any attention. The poem has me thinking of Satan incessantly, admiring him, and is the occasion for my memory of east Texas, and all that came with it. There is something in Milton’s love I want to emulate. I want to satisfy my esteem for disobedience, imperfection, eroticism, and failure – not to worship but to fathom, and harness, Satanic areté. But I have only a little wrath, which I shall turn inward: I corrupt myself only. This is my definition of love.

  The other day, queueing for a cash machine in a cloud of smoke from a burning rubbish bin, I thought of Satan’s vanquished army and the Stygian council’s debate: Moloch, the sceptred king, advises open war; Belial, the coward, wants ignoble ease; Mammon argues for a free hell, existence to none accountable. Beelzebub, who will propose the corruption of man – Satan’s idea – says:

  What sit we then projecting peace and war?

  War hath determined us …

  Having got my cash, and bought a sandwich and an apple, I had twenty-five minutes of lunch hour left. There were only a few empty spots on benches remaining, and most of them were adjacent to passed-out drunks or fat men with their shirts off. Elsewhere, men and women in suits and sunglasses discussed work. Backpackers read maps and listened to iPods. Single girls read books in one hand by bending the cover all the way back. A group of out-of-work Polish men shared a bottle of something golden. Every man that passed them was asked for a cigarette. A few lovers were out: I picked a spot beside a couple discussing a holiday, but I couldn’t make out if they had been on one, or were going. I ate and observed the great lunchtime repose of the city.

  That afternoon, we – the reporters – filled the last pages of the issue. I had a small pile of press releases in my inbox and pasted them, slightly rewritten, into the editorial pipe. My way of working had started as a protest: if life was going to deal me monotony, I would deal monotony back, doubled. But my protest went unnoticed. In fact, the editor told me my stories were getting better. Every week we waited so late to lay out pages that our paper was filled with typos. Violent typos. But it was summer, so nobody was reading us.

  Adam humbly asks Raphael how and why the earth was created. Raphael has been commissioned by God to lend him knowledge within bounds. He reveals that Adam’s world is Christ’s trophy. And that Christ’s glory, great, was scripted. After the battle, Christ, gloating, says to God:

  At least our envious Foe hath failed, who thought

  All like himself rebellious …

  When Adam asks for knowledge beyond his human status – why create this earth, a grain, an atom, in such disproportion to the firmament and all her numbered stars, that seem to roll spaces incomprehensible? – he is admonished. Milton sends Eve away for this admonishment; she goes to tend her nursery – a miscalculation of her rebelliousness, but deliberate. Raphael tells Adam that the great architect

  Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge,

  His secrets, to be scanned by them who ought

  Rather admire …

  Why seek to know what is beyond your belief of it? There is plenty on earth to content yourself with. Accept that God’s bright luminaries are attentive not to earth but to man. That creation is spacious so that man can know he is not alone. The unknown is on purpose, for your good.

  God, to remove his ways from human sense,

  Placed Heaven from Earth so far, that earthly sight,

  If it presume, might err in things too high,

  And no advantage gain …

  …

  Think only what concerns thee and thy being;

  Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there

  Live, in what state, condition, or degree –

  Adam is cleared of doubt. He is a simpleton – this too Milton makes obvious. (His eloquence, particularly in his plea for a consort, arises from Milton’s inability to write poorly.) Adam’s mind is made for easiest living, freed from intricacies, liberated from perplexing thoughts. He shall be busy in the prime wisdom: everything that lies before him is his; everything not is fume; it belongs to God.

  It is taking me a long time to read Paradise Lost: what time I can afford is used as much for contemplation of the poem as for reading it. I allow lines to arrest me. I scribble them on a piece of paper – or whatever is near by – and set aside the book and pace around the house. If it is sunny, I open the blinds and all the windows, and lie on the couch with sunglasses. I wash dishes and do laundry. I eat. I smoke a cigarette. I cannot believe in Adam – I have no sympathy for idiots. I believe in Satan – overconfident, revolutionary, sick of obedience. And tormented: he does not even know why he is sick of obedience. His reasons contradict each other. I watch – in my imagination – his army gathering in the north. Satan was the first hyperborean. Heaven sends a force exactly equal. Michael, prince of celestial armies, fells him on the first day; on the second day they push heaven back. All this is illusion. God has scripted the stalemate for the glory of his Son: He did not mean to quell the rebellion; He meant to make it more worthy of epic poetry. So on the third day Satan, as Hector when Achilles reveals himself outside the walls of Troy, understands that he was never, not for a moment, in control of his fate. Satan was a slave when he was obedient. He remained a slave in rebellion. Christ, grasping ten thousand thunders, knocks the adversary’s astonished army nine days out of heaven.

  I cannot move on until I have explored the lines within my own memory, until I feel as though I have written them. I cannot help but think of Menard’s Quixote, and the absurdity of my actions, but everything is autobiography to me, everything – reading especially. To read something is to write it – but I do not recreate the work; I recreate myself. I re-establish the boundaries of the world. All my memories are adjusted, like a man going through a slightly vandalized museum of natural history, repositioning, standing a few displays back on their feet, dusting, polishing.

  In February, Evelyn and I went to Riga for a long weekend. I had hoped we’d get snow; instead it misted and rained for three days. Evelyn wore a long white coat with a furry hood. I had a black overcoat. I thought the city would be packed with tourists; it was empty. Everywhere we went, I asked locals where everybody was. They told me it was not unusual.

  We got a room in the Europa Hotel Riga, a gigantic space with high ceilings and dark green walls, and views above some unremarkable streets. Evelyn doesn’t smile much; there is always a long distance to her gaze. She is the kind of tourist I like to travel with: she is tuned into the eroticism of everything. We dipped into empty bars and kissed; she put her hand down my jeans in a booth; in an alleyway I slipped my hand inside her jeans and put two fingers in her cunt, then let her suck on them. There was nobody around. We had nice meals in empty restaurants. We discussed her fantasies about other women: she wanted a woman to lift her dress up and straddle her face, then let her dress fall down, and in that privacy she would lick and drink the woman’s wet cunt. We shared fantasies of her being fucked by other men while I watched, of double penetration, of her kneeling between me and another man, sucking both our dicks. When we came back the first night, she took off everything but her stockings and high heels and said she wanted to be spanked. We moved onto a little couch. She sat on my lap with her back to me, then leaned forward, so that her elbows touched the floor. She put her legs back – her legs are long and fine. She told me she had watched a television show about spanking, and would like to be struck very fast, but not very hard. I did so, and she made the same noise she does when she is being fucked – something between a grunt and a breath. A minute passed, and her ass was bright red on both sides. She asked
me to spank her harder; it didn’t hurt. I began to, and soon I was battering her: her ass became purple and speckled. Finally I stopped; I could not possibly hit her any harder. She was trembling. Wetness was pouring out of her. I wiped it all over her ass. I put one finger inside her ass and she pushed backwards to drive it in deeply. Then two fingers. I told her I was going to put my entire hand in. She did not answer, but became very relaxed. I got five fingers in. Half my palm. I told her I would push my hand into her stomach. I touched her clit, lightly. She came, I released, and she dropped to the floor like a snake.

  I wanted it to be colder: I carried my gloves and hat in my pockets, but I didn’t need them. I had a camera with me, a Christmas present from my mother, but Evelyn refused to be photographed, and I had no interest in the buildings. Locals hail Riga as the Paris of the Baltics. I took pictures of some of the Jugendstil apartments on Albert Street – I had heard that it was rather grand – but I found them unremarkable; perhaps I don’t know how to appreciate architecture.

  On the Sunday we had a few drinks in the Skyline bar at the Reval Hotel Latvia, twenty-six storeys up – austere, straight lines, soft brown-and-violet lights. The city lay in light fog; we were above the fog, looking down on the city, which was grey and black and full of lights. The previous days we had mostly wandered around the Old Town, and it was striking now to see how small it was compared with the rest of the city – we had really seen nothing at all. Evelyn wore comfortable runners, jeans, and a ratty jumper. She drank a few cocktails slowly and read a guidebook to learn something of the places we didn’t see. I read the cocktail menu a dozen times, in between long and silent observations of the view. Our flight was much later that night, and there was nothing to do but wait for it, and wish we had another week. I knew then we were doomed to separate – all we had in common was dishonesty and expiring lust – and it was only a question of when, and what boundaries we would cross before it ended. We watched light dwindle out of the sky. From time to time, raindrops spattered the glass, which, in the dimming, grew harder and harder to see through. Soon it was just lights and our reflections. I remember almost nothing of the rest of the evening, except a quiet drive to the airport. Evelyn’s eyes were closed. The night was wet. I thought of myself as a boy, on a rooftop with binoculars. What would he make of me in Latvia, in a speeding taxi with a beautiful woman with white skin and black hair? What would he have worried about, if he had known this was the future?

  This memory is forever altering. It shape-shifts. It changes colour in the light of my endeavours. Milton must have desired Eve – his verses lust for her; they make love to her. When Satan, within the serpent, spies her alone in the garden, she rapes him – Milton’s word – of fierceness, enmity, guile, hate, revenge. This is the immensity of the beauty Milton paints: momentarily she makes Satan stupidly good. Milton owes his own lust to the corruption; he is not the child of Adam and Eve, but of Eve and Satan. We are all in this condition. The image of Eve naked drives Milton to ecstasy. It drives me to ecstasy: that is more precisely what I mean to say. Eve is the force of human rebellion, the desire for equality with the gods. She is Satan’s lover. She is the poem.

  My memories inform my experience of Milton. The poem also alters my memories. They are studies of each other. They fill each other with mischief, and why not? I begin at a precipice – a memory – and fling myself into the unknown. I like to travel to my mind’s exotic destinations, not the places that are easy to reach. I am only happy when I look back and can barely see where I began. The idea of rebirth repulses me; so does remedy.

  It is August now. The writing moves slowly; so does the reading. It has not stopped raining for weeks. Manholes are vomiting water back to the streets – they gurgle and spew and overflow – and inundate crossroads and bus lanes. Gardaí in fluorescent yellow jumpsuits direct traffic; sometimes they shake their heads and tell drivers to go back. I think it looks like hell is boiling over, and my appreciation of it confounds my students, who wonder if they’re ever going to get a summer.

  I carry the poem everywhere with me, and it fills the days with the weight and wonder of corruption, disobedience, and sex. All my thoughts remind me of Eve greedily engorging; of Satan, all impassioned, watching. I see her naked body, dripping, her breasts, her mouth. Her first thoughts are of gratitude to Satan. Her second thoughts are of secrecy from God.

  … Heaven is high,

  High, and remote to see from thence distinct

  Each thing on Earth; and other care perhaps

  May have diverted from continual watch

  Our great Forbidder, safe with all his spies

  About him …

  Next she must decide on Adam. Will she let him partake of full happiness, or

  … keep the odds of Knowledge in my power.

  Without Copartner? So to add what wants

  In Female Sex, the more to draw his Love,

  And render me more equal, and perhaps –

  A thing not undesirable – sometime

  Superior; for, inferior, who is free?

  Eve returns to Adam, imbecilic cuckold, who, while Eve was off polluting God’s creation, wove choice flowers in a garland to adorn her tresses. When she asks him to partake of the fruit, he resigns his manhood; he becomes Eve’s subject; he eats,

  … not deceived,

  But fondly overcome with female charm.

  Not deceived? But what are the lies he tells himself, that God would not undo creation, since Satan might rejoice:

  … Me first

  He ruined, now Mankind; whom will he next?

  The earth, predictably, trembles from her entrails. The original sin is complete. Lust follows, and following lust, shame. God, when he comes to admonish the pair, suggests that Adam is pathetic, that he ought to have given only love, not subjection, to a woman

  … made of thee,

  And for thee, whose perfection far excelled

  Hers in all real dignity …

  If Adam is a fool and cuckold, then perfection must be flawed. You may argue that Eve was deceived, but the deception is irrelevant. Eve wanted knowledge. Anyway, I can see no virtue in innocence. Poetry makes gods of the imperfect. But man is too afraid to live at the pitch of poetry. He creates hell to suppress his hatred of obedience.

  Tomorrow – literally, tomorrow – I will be thirty-four. The number that symbolizes the indomitable victory of Christ over sin and death will pass through me, harmlessly. The city is a paradise of human catastrophe,

  Wholesome, and cool, and mild, but with black air

  Accompanied; with damps and dreadful gloom –

  And I shall stalk it like the figure from my childhood, dragging the invincible state of failure behind me:

  … in this we stand or fall;

  And some are fallen, to disobedience fallen,

  And so from Heaven to deepest Hell; O fall

  From what high state of bliss, into what woe!

  Since I see no bliss in heaven, let me live in hell, and eat ash out of a tree like that which grew in Paradise, and writhe my jaw on soot and cinder. Grant me strength and daring, that among men the adversarial in me is most conspicuous; make fire blaze from my shoulders; urge me to the middle of the fight, where most men are struggling, and I shall writhe a little, and in writhing, discover.

  8

  On a Short Stretch of Road in Letterfrack

  Art – the stuff a child would call art – does not come multitudinously to me, as they say it does to those who are naturals. I am no good at drawing, or sculpture, or music. I took piano lessons for years and can’t play ‘Chopsticks’. I cannot dance or sing. The only play I ever starred in, I ruined. I do not even consider myself a natural writer. The more I try not to ape other writers, the less myself I sound. I have an above-average mind, a good attitude toward work in isolation, an appetite for authors who humble me, and I am not afraid of my entrails: that’s enough. If I am moved by something, I can put a sentence together nicely; at the very least
my style is adequate. I used to measure my writing by its charisma – such was the way in which at that time I loved my fellow-men; according to the standards of other men [Augustine] – but now I judge it by its character.

  I get my discipline from contempt, from a natural uneasiness; but my inspiration comes from influence. I search for new books, new authors, to uncover more of my nature – some lost strains my habits and prejudices may suppress. I imitate; I repeat; and new selves emerge. Originality is not forged anew; it is borrowed. Originality is a substance in the universe that we pick at, mine for, and give back. My favourites seethe through me. They boil right out of my eyes and ears and fingertips. If literature is a street brawl between the courageous and the banal – that’s the way I teach it, anyway – I bring the toughest gang I know: the pure killers, the insane.

  The person who reminds me most and least of myself is my cousin Fielding, who is a philosopher – though I am not certain that profession exists anymore. He is about five years younger than me. In all respects, we are entirely similar or exactly opposite. This time one year ago, precisely, he visited from Texas to celebrate the completion of the seven-page essay that took him one year to write. We sat, on a weekday night, at a table in a tapas bar in town, discussing the hope of representing the self; we were, in different ways, attempting that. He hated the transparency of influence in my work. He considered it a sign of intellectual impotence. While undertaking his project, he refused to read anything, lest it seep through. I considered that a sign of pure delusion.

  In seven pages, he had set out to tell the story of the evolution of a perfect self, from an infant’s first relationship to experience, through all the dehumanizing challenges of life, to a victory for a loving and free consciousness – his answer to the fragmentation and unhappiness in man. He wanted to shine a light for all people. I said I liked it very much, because it seemed to me like a sad and touching autobiography – the story of his failures and his yearnings – and no more. He did not accept this; he had no interest in his own self, but the self. Now that he was finished, he would like to make a film of it – I told him I would probably rather not watch it – and then he planned to begin the great project of his life, which was the story of the evolution of consciousness from the first Homo sapiens to the present day.