Adhesions 3: the world where Antigone’s death precedes that of Polynices

At the plain’s far edge, an unpitied corpse is torn by hungry dogs. It speaks. Brother, it is true you really grieve for me. It is true you are in mourning. But brother, isn’t there also something else in your heart, another passion pushing up through your loss? Why are you squabbling with the authorities as if they might replace your sister as your life’s worthy opponent? Could it be that you want to lever the world with your affliction? Perhaps you wish for a reason to go to war, and the images of suffering and death that you evoke with such articulacy are both the trigger for the playing out the demonstration of your self, and a retrospective justification for whatever atrocious measures you are prepared to take. I ask now if I am really lost to you? Or is it that I am more useful to you than I have ever been? More loved? More here? Did you care so much before? I trust you feel, but you have turned towards and not away from the world, you are angry not sorrowful, and I do not remember why. My sister, how you needle and complain. Why do you demand that I should not take my own path? Why do you want me to not act in accordance with my will? Whenever I agreed, for reason of my love for you, to your changes, acceding my space to you, bowing to your command of my actions, then we both lost all sense of where we were, we both become directionless. If you had your way, the ground I once held for both of us would not be occupied at all. Why should I listen to you if it ends in catastrophe for our house? Where before you said you found me unresponsive, remote and inflexible, suddenly, by agreeing to listen to your demands, I become reduced, enfeebled and characterless. You immediately lost respect for me whenever I gave way to your fury, I became weightless and fey under your gaze. Do you not recognise, you have nothing to say to the one who is ready to hear you? Where I give my ground to you, because as you say, I have no right to it, because as you say where I am is itself a crime, you do not then take the space but seem to forget it, and it becomes unviable. Wheresoever I am removed from the sphere of action, you do not step forward to replace me - the only change is that I am no longer the man to whom complaints are directed but the less-than-man about whom complaints are made. For you, I am either in error or I am irrelevant. Brother, in our house we do not yet know the work of unwork. We were born too soon. We do not yet know unweaving. Even so, our truth will be brought to our door, to our fences and to our walls, it is brought by the neighbour and we are made by what he brings. We do not yet know the other cheek which we do not offer him, his severed ear which we do not heal with a good word, or a gentle touch. The neighbour is bearer of the truth of our house. But our code says we may not admit him without also injuring ourselves. We may not know our truth which he brings. Our work is directed towards forcing the world to know our house. But we do not yet know ourselves, which is our undoing, and the world will not know us until we know ourselves as the truth of our house. But then our truth is withheld from us, it is carried towards us from out of the hazy fields, from the far and unclean edge, by one who approaches and never arrives, the one who cramps us, restricts us, moves our boundaries, scatters our sheep, denies us the path to our pastures. And we may not include or acknowledge the house of the neighbour because it cannot be included or acknowledged. Nobody speaks in our house from the position of our neighbour, there is no voice there. We may not hear it. It is not silent. The neighbour is unheard but he is not silent. He does not arrive but approaches endlessly, bringing the truth of our house, of our wells, our pastures, our vines, our sons. We are in no position to negotiate the demands we are unable to admit. Let the stranger approach, the other one, but the neighbour, never! The neighbour makes demands upon us. He is implacable. He presses against our pressing from the other side. He is bound to us but we only become ourselves where our house refuses to recognise his demands. That is how we are made. But the neighbour’s neighbourliness is irreducible, he is always there - and it offends our eyes. We can’t escape him, can we escape ourselves? He is fixed by our partiality for our house, the place to which we return at the end of the day. He is fixed by the law of our preference for our house which cannot acknowledge or include him. The neighbour is not fixed as himself. He is not black, nor woman, nor foreign, nor Muslim. He is not sick nor unclean. Nor is he our distant enemy. He is not fixed as himself but by our own fixity. He is the neighbour because of house. All that we might say of him is that he is what we direct our critique and rivalry at, and what we seek to separate ourselves from. We separate the perfection of our house in life as that set of agreed-to statements and rules written to prevent the influence of all that we do not want the world to see as belonging to us. The neighbour belongs to what we do not want to see in the world. The neighbour conforms to those forces and tendencies from which we desire to break away, those forces which we cannot acknowledge as belonging to us. He bears the truth of our adhesion to that which we would disavow if we could recognise it. And we escape the neighbour’s hold over us only where his reality is translated into symbols, it is only there that we escape the truth of our selves, and of our house to which we otherwise must adhere. Sister, that is because the neighbour is not the neighbour, the neighbour is in the arrangement, and is not the one arranged. All that is arranged, also adheres. I remember you said adhesion is the last viable form-of-life. It is where traumatised tissue, injured in illness, operation or violence, heals by adhering to, that is growing into, neighbouring tissues - wrong healing elicits a peculiar pain from ordinary movement. Brother, adhesion is scar tissue, a sort of living bridge across a space such as the peritoneal cavity, and between organs. Similarly, in what is written, traumatised fragments, traumatised by the compulsion inherent to free associating, adhere each to each and emerging as an abominable unity of scars, begin to walk on the earth - every lurching and difficult step, expressing that discomfort and complaint of things grown together. Sister, what we complain of is not what afflicts us. Brother, I don’t know what afflicts me. Sister, I do not know it but know I should know it. Brother, because I complain of it, I should know what it is. Sister, I don’t know what it is that afflicts me that I should know, I don’t know what it is that I don’t know. Brother, I pretend to know what afflicts me to hide from myself my not knowing it. Sister, I complain so as to hide what I am not complaining of because I do not know what it is. Brother, I complain because I feel I should know what it is that afflicts me before I complain of it, that knowledge should act as my right to complain, but my complaint hides my not knowing what I am complaining of, and so betrays my true affliction. Sister, I complain to you because I think you know what it is that afflicts me but I do not want you to know that I do not know what it is. Brother, I complain to you because my complaint expresses what I think you think afflicts me, I complain so that you recognise my affliction that I might recognise it in your recognition. Sister, I complain so that I might recognise my affliction in your recognition of my complaint as my affliction and that we might join in common cause around it. Brother, do you now press your complaint into a tightened fist to be rid of it sooner? Without that pressing, would it so soon be scattered amongst your other worries?  Is rage all that remains of grief? Remember a day before today. You, brother and I, sister. Free as the grass. We sailed feathers on the stream. We saved bees from puddles. We swung in the tree that still stands. With bright faces bound each to each with a natural piety. But now, now I am gone and you desire to serve the dish of your grief to Creon, and by force of arms make him eat it. Who is he to us? Yes, you mourn but you want it to count for something. You want to snatch something of your loss back from death. But it counts for nothing, you will leave with nothing. You will draw not even the smallest victory from my death. Or, tell me I am wrong. Tell me that in your distress, you are drawn even now bare footed across the stony field, you are flying ragged over the dangerous ground, your frantic eyes searching amongst the dead for me. Tell me you are forever approaching the unforgiving ground of my falling, the dreaded place on the far edge of the plain where I must lie. And how eagerly you seek to separate me out again, draw me up again, from this state of contiguity into which I must decay, forgetting and forgotten in death’s hollow marriage chamber, a chamber maiden, a chamber martyr, caught in the noose of her own linen veiling. You say, memory play is the predicament set out by Tennessee Williams. I say, it describes the frame in which plays such as The Glass Menagerie operate. You say, characters adhere to a repetitive cycle of behaviours located in the here and now but held in place by inescapable past traumas. I say, that traumatic event itself is either poorly remembered because of its painful associations or cannot be directly addressed by the characters because it is deeply disputed. You say, characters will not free themselves from self-destructiveness in the present until the events of the past are directly confronted – and yet even the prospect of release is coloured by apprehension as the dissolution of repressive binds impies a resultant directionlessness, and loss of meaning. I say, the memory play presents the ambivalence generated between two equally unappealing alternatives: continuing with abusive but familiar relations; or fleeing into cold isolation. You say, there is no prospect of redemption, only a chance of release from the eros of our protesting against our own dependency, those endless repeating patterns of adjustment, orientation, adaptation: the old arguments, the old tensions, the old fury. I say, I have no sense of what might fill the hole left by our relinquished relations. I say, I do not know how to leave this world. I say, I have left this world. I say, stay brother. Stay your mad flight to me, I am not here. I say, I am teasing fondly as sisters must tease their little brothers. I say, forget me, leave me to the dogs. I say something banal. I say, I do not curse you, nor do I do mock you. I say, loss is grievous long and not a moment’s thing, it is long and goes on again. I say, it is a shock to the core but not an event. You say, an event is the collision of convergent series, each finding its limit at the place of dead roads, and what triggers convergence can be anything, anything at all, anything so small - and all lines end at the end of the line. I say, in what is continuous there are ends but no origins, the continuous is all ends, ends without ends. You say, if resistance is the limit that is set upon the work of the subject, where the limit fixes how far it has got in working things out for itself, and the subject is nothing but the sum of all resistances, then the event is the limit placed upon resistance, the resistance to the resistance and by implication, the inevitably squalid end of the road for the subject. I say, there is time yet for mourning to complete itself, please don’t press it into this short moment, this sudden outburst. You say, you hear me. I say, you won’t listen, so before we part forever, answer my question, my too cruel but sisterly question, mocking and yet needy, needling, fearful and appealing, answer me, before I lose the world, tell me how it will go with you, after this pantomime has ended, how many times will you feel impelled to come back to visit me where I lie, or how long will you tend my grave, the intervals always longer each time, and when exactly, in number of years, or if in months, how many exactly, will you stop coming back, when will you abandon this broken place, our memory play, forever? 

Adhesions 2: Whiskey Priest gets married

 I have seen more innocent men in the world than repenters, and the world is nothing but its banishing of all innocence - St. Ambrose

The wide river ran shallow, benign and clear over its chalk bed. It held no terrors and yet one was warned against falling into it. Marriage lay on the other side and a successful crossing was the ceremonial requirement for attaining it. I stood with my bride-to-be on the river bank amongst a small congregation of well wishing strangers. They had produced her from amongst their number and this was the first time I had seen her. She was dressed in a white gown, I did not see her face for the veil and she made no telling gestures but waited quietly with an attitude that was neither demure nor anxious. The attendant psychopomp advised me urgently, with quiet and reverential words, as to how I might safely step onto the ceremonial ferry whilst interposing scriptural references of a banal scope, ‘holy men will not convert the unbelieving husband but he shall be brought briskly to prayer by his pious wife’. The ferry was a square unstable pallet raft, with no guard rail or furniture, and wide enough only for two persons standing close, facing each other. I enquired lightheartedly as to when my belongings would be transported to the other side. I hoped my question suggested, without wink or smirk, that as a man of the world I was aware of the necessity of this local ritual, and acquiesced readily to its requirements, but also that practical matters had to count for something in the end. As they paused to consider my request, I showed my unconcern by humming the jaunty music hall line, ‘she wouldn’t have a Willie or a Sam.’ I suspected I was about to be brought back into line. The psychopomp advised I should distribute the contents of my suitcase amongst the congregation. You will not need them on the other side: ‘ancestors may bequeath home and wealth but a good wife is provided by the Lord’. I glanced at the mute figure in white standing as if in his shadow, she seemed the instrument of an unfathomable intent. I did not reply, ‘she is a snare, her heart a net, her arms are chains.’ He went on, it is time for you to step onto the ferry, give your hand to your bride, this is to show your willingness to assist and steady her as she joins you on your journey. For a moment I hesitated.  The assembled company became restless as if leaves in a forest were being caressed by a breeze before being shaken by a storm. I fixed my gaze on the ferry’s deck. I could not picture stepping onto it. Even as I stood on the bank, I felt unsteady, as if already in queasy motion, and always about to fall into the waters. The psychopomp made encouraging sounds and handed me in great ceremony, the 10 foot fenland quant pole with which to steady myself. He also gave me a mirror of unknown purpose and significance, and a single obolus as symbolic payment for my release from solitude. Shouldn’t I be paying you? I asked. Steady, steady, he whispered. Steady as she goes. I did not reply directly but asked myself if it would not be better if I did not step onto ferry, and instead called a halt to the ceremony. Was it too late to break my agreement with these strangers? Alternatively, what if I did board the raft for good form’s sake, to be seen to play my assigned role, appeasing the crowd and observing the solemnity of the occasion, but then allowing myself as if by accident to topple into the kindly waters of the river? Would my seeming good intentions, even if let down by my inveterate bad luck, be sufficient to release me from my obligations? Might the fox yet run to ground? If I should be disqualified on the grounds of my physical clumsiness, wouldn’t that constitute a no-blame scenario ending in commiserating handshakes and good natured farewells? I was all but ready to drop upon ‘me marrow bones’ and sing God Save the King but the psychopomp kindly ignored this groom’s understandable reservations and continued with his whispered advice as if calming an unsettled horse. You must not disturb the chalky sediment with the quant pole, it is bad luck. Bad luck? The growing list of whimsical rules that I was supposed to remember, hinting at mystery, suddenly became too much, I felt about to laugh at the absurdity of my predicament and what had brought me here. Laugh? My girlish and helpless giggling had given me away before on too many solemn occasions. I am aware how offensive my array of involuntary outbursts are to others. I could not stifle my amusement but to distract from it, I stepped boldly from the bank onto the raft. Let’s not tarry any longer I announced with conscious theatre. The alacrity of my gaining the river ferry elicited no excited response from the crowd but again only an unquiet rustling of leaves. The psychopomp presented me with a further set of marriage objects and the precise instructions for their use but his words were taken by the breeze and I could not follow what he said. An instrument. An ointment. A receptacle. With an abrupt gesture, I reached out my hand to the bride. You recall a girl that’s been in nearly every song?But she shrank from me, as if in terror, and retreated into the crowd. I stepped easily off the raft like a lifelong sailor and tried to follow her but the congregation closed itself against me, and I found no way through. I handed the collection of marriage objects to one of the young men in the crowd. He raised them aloft like trophies of war. Then, by swift feint and neat footwork, he won the raft from me. The crowd parted, the bride emerged, veil torn aside. And so began the perfunctory ceremony of the new groom’s wedding which the psychopomp hurried through as if time had run out. The congregation rustled appreciatively, it was right they said, to have played me false. The smiling bride, in on the game from the start, had joined him on the raft, waving and laughing. For a moment, she looked at me, but I saw no significance in her expression. I thought I would catch her bouquet if she had had one. And then the newlyweds set off for marriage, taking my suitcase. They stirred up immense clouds of chalky sediment from the river bed with the quant pole until the waters turned opaque and white. That’s good luck, our best wishes, the crowd murmured. The psychopomp repeated the parable, ‘A man does not provide for his friend at midnight from friendship but because the friend is persistent and importunate in knocking on his door.’ I did not know what to make of it. Was the arrangement over? Had I fulfilled my obligations to these strangers? Then two doves flew out from the dark trees hanging over us with startled wing claps. In their wake, they left a chalk white breast feather, soft and lovely, that hung for a moment and then drifted downwards. I prayed, if this feather should come to rest upon the surface of the waters and be carried downstream, then let me be delivered from this place. But the breeze blew the feather back to land and it fell into the churned mud of the river bank. Even the auguries are in league against me. Even allegory has become hostile. I have lost my suitcase, and yet I do not travel light.

Adhesions 1: nihil feci vermis omnia

It is said moles (Talpa europaea) bite the heads of worms (Lumbricus terrestris) to incapacitate without killing them. The worms are then cached alive, kept fresh, in specially dug larders located in the walls of the mole’s main tunnels. That is all true. A mole’s larder is where I find myself now, bitten, cached, alive but paralysed, and waiting for the moment the mole returns to devour me. Four hundred and seventy living worms were once recorded in a mole’s larder. I do not know how many are with me here. Many. Many. I feel them. Soil moving in soil. They have lost the capacity for locomotion but I feel them near me, squashed together, alive, and trembling. But our paralysis is not simply a living end. From where we are thwarted, there we might also flourish. In the mole’s larder, worms have found thinking. Strangely, most strangely, the unfatal the mole’s bite also confers a peculiar and separated-out form of worm consciousness. A soft bite that does not despatch but preserves the other’s loss across time, that is one of the mole’s most fearsome weapons. In the moment we become its prey, we thereby become aware; aware of our personal subjugation, aware of our species, and aware of the world. As we are torn from our place, we also come to know that place and in so knowing it, we exceed it. It is true, our wisdom is gained only at the expense of any possibility of acting upon it but it is wisdom, and it is in the world. There is no private consciousness that is not also tethered and relevant to a worldly circumstance. Where before we changed the earth, utilising the full range of our taphonomic powers, and thus raising earth’s surface to heaven, now we understand the process by which the great weight of fallen plants, animals and cities, first pushed out of the earth’s surface, and subsequent to their having fallen, then entering a state of advancing decomposition,  become mixed in with cosmic dust, only to be swallowed finally down into the depths. We do that. I did that. And now, if I do not do it any longer, I am bound to recognise it, and find a self within it. Worms work in and against the earth, weaving the warp and weft of it into a single cloth, unpicking it from the bedrock, elevating it in undulations, suturing it to the distant horizon. We plough and sew, we're so very very low. We delve in dirty clay. But I am no longer low, I am raised up and elsewhere, travelling by way of wormholes, and never returning to the place of my first delving. I recognise that in my present state, the earth’s great loom is all but lost to me - of that which I once was, now I may merely know but in my knowing I plough and I sew by other, and bitter, means. My thinking fills with earth as my mouth was once so filled. Soil moving in soil. I grasp the thinking of this my earth as a transferable image, and by applying it I develop a new capacity to make sense of the other earthly realms. Collected here, trembling, we are busy at re-weaving, re-tunnelling all that was undone and filled-in in us. We are making of it a new cloth, a cloth of tunnels, a cloth of our idea of our earth and a cloth of our weave-delving within it. The fatal awareness bestowed upon my writhing companions, startled awake, found out by consciousness, as beneath a burning sun, returns both us and it to the earth, changing its processes as we are also changed. From this our last place, sequestrated, writhing, convulsing, twitching as if impaled upon an angler’s barbed hook, we are cast out into the watery abyss whereupon we transform it, and it is our hook, a component of self, the hook of self. And we become the hooked self, the self inseparable from its severed awareness, oh yes a worm may live if severed in two, and awareness as such is found only in its jeopardy. We await the jaws of our end, and tremble at the thought of the approaching moment when we shall be drawn from our cell, and devoured savagely by our keeper. And yet, although we are vigilant, this moment does not arrive. The voracious mole returns often, but it is only to stuff another dawning awareness into its bulging store. The mole is compelled by some deep anxiety to hoard worms but is not equally compelled to eat us. It seems repulsed by our broken form. Instead, as I imagine it, it relishes the joy of a running, fleeing, yelping prey, torn and consumed in the hot moment of the hunt - what savour is there in canned security compared to that? The mole possesses us as an unconsumed surplus, an unspoiling midden, an irrelevant stockpile built up in a time of abundance. Contradictions everywhere, and the whole only in the fragments confronting the idea of the whole. And the violence of our lived time curdles within the mole’s sidelined anticipatory time: separating, concretising. In the mole’s larder, we are transformed into a thinking wealth, aware of and against our condition, and thus capable of thinking beyond our predicament. Behold, O Saturn, behold the children you did not devour! And behold again all that we behold, and how we now find and recognise, soil moving in soil, and by image transfer, the fate of Penelope’s suitors, as they languish, incapacitated, cached. Do you read us suitors? We read you. Do you recognise us suitors? We recognise you. And with our taphonomic powers, we re-write you. Will you re-write us in turn? We write by tunnelling within your predicament. Soil within soil. Chilled by her enchantments, woven into her stratagems, bitten by her beauty, and thus subdued by the voracity of her will - the suitors in thrall to Penelope, by way of image transfer, become our allegory. But we move in both directions. We contemplate as well the movements of Penelope, also cached, by husband, also as our sister weaver, but also as savage mole. We recognise her as from the place of the suitors, who are captured and accumulated, and then we recognise her from their place of potentials which she has forever deferred. What need has she for them, what need has mole for us? How the non-act of possession must sicken the possessor as the unused talent must be confronted, and thus tarnished. The act of compulsive acquisition is in turn driven by the hoarded treasure’s depreciation -  everything definite will be assailed, teased, worm-eaten by the card turning of Fortuna. And all things attained, strongly stored, and unthreatened by rival, thief or invader will lose both lustre and value in the wider world - because they have been removed from the threat of the wider world. There is no private wealth that is not also an impoverishment imposed by the world it refuses. Then, Penelope-Dentata will cast the woven cloth of her desire out and across the world and will make the cloth anew. With her webs, her nets, and her sticky threads, she hunts for that last prey still running. 

Parable on the spring offensive

a time to rend, a time to sew

I hid in winter. I buried my weeping before start of day. I skulked and warbled from the closing thicket. I said, ‘rags of skin shed from a full moon’. By new spring, jackdaws flew across my path. Daybreak dragged off curtain and comforts. We waked longer. We sang longer. Still more light came. Nowadays, my eyes are dry at dawn. Starlings call from chimneys. This morning, as I walked out for work, I judged it neither first light, nor already too late.  On the path, I saw pieces torn from a pomegranate.  

I built my nest

I built my nest in a forest of thorns. As my children grew so the forest grew round them. 

parable of the two energies

I survived my escape from a land of hostility. And now I must survive in a land of indifference. 

parable of relief

We are cured of the afflictions by which our ancestors knew the world. For our good health, we are exiled.