We Must Risk Delight. Even Jumblies Have Bad Dreams

There’s been peace, if you can call it that, around here for days. Time folds in on itself, like fields, like snow. There’s the scrape of something that resembles fear out where the grass at the edge of the yard starts to grow wild. But it’s not a noise I’m making. It is somebody else’s pain moving through, dragging stuff, no danger to me right now; I have nothing it wants, not yet. Maybe it’s mourning what it has lost, or stands to lose. But that is nothing to do with me. And maybe that too will change, and I’ll learn to be afraid of everything it already knows. But not yet.

Every true word you say rings false before you’ve finished saying it. Like those old cassette recordings of your own voice; higher-pitched, adenoidal, whining. “Is that what I sound like?” you’d say. And you did, you do. Like a fork on a plate. There’s nothing to be done except shut up and be still; so seeing you over there, kicking the dirt, angling, angling, the better coiled to spring, with mask and brand, when all this is over. And murder. And not understand. It makes me wince. You’re at your worst without your clothes.

And so another joint of pork, coffee and paprika rubbed, is shouldered into the oven for eight long hours of melting. I wipe my hands with an old Table on Ten tea-towel and reflect; that was a strange one. Strayed sideways out of the bubble, found myself in a virtual reality where those who have sworn to say nothing immediately say everything. And from a self-anointed shed of humility, speak first for themselves, then their husbands, then the village, the province, the great cities of Western Europe and noble humanity herself, wailing like virtuous Andromache across the broken plain. Blimey. And the adjectives. Never has a thesaurus been so wept upon and flayed. Count on a crisis to periwinkle out the pious, with handy exhortations, not merely on how to live, but how to think and feel too. Quel cadeau! Back indoors, the fire is lovely, and if the last two Harry Potters in succession are akin to being stabbed through the eyeballs with Voldemort’s whittled penis, with Thing One and Thing Two cosy on either side, it’s pure love. We refuse to bludgeon Joy with the blunt instrument of Guilt. Jack Gilbert:

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island:
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Shambled downstairs from the still-sweating bed. One of those nights of indeterminate horror, where the nightmares aren’t single spies, more the slow arcing splatter of a wet brush, a subconscious electrical storm, tugging at the curtains. All the unhurried day her mind lay open like a drawer of knives. It’s hours before dawn, you’re sitting on the edge of the bed, your feet in slippers, ready to go somewhere. Where? To do what? Neither asleep nor awake, you know something’s wrong but can’t remember why. And the same window-cast moonlight on the wall is suddenly unfamiliar, like somebody made it happen. There’s no Dusty; so no familiar back, rising, falling with the tide, to anchor the coracle, suddenly unloosed. They went to sea in a sieve, they did; in a sieve they went to sea. And if you had to shake her awake, tell her to pack a bag, it’s time to go; it would kind of make more sense than not. Nights like these, when the rules of sense have been suspended.

I guess we’re storing this stuff up. We go about our rounds like postmen, but the vertigo has to end up somewhere. And once there, it leaks around the seams. I make tea in my underpants. The kitchen takes shape; it’s almost disturbing that actually nothing new is wrong. That today is like yesterday. No better or worse.

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