Novel

*** “When someone pushes your bed out of the ward, when you see that the sky becomes green, and when you would spare the curate the funeral sermon, then it is time for you to get up, gently, as children get up, when the morning light shimmers through the curtains, secretly, so that the sister does not see it-and quickly! But he has already begun it, the curate, you hear there his voice, young and eager and unstoppable, you hear there, he already speaks.  Let it happen!  Let his good words be submerged in the blinding rain.  Your grave is open.  Let his swift confidence first become helpless, that it may be helped.  When you leave him, he will no longer know in the end, if he has already begun.  And because he doesn’t know, he gives the pallbearers the sign.  And the pallbearers ask no more and take your coffin out again.  And they take the wreath from the lid and give it back to the young man, who is standing with bowed head at the edge of the grave.  The young man takes his wreath and rubs all the ribbons smooth, embarrassed, he lifts his face for a glance, and the rain dashes a few tears from his cheeks.  Then the procession moves itself back along the walls.  The candles in the small, ugly chapel are lit once again and the curate says the prayer for the dead, so that you can live.  He shakes the young man’s hand violently and, in his embarrassment, wishes him much luck.  It is his first funeral, and he blushes down to his collar.  And before he can correct himself, the young man is gone.   What remains to be done now?  Luck has been wished, there remains nothing for him to do, but to send the dead home again.   Just the same, after that the hearse with your coffin drives back up the long street.  To the left and to the right are houses, and in every window stand yellow narcissi, like the kind wound into every wreath, there is nothing to be done against it.  Children press their faces against the shut panes, it rains, but one of them will run out of the door.  He hangs on to the back of the hearse, is thrust off, and remains behind.  The child covers his eyes with both hands and looks after you angrily.  But where else should one swing, when one lives on the street to the cemetery?”

RB Kitaj
 The Gay Science (1965)
 screen print

Josef Strau
 Walking Alone (2017) 
tin plate, tin wire, acrylic on canvas

And you said ‘an identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall or when the wretched begin to rise or when the stranger enters the gates never thereafter to be a stranger. Identity would seem to be the garment one covers the nakedness of the self. In which case it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert through which one's nakedness gives one the power to change the robes.’

And I said ‘how can you see who we are when others are pretending to know and understand. This means they don’t ever have to really find out. If you aren’t really seen then how do you find your way in other people’s night?’

And you said ‘because the responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him. Did you mean I could lay a trail and at the same time follow one? Every folk tale knows that story.”

“I spiral for eternity, so I find the moment and look down to see myself sitting in a chair with my legs on top of each other. My legs are creating a tall tower that’s topped with my far-right-knee. It’s hiding the view from my eyes.

My soul’s infinite twirl forces my mouth to open and as the first tickles of sound appears in my throat I feel a familiar itch at the back of my neck.

A mistake for me is just another step forward, and as the owner of fifteen legs I can proudly say that I have made many and learnt from them all”