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His name was not written Hannah Arendt
Walter Benjamin took his own life out of pure exhaustion, walking into the mountains against love’s gravity up the scarp slope of his melting reason to where he was abandoned by language. Huge lethargies in the world glutted him then stiff blood came, pulsed out in coils. Who knows where he could have gone to after that, except he couldn’t go on, burst by the butchered choice of angel history, a tremendous shattering tossed across his face, tiny maggots gobbling on sunlight, fascisms in the honeys of his friendship. His name unwritten, nowhere to be seen. He who was the loveliest among people. Why did no-one tell him when he lived ? Nothing was left to hold him on the hill. Angels could not put back insane reason. Exhaustion killed him, more than terror, more than despair, or a theology of dirt. At the end—when the angel of history called out his name to mock him—he walked higher up into the blind frontier and took his own life on a hillside that looks over the sea : one of the loveliest places on earth, as Hannah Arendt said, and like himself, halfway up and halfway down.
I will be talking with my mother close to my death I will be wrapped in a blue plaid cloth and I will be sitting at the edge of the sea those bodies will be burning out on land’s dark spit that bicycle will come down the incline all of its own I will hear the train arriving over the slope and bells of cows in the fermenting town. This will be well on in the next century and I will be talking to my mother as I wait
Mountains like broken teeth will be glistening across the placid sea horses will be ridden over the island’s white pastures they will eat sea-pinks and buttercups and go down tilted shores for cochineal of weed townships will be repeopled, lost languages regained. Schist rubbles accommodate the straggle of mourners as I sit out the white war of winter rage and drift on the bridge of dreams
At the frontier of the mountain town my twin uncles will die of german measles thirty years before I am born, and a cart carrying my mother’s mother will pull into the bomb-pocked town. My father will duck under the belly of a running horse rivers will join and be parted again wooden bridges be trampled in a rut of vodka apples I will be talking with my mother, close to the stretto of final exhaustion
Whatever has happened with me and my friends or in the rotting gut of community, shadows passed across a face, memory’s blade of bone, the final stretto made between language and silence is set in a vision of clotted sanity that flickers on my eye and time is flaking away, o dear and tender body, o ebbing breath, and syllables will collide to form a poem and birds will fall out of the unprophesied air
Therefore, as I look from the next century back to this through the shark-tooth visioned sea, through veils of rain that run across the distant waters I will see a sorghum cart turn in at mountain pastures vagrants will pour from it, my self and my grandfather among the refugees of time. And the frontier of the mountain town will give way to spits of black schist and far-off maritime lights entice me back to or out from life’s dream.
All the colours of snow imminent in the sky that is coming, black and brown obelisks in a dance of light birds whorling white beaks in front of an unshattered curtain, gulls whose backs become white as they spin against the breaking air, green flecks that are owl flight in front of the storm, fire when the prayer wheels burn in cartons of raw light, crimson flame when mountain tenements go staggering on singed air. This is language that is forming in my throat revolt of burst energies from the skies of my silence, snows that tossed dead gulls across the moor, in the perfect circle of dawn they are strewn about the shorelines, in the exact geometries of morning they are bruising my veins. Remember the tortures and the poetry, and the fertile crests of the white-out, the horses of laughter, the nostrils that foam, the sermons on barbarism, and the struggle against butchered choice. This is language that is forming in from a clot in my throat, a torch of fire out on the wasteland, a tent of heat beneath the mountain, a little drinking fountain for those abandoned by language, a spray of paint on democracy wall, democracy wall that does not exist. Moorland with snow and fire : a far-off burnt headland has stood up in my blood – it is trickling its crystals down the garnet air.
Mickie I met down Watney Street and he whistled me across. “How are you” he said—and of course really meant “have you a little to spare for some drink”—but could not bear to ask
We walked through the decayed market, a yellow- black sun gazed down over Sainsbury’s as I went to look for change. Ten pound was hardly enough to get him through the dregs of that bitter day
We stood on the corner where for centuries people have stood. Many worlds passed us by. When he had been in hospital he’d taken his pills and been looked after and had not got worse
Now he’s barely getting by. He walks out of the rooming house in Bethnal Green when it gets too loud inside. His scalp’s flaking and he needs a reliable level and a small brickie’s trowel
That woman’s son’s inside for good. That one’s man is a chronic alcoholic. This one’s on her own and better for it. But how can you know anyone’s story when every day you walk by without stopping
Charlie Malone was a good friend. So was John Long. Now they’re resting in Tadman’s Parlour—and first thing in the morning Mickie’ll go and say to them words that cannot be answered
Those are the best words, but they’re hardest to bear. To me he says : “Always—always—stop me—always—come across.” And what is the point of centuries of conversation if no-one’s ever there to hear
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