This Is Memorial Device

by David Keenan

  You don’t crush your can when you finish drinking it? What’s that about?

  The thing is, right, seriously, and this is between us, right, Lucas had a brother, or so they said. Seriously. Okay listen, seriously, the story I heard was that they were identical twins but of course they were never seen together, you feel me, which led to the theory, the conspiracy theory, that there was really only one Lucas but he pretended or more likely honestly couldn’t fuckin’ remember that he was sometimes the other brother or even that the other brother sometimes turned up and pretended to be Lucas. Think about it. Fucking think about it. It was feasible because of course Lucas had little to no memory of what had happened at previous gigs or even on previous days outside of what he had written in his notebook so all it would take for either brother was a quick fuckin’ glance at the notes and he was immediately up to speed and of course any slip-up or gaps in continuity would immediately be put down to Lucas’s illness, the water on his brain, the tragic tributary, that’s what he called it once, that’s how he described it to me, me and him we were like that back then, it was like it was a delta, that’s the way he described it, you get me, and of course I thought of all the blues songs, like ‘High Water Everywhere’, which was sung by Charley Patton, I don’t know if you know that, and of course ‘Texas Flood’ and ‘Flood Water Blues’ and ‘God Moves On the Water’, which was by Blind Willie Johnson, do you know that one, it’s a classic and of course ‘Goin’ Down to the River’ by Mississippi Fred McDowell, that’s a classic right there if you ask me, and then I thought of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Little Rain’, no rivers without rain, after all, no rivers without rain, no siree, Jimmy wasn’t lying man and of course I thought of the damage a little pishing rain can do.

  You know what, it isn’t melon, it’s grapefruit, innit? Grapefruit juice that gets you pished. Bring it on.

  Then I thought about how people sang about the Mississippi Delta like it was a snake or more like a basketful of snakes all snaking their way up north through the 1920s and the 1940s, those were its years. Snakes live in decades, someone told me that, do you realise that, the way humans live in years or months or minutes like snakes mark time in terms of decades. They move through time slowly is what that means, like trees though to them it’s quickly but it takes a decade for their conception of themselves, do you get me, for their understanding of their existence to come together which is weird but it’s no coincidence that drunks take at least ten years to wake up to themselves, ten years of living like a reptile, we’ve all been there, I’ll drink to that, plus Lucas had those wide eyes placed far apart almost as if they were disappearing around the side of his face, you know what I mean, and of course everyone commented on his big feet like flippers and so white, seriously, pure white, which despite what everyone says is nothing like snow but more like yogurt, glutinous. I’ve got a theory about white. This is my own theory not Patty’s. Pure white has a glutinous quality like egg white or like pus squeezed from the eye of a snake. White is a container, is what I’m trying to say, it contains things, bacteria, life, enzymes, it’s the opposite of blank, in my opinion, whereas snow is empty like the end of things which is why it’s so romantic. Have you ever had a white beer? They call it Weiss beer. But don’t get me started on white, I could be here all night. Oh my god now I’m spinning, seriously it’s all this remembering.

  The thing with the concert in Kilmarnock was that after the support band played, some bunch of mental cases, an old man, an idiot, a middle-aged woman and a creepy-looking guy who together made a noise like a fighter jet tunnelling into a mountainside in the fog at 120 miles an hour which was good while it lasted but was even better when it ended and you had a chance to think about it if you know what I mean, after they had cleared the equipment off the stage and everything was awkward and silent and no one had bothered to put any music on Lucas came up to me, we had barely spoken all evening even though I was unofficially their driver and tour manager and publicist and long-sufferer, let’s be honest, and though I couldn’t see his big white feet – he was wearing Dr Martens – I could see a large vein in his neck that was as blue as glacier water and that made me think okay maybe snow isn’t completely empty, maybe it’s just the end before the beginning, do you know what I mean, and before I could even elaborate on that he asked me if I knew how to knit and again before I could be pure like that, what the hell are you talking about are you fucking kidding me you sexist, he was like that, have I ever given you one of my magic squares? I’m like that, no, you have not given me one of your magic squares, though really I was like that, what the hell do knitted magic squares have to do with my own life, and then he took this little knitted square out of his pocket, it was coloured turquoise and brown and baby blue and pale blue and dark brown and had strands coming off it like a fucking Space Invader and he said, here it’s a magic square, it will make all your dreams come true. I was like that, oh my god that’s mental.

  Will we have one more? You gottae have a can. My dad used to play the guitar using a can for a slide. It was mental. Okay, one more for the road, I don’t normally drink during the day.

  I barely remember the rest of the night to be honest with you. The concert was good, they came up with this song where Lucas enumerated, is that a word, e-num-er-ated all of the subjects of songs, I can’t remember exactly how many there were but there were songs about falling in love and songs about being pure enamoured and songs about meeting and songs about falling out of love and songs about being all tore up and then there were songs about despair, complete despair (I may be making that one up myself, I can’t remember), songs about God, songs about existential lifestyles, songs about the seasons, about autumn leaves and flowers in the springtime, songs about animals, about wanting to be an animal or acting like one, songs that were more like social commentary, trivial songs, songs about memory, songs about the past and about the future and songs that would bring the two together, songs that were written out of guilt alone, songs that were meant to salvage guilty feelings or salve guilty feelings, one or the other, the PA was cheap, who knows, songs about time, like when will you or what have you or if you or now you or can’t you, songs about songs, singing about singing, which isn’t singing at all if you ask me, singing about plants growing up or the vagaries of weather, is that a word, vague-ar-ies, and there were more songs, for sure, he listed them all, or it seemed as if he did, and then he had this whole thing where he acted as if he had exhausted songs, he shrugged and he shivered and he cried – it was like rockabilly to me – and then he went into this thing where he started spouting nonsense, like he was having a conversation with himself and talking rubbish, just crazy stuff that made no sense and that’s when it struck me. He’s singing about nothing. Fuck me. He’s writing a song about nothing. It’s the only thing that songs haven’t been written about. D’you get me? And it was like a love song, it was like he was singing a song to something that was so lacking in love that even the mention of its name would bring it back to life and we would all notice it and fall in love with it like a prom queen or a movie star. Oh god every bit of nonsense was like a poem to nothing from the depths of his heart to the depths of his heart. It’s all nonsense, I said to myself, it’s all bollocks, then I imagined Lucas lifting me up in his arms, I imagined the pure freezing rivers running through his veins, I thought of his feet, pure writhing like fish out of water.

  After the gig we ended up at Patty’s flat above The Capocci Man with the windows open to the night sky and I thought of wolves and silence and distant lights and the sound of your heartbeat in the empty cavity of your chest and all that mad stuff and it sounded like the greatest love song that had ever been written but when I turned around to tell Lucas that I could still hear what he had sung and that the open window and the sounds of the street were playing the same song he looked at me with a horrified expression, oh my god, like I was some child he had pure given birth to and that he had never known about and that had turned up on his doorstep looking for m
oney and a place to stay, so that I was like that, never mind, I’m talking shit, never mind, and he seemed happy with that and I went next door and lay down on the bed, a bed that was covered with other people’s coats, and fell asleep and woke up early the next morning and let myself out and walked around the streets like it was after the end of the world and imagined how I could possibly go on, how the fuck could I possibly go on, which is something I ask myself every day, these days, even while the rest of me pure ignores it and gets on with it anyway. Is that tape still running? Turn it off, I don’t want to talk about it any more. Turn it off. One more for the road and then it’s

  15. The Day of the Frozen Vampires: the day that Lucas died was The Day of the Silver Sun Ruth Turner says in a letter to the author about the past and the future and about how we invent endings every last damn one of us and how Nothing is Anchored Any Longer.

  We think we’re walking into the future. We fool ourselves! But every last damn one of us is walking straight into the past. A shadow passes a low wooden fence. It is wearing a hat and dressed, already, for another time. The pace isn’t hurried. It’s a pace that says, okay, I give in, I accept it. The movement of this spectre, this would-be ghoul, seems self-chosen, willed from the deepest, most stubborn depths of itself. I heard someone describe it as funereal. Have you ever been to a funeral? The cars are under instructions to remain just under twenty miles per hour. And the mourners too move quite deliberately, instinctually, like a flock of birds flying towards their death in the heart of the sun.

  The day of his death, which might as well have been the night of his death, was a day of intense contradictions. It was like a ghost movie, a vampire flick. The sun turned white. The fog rose up, fell back down again, and rose back up. It was like walking through dry ice. I woke up in the morning and I thought, oh shit! All of my pretentiousness, all of my Gothic fantasies, all of my reading is coming true. I cursed every damn book in my library. Then I smoked a cigarette on the window ledge, looking down from three storeys at the street below. The whole damn world is in mourning, I said to myself. This is worse than a Kenneth Grant book. It’s more like some pulpy French garbage.

  I always had this theory. Men die, women exit stage left. Men’s deaths are heavy. Have you ever seen a male corpse? Talk about a full stop! You can’t argue with that. The lower jaw becomes distended. The lips widen. The skin hardens. It’s like a toad slithering out of the mouth and then taking its place on the top of the skull, an inscrutable toad, a grotesque, undeniable toad, a prehistoric fact. Compare the deaths of women. Women die every day. They lose blood every month. Their blood turns to milk. Their bodies are incubators as much as coffins. Men’s deaths look right back at you, dare you to challenge them. And it takes a headcase to do that! But thank god we have many headcases in Scotland, many headcases in Airdrie. Women are indentured to death. Their death is barely a shrug, barely a ripple. I am softer than water, it seems to say, no more forceful than the breeze itself. Women slide into coffins that they never fill, even as the coffins are impossibly narrow, or seem like cots for infants, they dissolve into ashes, are swept up into clouds, are launched in baskets towards the city of the pyramids. They are transfigured by death. Whereas men seem more like monuments, cold stone, prophetic carvings etched in flesh in the aftermath of a landslide. I don’t mean to be maudlin. It’s just that we have very few facts and most of them seem to be very, very sad.

  I heard there was this recording of the dawn chorus that he had made, supposedly on the day of his death, the day of the silver sun, the day of the frozen vampires, whatever you want to call it. The person who told me that is completely unreliable, so I was unconvinced. But then I heard it. It sounded like music for the gallows, The Morning of the Executioners, which is what we called it, in the end. I got the tape from Patty.

  At the time I was more involved in visual art. I had this house in Gartlea, this house that had been squatted, an old woman had died in it, and I had turned it into a visionary environment that was open 24 hours a day. When I say a visionary environment it wasn’t one of these idiot savant-style playgrounds and it certainly wasn’t the fucking Watts Towers! In fact, if you didn’t know anything about art, like me, woops, you would have thought that it was just an ordinary council house with drab furnishings and the smell of cigarettes and detergent and maybe even urine. I found most of the furniture in skips. I never cleaned the carpets. I blacked out the windows. But the door was always open. I advertised it in the library. Nothing is Anchored Any Longer, I called it, and said that it was open for viewings 24/7. I thought of it like a ship going into the night, everyone ageing, imperceptibly, in dark rooms drawn forward on who knows what dreadful tide. I didn’t live in the house. You don’t sleep in galleries, unless you’re some tedious performance artist type. But sometimes I would be present, sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette or opening the door to let people in. I mean, it clearly said above the door, Gartlea Gallery of Geomancy and Geographic Speculation, G.G.G.G.S., which looked communistic, somehow, at least that’s what people said, but even then they were frightened to come in, opening the door and peering into the hallway like they had just broken into an Etruscan tomb, and then they would creep from room to room, talking in a whisper, like they were sneaking into someone’s actual house, and they would look at things like it was the first time, reading occult patterns into tea-ring stains on the sideboard and describing the position of dish towels in the kitchen as macabre. The amazing thing was that it wasn’t vandalised. I would leave the door unlocked at all times and okay, sometimes I would come back and find a cigarette burn on a chest of drawers or a crumpled can of beer on a dressing table, but overall it worked pretty well. Once it was obvious that someone had slept in one of the beds. The covers were all disturbed and the portable television had been placed on top of the cupboard across the way as if they had lain in bed and watched television before falling asleep! That kind of gave me the creeps and thrilled me at the same time, I still think about that person, but overall the installation went comparatively unmolested.

  So when Patty approached me, I could see that he was thinking of it more as an artwork than an album per se. He asked me if I would like to present it, this final recording made by Lucas. Now that’s an ambiguous term. But I didn’t ask him to clarify. I said to myself, okay. Okay, I said, how best to present this? At first I had the idea of playing it in the house, you know, having it on an endless loop in the house as people looked around, but it seemed too pastoral and took away from the atmosphere of uncanny suburban dread in the sea at night that I had fostered by doing not much of anything, really. Then I had the thought of a speaker in a tree, you know, playing night and day, and then I thought, even better, let’s have a speaker at the bottom of the swimming pool at Airdrie Baths, you know, have the dawn chorus taking place beneath the waves, like conception itself, in a way, which would make it more like the Song of Songs. I approached the council. They didn’t want to know. They were more interested in tortured strips of iron set on low pedestals to signify the miserable industrial heritage of this godforsaken hellhole. Birds rising up like the first morning through the waters was too much like reality for these dull lefties. So we pressed it up on an LP. I had never been involved with anything like that before so it was a difficult process. We found a pressing plant in Glasgow, in some subterranean basement in the Merchant City that smelled delicious, of old newsprint and hot ink, but really they were hopeless. The test pressing crackled and had so much surface noise on it that it sounded more like a recording of sunspots. We ended up getting it pressed in Czechoslovakia, in a little town just outside Tábor. We pressed up 333 copies and Patty came up with the idea for the sleeve. It was a picture of a page from one of Lucas’s notebooks. Of course the looped letters look like hangman knots and the punctuation looks like insects, like maggots worming their way out of the text, but it’s all accidental, or incidental, really. In keeping with Lucas’s ordering, there was no significance to the day that we picked. We
simply opened the notebook at random and used the first page we came across, which was the ides of April, predictably enough. Most of the text is indecipherable. But you can make out single words and some distinct phrases. There’s a quick zero, like an ellipse or a bendy halo, above a drawing of what looks like a werewolf or a feral child. Then there’s an e like a foetus, curled in on itself, or a sperm, perhaps, is that not what the hermeticists say? People say it’s Saturn and a drawing of the stars but I say it’s a Q and a couple of full stops. There are words, clearly, Rose, Earnest, and Artist, Maybe, a little, December, which is weird, in the middle of spring.

  We invent endings, really, which is what it says to me. There is no resolution, no fixed beginning, no neatly tied-up end. People have tried to read into it so much, but it was just a moment, passing. Then of course there’s the picture on the back. That was supplied by someone else. It’s a still from a silent film. The figure is walking away from the camera. The ground is sloping slightly, it’s a small incline. I’ve heard say that it was taken on the Isle of Man. Someone identified the vantage point, especially the old tractor that can be seen on the far right of the shot, a tractor that is known locally as The Wreck of the Hesperus after the poem where the captain ties his daughter to the mast in a futile bid to save her life during a ferocious storm. They say it was filmed in an area known as Smugglers’ Cove. I think of Lucas and his bootlegging of memories, his manufacturing of continuity, and then I see him as a pirate, a laughing skull and bones, now, and it makes me want to up anchor once more, to go back to that house that I used to have in Gartlea, that silent gallery, and to cast off for the nearest island, or planet, or lifetime, wherever it is I wash up. But I look at the picture some more and I realise that we are far from land and are missing so much as a dove with a leaf between its beak, so much as an intimation from the future, and so I sit back down at my desk and write this letter and stick it in a bottle and cast it out to sea in the hope that it reaches you. Write back soon. I miss you.