While working for the Duke, I see a horseman ride out like lightning chasing a stray hound and a girl. We’re looking for gold coins in the bloody underbrush, the medals of comrade or enemy amounting to the same in the regimental purse. I listen to the guy’s story, all about how he was dead and so was the girl and how they were doomed to repeat this miserable chase for as many years as the months that she rejected him on earth. Or something like that. There was little sense in it. My brother wasn’t impressed either. We’d been assigned to scavenger duty for suspicion of cowardice on the battlefield. I admit that there was something to the accusation. Only equal distrust among accuser, accused and judge prevented anyone from getting the death penalty. The one who pointed the finger at us is polishing the Duke’s boots, and probably much worse. Don’t know what happened to the rider after I stopped asking him questions. The fate of the girl, I might be more interested in. She had fine long red hair.
Blame the mastiff for what he mauls. It could be that the beast has gone mad and the knight—he must be one, he shines so—is trying to stop the hunt. I imagine that this little tyrant will tell everyone how he gallantly failed to avert the tragedy. As he carries her ravaged remains—she wasn’t ravaged the way he’d have liked—through the doors of the great house, he will manage a giant sob as he lays the servant girl at the feet of the grieving staff. This one moment of obsequy is enough to last the domestics a lifetime. To some, it’s proof of his boundless humility and they will tearfully recall it well into old age, even though they had seen the spoiled young master beat his grooms, bite his mother, and burn down the forest when he found that it obstructed his view. As for the other servants who think differently of the matter, there is no need to state the obvious. The scene is common and dead, but someone witnessed it and remembered. It appears as part of a painting which the experts assure us is purely allegorical.
From the stern of the ship, he watched a beguiling scene. A girl and a dog, bounding like rabbits with a desperate cavalry officer in pursuit, throw themselves on the mercy of two huntsmen. Though he towers over them on his steed and swings his sword wildly, the chevalier is only one man and the huntsmen are at the edge of their camp. In seconds, they will summon the others while the horseman flails around, trying to catch his beloved dog and get his bride to come home. But no, she has totally rejected him. She’s rather alluring, so the group will doubtless appropriate his property and then fall upon him mercilessly. It is obvious that you cannot trust such a disrespectful land, where number always makes right and the chivalrous are always outnumbered. I’ll go back to playing cards with the others and forget I saw anything, he thinks. Maybe we will circle round the bay and skip the place entirely, he hopes.
To summarize our findings: people unconsciously reenact whole scenes or details from certain images from the past. Not in a psychological sense, but with their very physical bodies. Mystical ideas of archetypes are useless in interpreting why this is so, but there might be something to the uncanny proposition that we are all living statues, replaying slight variations of the same few figurative movements in an eternal cycle. We live between these repetitions, existing only in order that they be repeated for some purpose which we will never be able to fathom. Nothing else can be said with any certainty for now, at least until a catalog of these human gestures has been attempted (it would resemble Muybridge’s photographs). What is important is the data that can be gleaned from observing the positions and their minor variants ‘in the wild’, so to speak. You said you saw a strange thing from the bus: a man running after his lost dog and a girl who thought he was chasing her; two guys sweeping the street for some pathological reason; drinkers relaxing under a tent watching the events unfold as if it were all some entertainment booked for their pleasure. And there you were, to cap it off, watching them watching the scene. Too many onlookers. It is getting late, and the daylight figures having faded away, you see only your double staring back at you from the black mirror of the bus window. The scene you had witnessed will have long played out in capture, resistance, exhaustion, or something more exotic. So the rest of it will have to be invented, no matter how unbelievable it sounds. The investigation is ongoing. I will add your report to the files.
Well, stirring the storm with that old twig surely made the General smile. 100 miles to the city and no provisions left. The columns complain to themselves, tramping along the gorse and dry bracken, dregs from the dead leftover season despite the spring air and the feasts promised in the calendar. I came upon a clearing, says one of them, a lowly corporal who is a devotee of the cult of Mithras and drinks mulled wine to excess. In the clearing I came upon a revelation, he tells a grizzled old campaigner to his left. A kind of bacchanal, the like of which is not held in honor of my great God-at-arms nor for the Crucified One either. I’ve attended the festivals of both: mine are severe, winterlike and strict, full of cold mystery and the sacrifice of hens. The Crucified demands burning incense and the chaste adoration of a young virgin like the ones Mithras promises to me. Both of these gods are silent. They reside in silence and for the most part, except for a few tedious songs, we worship them in silence. We carry their banners into the cacophony of war, and afterward silence comes again after nobody’s prayers have been answered. I saw in the clearing the blurry outlines of several figures. What they were doing, I cannot say. Then they vanished abruptly and the clearing was just a clearing again, different only because the ground was now covered with peach blossoms and wet black slugs writhing in peach blossoms.
Three of us count a fourth in our three—and it is not that imbecile cupid, the blind assassin of prior loves. The fourth one here who yet is not is the Huntress, green-eyed with blood in the corner, lissome and terrible, eaten with thorn just as water buckles wood. Spring tortures us with wild hope, unreceived messages, the deadlight of warmth in a false spring night. Here, the Huntress plays her Major Arcana, cards of cruel miracles, a fan of regrets glittering like arms. Absent spring, cholera spring, quiver and pig and ankle. Huntress, why do you leave us in your shadow when we three pleasures pick away rotten fruit, bringing this season even though it corrupts us and make us corrupt? We transformed her and purpled over her frost, spinning a cat’s cradle of saliva in the vane of her thigh. Now we make an exit from Eden and despise these vernal days that have given us thorns and the scars of thorns, wild hope and a hand outstretched. We raise the spirits of devious warmth and eat the steam from bruised fruit. Huntress, a vine twists under the moss. A snakeskin thrills in the sun. Huntress—finally, there are no other gods.
We spent much time breaking into washing machines for quarters that spring. Me and the brother, creeping with a crowbar and prying open the metal slots, raking in the cupronickel and then going off on a bender. One May night, a night of insects and skinned knees, we found a particularly luscious basement requiring minimal effort for very promising holdings. I stood watch while the brother did the jimmy, killing time with a fiery Lark and looking up at the secrets behind the apartment windows. Most were shuttered, but an open one on the second floor caught my eye. Inside the yellow room, three figures stood as still as a great stone octopus. Women, to be sure, nightgowned, they seemed like a single entity with arms grasping and legs interweaving, pitying and crowding like trees over a clearing. I watched until the brother tugged my sleeve with his mouth (his hands were full of coin). It was no spectacular night, except for these three weird sisters. This was long ago. Now I’m on the 54th floor of Chunking Mansions, getting in another continent. Life has its ups and downs. Last night, eating Nigerian cheap eats on the main floor, I looked lazily over at a vender in the blue-pink light. On the counter, next to a plastic Buddha and an electric Bast, was a figurine of three female figures entwined just as those women had been way back when I was thieving Uptown. The dour Egyptian who owned the shop held up the canopy with a stick. Two men walked by, sweeping up the remains of food and saran wrap from the floor. From a second tier balcony, a security guard pointed at two ladies, one modest and the other whorish, talking intently down on the floor. I have been floating here many years and Hong Kong is unforgiving. The brother’s long gone. I can still see the women in the yellow room and have seen them several times over the years. It is almost as if I am being followed but followed accidentally. This is a comforting thought, like hearing footsteps above your head in a quiet house. You feel that here is where you must be and that chance has not yet done with you.
Public transit is a disaster. From one line to the next, delays are staggering and each link in the system demands an additional fare. Whole arteries are clogged and the air is stagnant and deliriously hot. Guards are employed to keep the commuters moving. Once these men were seen as fearsome clad creatures, barely holding their dogs at bay, strapped with sidearms and sporting glittering glasses. Now they occasionally get jostled forward and fall on the tracks before oncoming trains, unable to move because of all their protective gear and dragging their canine partners after them like strings of stolen pearls. Vendors sell strange substances, pink bladders convulsing with sweet-smelling gas and emitting sugary geysers. These wares are not quite fish and not exactly plastic. Sirens go off constantly, accompanied by long muffled instructions that no one can possibly understand. There are singers and dancers on the platform, most of whom are very talented. People don’t talk to each other as a rule. The ones that do talk are drunks or foreigners desperately trying to keep up some form of human interaction. A giddy spectacle is offered by the rats below, exciting little mammals who skirt quickly out of sight and then taunt onlookers by brazenly snatching little chunks of garbage under the pulsating subway lights. People bet in how many rats will appear in a minute or an hour. These bets are taken by young kids who report back to silent men in raincoats off in the boiler rooms under the stairs. The rat number runners are a part of a new parallel economy that has attached itself to commuter life. Money can indeed be made underground. It can be lost just as easily. Many a man has started off to work in the morning with a full wallet and shiny shoes only to return home destitute, shabby, and broken to pieces. Most people are terrified and they show it. This terror is a constant source of amusement to subterranean delinquents and the more seasoned passengers. It acts as a distraction from their own problems. Occasionally a scream rings out or there is a peel of unhinged laughter from far off in the darkness of the tunnel. But as far as I am concerned, these inarticulate bursts echo like the tender greetings of an unknown friend.
In the library is an old book. The last date stamp was decades ago. In the margins of this obscure treatise are a series of comments, the work of an old man who wanders the neighborhood with plastic bags and talks excitedly to himself as if he were on the verge of some great discovery:
The scarlet folds of a long cloak are barely visible at the right side of the small stairwell, giving the impression the cleric has left the room a second before the Annunciation. Mary has outwitted him by summoning the Archangel at the exact moment he turns to go upstairs to mend his miter or calculate Church assets. Unluckiest of men, this priest has been denied everything. He did not receive the blessings of the lowly thieves at the Place of Skulls. The harlot Mary of Bethany watered Christ’s feet with her tears, while he weeps alone over his books. He has even been refused that which was granted to Judas, who was at least allowed the perfection of the greatest of all betrayals.
Does not the Annunciation occur every moment, along with the Crucifixion and the Redemption, the Flood and Creation? These eternal events can hardly belong to simple historical time. They cannot be complete in time and time cannot complete them. If an event like Salome’s dance or Ezekiel’s vision was a mere chronological moment, it would be essentially no different from the Battle of Leningrad, your father making pizzas, or a sea calf swimming off Patagonia. No matter how memorable or fantastic the details, the nature of all sequential episodes must remain subordinate to the ruthless order of days and time. If this were not true, then the Divine nature of prophetic moments would also be contingent on the temporal. But the Essence of the Divinity cannot be separated from the Divinity (even before the Cross, it could be said that He is separated from His Son by His Unity, which becomes the very reason for the Cross). If this were not so, then the Divinity would Himself be a contingency. Even the greatest miracle would be ultimately an inconsequential moment—it would be hardly miraculous, nor even particularly unique.
During the Annunciation, Time is drawn aside for the angelic interval which impregnates not only Mary but also all of time with the Redemptive breath. Thus, Mary is able to outwit the forces of power and officialdom not only once but every time, as the event of the Annunciation occurs in the infinite. Just as winged Gabriel always appears to Mary, the prelate always ascends the stairs. Only Divine events bear this constant repetition. Everything else happens only once.
It would appear that there is no room for chance in the schema outlined just above. Though it might be argued that the priest has the Free Will to not look away—the opposite of that freedom accorded to Lot’s wife—that there is at least a possibility that he will not look away, or that the Lord might decree that he will see the Annunciation once in its infinite repetition. But then wouldn’t this also apply to Mary and to Gabriel? For example, the latter might suddenly elect to join Satan by disobeying a Command from the Most High. But if we inquire who asks this question, then the real motive for donning the silky robes of sophistic philosophy becomes apparent. Forget it, you bastard—you’re not off the hook for stiffing a waitress or ignoring a beggar.
If the problem of chance still exists in the Annunciation, it lies in the terrible thought that this salvific moment par excellence will cease its extraordinary repetition. Sealed off as a mere idea, the Annunciation will no longer be a constant in eternity. The horizontal line of the Angel’s hand to Mary’s will be broken; the olive sprig will fall to the ground; the silent barking of a dog that cannot be seen will stop; the priest will turn around in horror and astonishment. And this is precisely what has happened when the Annunciation became dogmatized in church teaching. This entails another logical proposition, easily the most dangerous of all: The Annunciation will never occur again eternally because, situated in Time (dogma) like a prisoner, it never could have happened.
Well, no one told the participants. They continue to stand in mute testimony of this momentous event which no longer happens in the past, is not happening in the present, and will not ever happen. There is an impenetrable gulf now between the angelic and the human, as the dialectical meeting point of both was the moment of the Annunciation (at least far as redemption is concerned). The rooms are cold as mountains. The angel has become as lifeless as the Churchman. The golden projection anointing Mary with her child, the Holy Breath, issues like a common draft coming in under the rectory door. By this infernal logic, who or what has altered altered Eternity, seemingly against the will of the Lord?
The tragedy is not Original Sin, nor the ejection from the Garden, nor Judas’ betrayal, nor Golgotha (all of these were ordained by the One as Holy Missions, and only the ignorant see a sacral curse in these necessary trials). The stain lies in the paradoxical fact that The Annunciation has not been returned to human time, where it must necessarily be in order for the Child to be conceived. In other words, I was utterly mistaken: we now see that this salvific moment must take its place among the dullest of human acts. The true failure, the real infidelity lies in a glance which continually passes over the most extraordinary moments, whether that moment is the conception of a Savior or the opening of a beanpod. The Annunciation must, for a moment outside of time which is truly Divine time, an analogue for the Divine assuming lowly human form, be utterly interchangeable with the fecundation of a cockroach1. All time is relative, and all possible events are equal—this is the requisite for a shattering of worlds by the one Event which was ever truly singular, the Second Creation as the Incarnation (at the Annunciation), a merciless equality which would be wholly Satanic if it were not wholly Divine. A rather obvious final conclusion: without Mary and the Annunciation there can of course be no Passion, no Resurrection, no descent of the Heavenly Jerusalem. In the end and we shall come to see this, not at some Last Judgement, but in the entirely human hour before our entirely human death. At this point, neither the Divine nor the earthly can be of any consequence. And so too, it is certain that everyone who ever lived will then be redeemed.
What a bitch this place is to clean up. Waxing the endless panels, scrubbing the tiles, making sure dirt hasn’t blown in across the floor, polishing the quarter round until it sparkles. The obsidian is not black enough; it should shine like a pool at midnight, says that old goat of a clergyman every time I bend down with my rags. Then there is this mysterious stain near the bench and a sort of shadow leaning across the room that will not come out no matter how hard I try. I have told the old man that it’s a mystery, that there is something wonderful in it. Something common but also portentous and profound. But why should he listen to an old custodian? So he keeps on reading his huge boring books written in a language about three people can understand. I tell him that I’ve cleaned palaces and sepulchers and general’s houses and I know something unusual when I see it. Contrary to popular belief, the scenes of crimes always come clean. The next day even the bloodiest ground is spotless, just as it was before. But this odd configuration here perplexes me. I have stopped trying the erase the marks and have grown used to them, just like I’ve grown used to lousy pay and a miserable boss. I find that when I stare at them, vague impressions in the stone and wood, they do something which is comparable to speech. But it is not speaking in the sense of words, but rather like a voice on the edge of the moon when the sun blots it out. This eclipse is a murmur made by two worlds that have ceased to pass each other in enmity. It is near dark and the curious blemishes are slowly dissolving as they do every dusk. Yet they are still there, besides.
Outside this museum of lamentations, save us from another question about the weather.
Save us, by the expulsion of this girl, from the debt incurred when a statue fell and its pedestal split into two shadows. Save us from the sacred geometry of the face, from the tyranny of the palm, from the length of the river.
Save us from milk gone black by morning, from another drunkard screaming at midnight, from a boiling pot without chickpeas or garlic.
Save us from the sorcery of markets, from stern faces at the last curve of a sigh, from the markets and from prisons, from the eagle at the eye.
Save us from the conspiracy of victory and dreams that become reality.
Save us from the nights of closed rooms with silent open doors.
Save us from the hand that washes us. Save us from mourners and their green well-wishes. Most of all, Lord, save us from our friends.
Give us a lamentation free of lamentations. Give us a savior freed from the saved. Give us a rose for Our lady of the Alleys. At her alter, lay a bicycle and a rose.
I do not understand all the fuss. You stand and shout, but what good is it? A murderess dies by her own confessing hand and still the people take sides. We used to burn them for just making potions in the forest and training goats stand on their hind legs around the soft fires of solstice. It was a neat peasant trick, until the security forces got wind of it and recognized therein a mockery and blasphemy which was old a thousand years ago and ripe for proscription. But still our grandparents did this little ritual, until they moved into the cities where they forgot it all, buying novenas and statuettes at the flea marker and wandering around gloomily. No more feasts and no more bitter apple wine. Now we have these public executions and people have found something more dangerous than gambling and more lascivious than singing odes to an ancient country devil. The poor still get a moment in the sun. The rich still block the sun in the square with their passing caravans and occasionally they throw us one of their own. But it’s just to reassure the crowd. We do not trust even this small sacrifice.
On top of that building, a great group of birds have gathered. No one else seems to be interested in them, the day starting and mothers staring and school down the road to gobble us up. Colors and colors and shapes! How can people ignore this riot and go on with their boring tasks? Little dead world on wheels, horror jobs, talk and trudge, and then all those birds above making grey pedestals shout fire and changing the sneer of the rooftop into a city of daggers? They made it only for me, he realizes. A solitary vision which will fade and depart, all instants being just the same and just as far out of reach. Vanishing too from remembrance, but a line of quivering color somehow remains. Impossible creation.
Because of one fleeting moment, the last in a series of recognitions culminating in this errant glance at the back of the bus, there was nothing left to do but go for the bags. Five of six plastic bags filled with God knows what kind of junk, to be carried wherever he goes. Up escalators, down the railroad tracks, easterly along the lake, west to the hospital. True, there were other options, but these could not be seriously considered and night has its own peculiar way of changing plans. It is the morning light which brings the harshest fantasies. Bitter sunlight, daylight arrival of a thought making green outlines shiver. A figure passes by below, a hammer to the grey street.
The glance itself was utterly destructive, yet it did put a stop to all those years of aimless wandering. Far worse than any actual order the eyes might have given, was the unspoken demand at the pain of death that the those plastic bags must be gathered and transported from place to place. End of the night of recognitions (the long neck, the locket, the seaweed-like curls). Now off on the bag-trail.
But you know that you will not see this stranger again. After a few days, you will be unsure of her features, even. Yet a particle is still there, the familiarity of the unfamiliar. Then that terrible moment when all that remains are the things that remind you of faces, a hundred faces on the bus. Ever reminded, ever glancing back. Short journeys become impossible. Time to get lost.
There is a story often told to children about three trees standing in a forest. One of them was used to carve a ship figurehead; the next was used to make a cruciform mast which was later used to martyr Christ; the third tree still stands. In the first instance, the man who carved the woman’s form fell in love with his own creation. Because of this, he comes to tragedy (I cannot remember the details, except that he falls overboard on the ship which bears his creation on its bow). His son, also a carpenter, chops down the adjacent tree and sells the lumber to the same ship’s captain for use as a new mast. The high wind in its sails speeds it to the rocks, where it is dashed to pieces. The wood is then recycled by a Roman timber baron and ends up on the hill at Golgotha. The third tree is used to watch the sea and signal storms to troubled ships, a primitive lighthouse from which one can observe but never really avert maritime disaster. I have heard it said that this was also the same tree from which the Serpent tempted Eve in the Garden, coiling down from a middle bough to wind himself in her hair like shining pearls.
The house isn’t quite empty. Every Tuesday evening, two minutes before midnight, a shadow falls across the kitchen threshold. In the mirror above the sink, reflected at a left angle, I catch her reflection for a split second. The clock counts down. A minute passes and I get another fleeting glimpse. Then, just before the final stroke of the hour, there is a third and final apparition. Then it’s Wednesday and the beginning of another week of waiting. I think of the hanging locket. I think of the long hair, like lava over stone cups. I think of red bands. I think of little else but these details. All this imagined geography and porous detail will vanish at the appointed hour come Tuesday, when the desperate inventions I’ve come to rely upon so heavily are obliterated by an impossible apparition. What else is there but this evening, more punishing and more terrible than equatorial midday? But the most unbearable thing of all is the certainty that one of these nights will be the last one. The girl with the locket will stare into an empty room which no longer holds her reflection. Then, fortunately, all three of us will vanish in the glare of day.
An impossible painting: In the giant foreground, Longinus’ great booted foot stamps on a fire ant. At the very top of the canvas, impossible to see with the naked eye, there is a miniscule rendering of the same centurion’s spear piercing the side of the Lord.