Read Tales and Imaginings Online
Authors: Tim Robinson
A poster:
BIRDSONG & LOGIC
A LECTURE
AT 5 P.M. TODAY
tacked to a tree at the edge of the wood. Five p.m. is now, chilly dusk. Words are started among the rustling bushes: ‘Over here! Follow the path!’ The bushes reach above our heads, we lose each other. ‘Climb trees!’ We rediscover ourselves held up into the light by thin birches. Bulky black overcoats among quivering twigs, we exchange amusement and surprise. There are others farther off, a rookery. The lecturer is in a limbless oak, among ivy
.
He begins.
Is
thought
a
calculus?
A
calculus
a
stone?
Thrown
at
a
bird
,
let
fall
to
sound
a
well,
used
in
a
wall
against
a
wind?
Admit
the
wind!
To
fence
a field?
Consider
the
territoriality
of
knowledge:
the
don
defines
afield
(the
territori
ality
of
birds,
we’ll
say),
assumes
a
stance
(his
axiom:
each
bird
sings
only
‘
I
am
here!’),
deploys
his
arms
(poor
scarecrow,
the
birds
are
flown
already),
and
lets
his
yield
define
himself.
‘
I
am
my
place!’
he
sings,
and
produces
proofs:
‘The
song’s
assurance
dwindles
with
distance
from
the
perch;
each
bird
and
its
neighbour
meet
in
equivocation
and
make
their
mutual
boundary
the
locus
of
equal
unconviction.
Thus
the
land
is
parcelled
out
by
blackbirds,
thus
by
robins,
thus
by
thrushes,
in
mutually
invisible
systems
of
exclusions
…
’
But
Doctor
Intelligence
Discarnate
views
this
from
above,
sees
what
is
not
to
be
seen
(the
crow’s
border
crossing
the
wren’s
domain,
linnetdom
within
chaffinchshire),
discovers
his
hard
calculus
to
hand
and
with
it
guards
his
empty
coverts.
Logic,
not
Song,
is
ritual
attack!
(Song
is
the
riddle
that
turns
upon
itself.)
If
you
are
your
thesis,
best
perfect
its
defences,
disguise
guilty
inclusions,
claim
originality,
defend
your
bounds
against
encroachment.
For
above
all
else
you
fear
encirclement,
the
hell
of
being
understood,
analyzed,
part
refuted,
part
absorbed
and
reinterpreted
within
a
greater
whole
in
which
a
fragmentary
occluded
you
lives
on,
forced
to
chime
your
thinking
with
another’s.
Are
you
perhaps
the
defect
in
your
objectivity,
the
vulnerable
centre?
Then
exclude
yourself,
renounce
your
place
in
the
winged
flux,
become
impen
etrable
,
a
stone,
at
rest
in
the
safety
of
complete
disjunction
from
your
kind.
Turn,
Professor!
Seek
the
glimmerings
of
sense
in
the
thickets
of
your
the
ory
.
There
is
a
pool
in
which
you
figure,
ringed
by
fleeting
diagrams
of
your
inconsequential
algebras.
Superior
intelligence,
this
structure
of
fears
you
think
of
as
yourself
reflects
you
well
–
and
thus
the
affronted
incalculable
outwits
you!
Self-description
is
the
cuckoo’s
egg
of
contradiction
among
your
sterile
clutch
of
theorems
–
and
an
unexpected
proof
of
kinship
with
the
birds!
From
a
contradiction
all
things
follow;
it
is
the
all-devouring
foster-child
that
bursts
apart
your
systems
and
teaches
you
to
fly.
Follow
its
derisive
voice,
poor
pipit,
beyond
the
circles
of
your
Boolean
mind!
Become
insatiate
of
possibilities,
watch
Venn’s
amoebae
spiral
out
in
unbelievable
evolutions:
multimen
with
flocks
of
voices,
wind-tossed
clouds
of
faculties
and
appetites
juggled
by
perspective
into
momentary
beings,
infinities
of
selves
lovingly
nested
one
within
another
…
So
,
crazed
by
mad
analogies
of
sanities
yet
to
be
invented,
the
sad
profes
sor
mounts
St
Francis’s
pulpit,
humbly
resolved
to
speak
only
as
a
bird
speaks,
for
the
pleasure
of
hearing
a
like
voice
return.
And
when
the
sun
sets
in
his
mind,
as
now,
his
thought
flies
inwards
to
its
own
dark
woods,
leaving
a
silence
where
it
sang.
The last of the daylight hangs between the crooked treetops. As the silence lengthens we begin to stir, look about us, call across to friends and wave, feeling our arms stiff and fingers numb. The
lecturer
is almost invisible between two breast-like swellings of the oak. We slide to earth through crackling twigs, find ourselves deep in the night, and grope our way together. At the edge of the wood we loiter to discuss the lecture and admire the fraudulent
transactions
of the dusk. Below us the sail of a little boat glimmers on the reservoir, a heavy procession of lit windows marks the road beyond, and in the distance where the city diffuses into its own sky, the long wail of a jet bears a star down towards Heathrow.
How lazy even flame is
nowadays. Drowsing on my rooftop I watched a house burn down throughout this afternoon. Fire heaved and murmured in the basement for hours before the weight of flames dragged down the floor above. And now evening is
delayed by the glowing sheets that seep and hang and flap from the upper windows. A little clan forced to shift by rolling smoke-banks carries its accumulations the length of the street to another empty house. I see a loving couple borne on a bed. The figure slipping from shadow to shadow behind them is their rat-god. When the darkly gaping door and windows have absorbed the last of his people the parasite shows briefly at the fall-pipe, a blur moving smoothly upwards to a hole under the eaves. The domains of his kind, and of mine, are suites of skeletal rooms left by the slow falling away of the flesh of these houses. Below, shapeless families nest in cellars full of rubble. Now that fire has so little infective power the few houses left could stand for some indefinite forever. These mild dunes of ash that sift around us, giving out moonlight for the sun they absorb, image our future: ever, never, the same, day by day. At a distance stand other groups of gapped streets, villages spared out of the city as history lost its appetite. I see their lights by night. I suppose they have their gods, to whom are prayed the same prayers, and who have, like me, but one thing in their gift.
Time is long past
Deliver us from the moment
says a message I found scratched on a wall some yesterday like this. The same plea arises with the scent of crushed nettles from the
calendrical
zero my people trample out in dew each morning. And I consider and reconsider, weighing in my hand the orb that could impose nothing, once and finally. Shall it be tonight? At this hole in the roof I would begin my ceremonial descent. I often prowl at night through the cagework of joists; I would not have to grope, my hands extend surely through the darkness to known points of
support
worn smooth: angle of a waterpipe, post of an interrupted balustrade. I am silent as dust. Not a flake of plaster would flutter down to announce my coming. Shall it be tomorrow?
A brief fount of laughter arises from the street below where the dust-worshippers gather each evening. This corner used to be famous for little whirlwinds, but of recent years they have become rare. Now one has occurred, quite a successful one to judge by the
clapping
and the gaiety. Sometimes a whirl of dead leaves is long-lived enough to initiate a dance. The glee, fading already, has an
undertone
of sadness; this game will not be played many times more. Now no doubt they hope to evoke another epiphany – two in one evening, how ridiculous! – by laying out tempting scraps of newspaper and wisps of straw. Girls with long scarves around their waists will be whirling gently, while the men sitting on the garden wall blow soft kisses of smoke among them. I no longer need to lean from my rooftop to savour the fading scene. And this evening a qualm of impatience runs through me. Nature – do you not
realize
? – has long lost sympathy with sympathetic magic. The air is unresponsive. They will soon lose faith and drift indoors.
Under the slant of the roof here is
an empty watertank, and behind it a hermit had his triangular cell. The hollow zinc used to
thunder under the drumming of his fists and feet in his convulsive ecstasies. Now he is gone, leaving a row of open books nailed
facedown
along a beam. Their titles propose some dry exegetical chaff The whole house is cobwebbed with futile cults. Being the object of one saps my self-belief But I can still fulfil their longing for emptiness! I shall, tonight, come down, seeping from floor to floor, the hollowness of the house distilled into a heavy globe of liquid, oozing, elongating, re-accumulating, until I hang just above their heads poised to overwhelm … But now:
Rape a witch, rot to death:
so in those days ran the law.
Knowing himself hunted from within …
Ah, once more! Vesper rehearsal of my acts and passions, scraps of chant filtering up through the grids of rafters, through my sardonic commentary. I love to hear it – acts and passions! – however
incomprehensible
it is. That introductory phrase seems to reflect a medieval chapter of my existence, I smell the charcoal of the great forests. And this, prehistoric, prebiotic?
… laid himself down
where the earth opens its skin
onto beds of glowing coals,
and when the shrieking of the blood was over,
creature of ash and twisted wire …
It seems I have left shreds of myself on the briars of all ages! Would that I had such freedom of the epochs, rather than suffer the
recurrent
moment! And now to tender modern times, for the riddle of the potato-crisp:
… kneeling by the road
took with his lips
from the hand of a child
the crooked wafer.
Traditional argument for my immortality follows, resigned and fearful, from an atomic future:
Having found the little catch
that holds the world together,
is
he the most powerful of men
or, all decisions waiting on this,
the least?
… together with the usual scholastic speculations as to the nature of this catch:
blade of grass bent under a stone,
two hairs of the thigh twisted together?
Ah, absurdity! Evening after evening, incense of absurdity!
How do the graffiti of midnight skies depict him?
What is the object hard to make out he bears in his hand?
Is it a bud? – It is scaled like a bud …
Indeed, my children, you shall learn what flowers from this metal bud so cool and fitted to my hand. Oh, the avidity of my imagination! Now I shall come down, now I shall materialize in your midst, now exhibit this dormant sphere to your wondering gaze, now release the catch that holds our world together, now place it in the middle of our circle. In another moment perfect peace, perfect darkness, will unfold themselves about us.