the trap condemns the fox, not itself
I think many years must have passed since I last saw Joab the gravedigger, whom I met today, because I do not remember him, and for his part, he appeared neither pleased nor disappointed to see me. We encountered each other unexpectedly on the road beside the cemetery and I sensed things between us were no longer the same as before, but then things do change. It is a rule. Whatever continues shall also change. I do not say grow or progress, nor decay and decline, but only that continuing things are also changing things. Change is the condition of continuation. True, in ourselves, we do not change. We are also in our way to be considered as continuing things, but we’re different because we stay the same. In our case, staying the same is the condition of our continuation. That’s just the way it is. It’s something that happens to be as true as its opposite happens to be true. Things that don’t change also continue, and the most successful forms of life change least. Success like that does not emerge from out of the capacity for open ended adaptation, but in the chance discovery of an impregnable niche fixed within the flux of eternity. We are like the old seers, like the old sorcerers, who by a ferocious and concentrated exertion of will succeeded in merging themselves with trees and rocks so that they might live forever - in this way we are also willed things, we are capable of slowing our metabolism to a standstill so that we might persist in being ourselves across time. Only patterns will break free of what is patterned. But some things of such a sort will always stay exactly as they are, unchanging across millennia, whatever we might mean by that. Yes, we are that sort of thing. I am exactly the same as I always was. And Joab is too, or that is what I suppose. Although I do not remember exactly how he was then, I would think he has had no choice but to stay the same and it is things between us that have changed. Then, it’s not right to propose that we should or could change because, precisely, we don’t, we stay the same as we ever were. But the things, the luminous strings, between us now are different. It’s those things held between us that change. They are the things, occurring between fixed points, that change, and they are changing all the time. We stay the same across millennia and, or but, the glowing strings between us change and change without any limit set upon the sorts of change they might be subjected to. And that’s how the woman who left my house has since returned - she now approaches me in the semblance of a lost daughter. She has become my eldest daughter. And that is also how I have since become an ancestor to this woman who once left my house so long before. As the beloved dead are fixed once and for all to the contiguity of our ancestors so the beloved alive shall sooner or later be assigned the place of indulgence at our table that is set for our daughters. At this point, I cannot but think of an exhumed queen, perhaps Catharine Parr. I cannot but think how her remains should have reclined throughout eternity in a tomb lined with the nest of her own hair. I envision a remainder of life luxuriating in that hollow airless void deep within the earth, and cushioned by her luminous hair which then crumbled into what we might call an immediacy of dust at the moment Joab the gravedigger lifted the stone which had fixed her there. The flowers on her grave have all faded away / Some day I'll go home and say when I go / On poor Ellen's grave pretty flowers I'll sow. As I fell into step on the road beside the cemetery with the exhuming gravedigger, as if in the familiar manner from when we might have known each other long before, perhaps from the time of Queen Catharine’s exhumation, but I do not recall much or anything of him from then, he asked me, ‘how is your wife? Are you still together?’ That is when I understood the reason why I did not remember him. He knew of me, she may have spoken to him of me, but he had known her behind my back and now sought information with which he might resume their surreptitious acquaintance. I replied, ‘she is now my daughter as seems to be the way of things.’ He did not show surprise and, with my ideas rushing forward, I imagined him asking for her hand in marriage whilst I replying, ‘I will give it careful consideration but there is much to think about first.’ We went to the gravedigger’s hut where he made us tea. It was a wintry day and the hut was not much warmed by the gas stove. Our shining breath hung between us like fleeting clouds. He reclined in his dilapidated lounge chair, whilst seeming to invite recollections of local friends I could not recall. Only then did I wonder if Joab the gravedigger might think I was somebody else, and that we were both at cross purposes. Perhaps we did not know each other at all and this was our first encounter, each imagining the other to be a dim figure from his past and playing along, hoping the memory would return. And yet he seemed to have all the necessary facts about me at his fingertips. At that moment, and with an air of exceedingly careless insouciance, he suddenly launched one of his Joab darts at me. The point of it stuck like a tethered harpoon into my bared forearm and I let it remain there, as a sort of badge or trophy. We looked at each other and he said, ‘only patterns may escape patterns.’ Then like the jolly whaler who as passed round Cape Horn he threw the other two darts which also stuck fast into the flesh of my arm. I was about to say, ‘playing darts as one says playing cards’. I considered ripping the darts from my arm, and with fletchings held toward him, handing them back, you are supposed to say on such occasions, ‘I believe these are yours’. I also considered attacking him with classical, tale flicking violence. I said, and keeping the conversation on track, with reference to my daughter, ‘We kill whatever we remember, but only in our forgetting do lost things live freely.’ He asked me how it came to be that my wife was transformed into my daughter. I said: It was something like a bedevilment by Kiarostami, but instead of two strangers spontaneously re-engendering provincial married life from a seething sea of ready made petty quarrels, we were thrown back, as by the power of an unfamiliar boiled sweet, into the broad comedy and permissive tolerance practiced within the non-literate, and thus uncodified, portions of some or other merrie place where all divergences pass unrecognised very much precisely because they are not so named, because they connect to nothing and have no value. We found that if the law of the father should be repressive, then it was also fallow and unproductive; and if at the level of experience dominion was fitfully applied, then so was it also incompatible with abstraction and totality. Where our conjugality became unviable, and friendship unlikely, a theatre of absurdist ubuesque patriarchy was our next recourse. Our shared project was the extraction of a terrain like an Anglo-Saxon patchwork of hedged fields that had been buried within our mutual conduct wherein were soon generated zones of inattention and the sprouting forms of an exterior life - who dares say, the leafless garden is not beautiful? Since then I have played the censorious father, and my banishings bring on an influx, and my innumerable and respectful daughters rebel most industriously against me. At this, Joab made a grand, surrendering gesture as if throwing a powder in my face whereupon I became fascinated by a new flickering within the lampshade. I saw a sort of skittering and feather light knocking as if of an orbiting moth - as if of a circling point of pressure, rising and falling, a gravity defying rider, pushing outwards against the planks of a wall of death. The shadow was then somewhat foetal, a little like that thawed twitching of a frog’s larva within its foamy egg sack beneath a soft and February sun. Soon the black form had something emergent and recapitulating about it, like a pulsating eel shoved down into fishbowl, or jam jar. I looked into the lampshade from underneath but could make out nothing hidden in the brilliance. Angels one five. Bandits two of the clock. As I stood back again, I discerned the shadows taking on a more familiar and animated dog like form. I saw a head and ears and inferred an eager intelligence. It was running round and round like a puppy chasing the way out. Then a little terrier, Freddie, my mother’s companion from so many years ago, jumped down out of the paper light globe, and from out of the formlessness of pure potentiality, onto the ground from where, in a single movement, it immediately leapt up onto the sofa and curled itself, as is the way of dogs, in preparation for sleep. I said to Joab, I am like a father, I am like the elder used to others deferring to my absurdities, an exhumed and hollow king, burnt out and wreathed in glowing strings. Others now approach me as if they perceive me set upon a dais, appearing before me, beneath me, roped in travelling along the shining strings, so as to make their cases, to present their complaints, and to wait upon my judgments. My eldest daughter, not recognising me, now brings the gushing labyrinth of her worries. Which way, father? And each of her troubles are greater than all my joys. I am diminished as she confides to me, as I absorb the agitation which becomes nothing to her. I am like the famous Taoist passage concerning the father at bay: I look dejected and forlorn, as if I had no home to go to / I alone seem to have lost everything / My mind is that of a stupid man / I am in a state of chaos / I alone am benighted / I alone am dull and confused / I seem to be carried about as on the sea, drifting as if I had nowhere to rest / I alone seem dull and incapable / I listen to her but do not follow / I am dead / and in the hanging, empty moment, where I am waited upon for my words / I rouse myself sufficiently only to grant the requisite absolution / repeating with a ritual and enervated air / the few kurtzian phrases that remain to me. She appears satisfied with this and goes away. My empty form confirms the plenitude of her being. I occupy a distant point, bringing forth the exterior, but in here, in close proximity and within the canny. Those others who approach me, knowing me not, whisper amongst themselves beneath the vaulted ceiling, and adopt the hunched habitus of hilarious mice - I consider what it is, to be grabbed by a sudden and audacious urge to worship an idol, as in ‘I can’t help myself I have to worship an idol, and worship it now’, as David was sorely tempted upon the death of of his favourite son, only to be roundly rebuked by Hushai the Archite, to whom David gives the apophatic answer, ‘It is better for me to serve idols than that God should be held responsible for my misfortune.’ Upon the dais of formality, I sit above caverns of forgotten dreams, every gravestone a misdirection from the grave, I am the guardian of the stone block as portal, this vanishing point, also source of all ordinary concerns as the perfect door, that is unlocked but cannot be opened. From the last place, I float my blessings downstream. Just as every knight of the round table is a better man than Arthur, so Arthur the neuter king occupies the empty space of permission that others shy from, and empties the crowded space of indulgence which otherwise would not escape the quotidian, setting his knights in motion that they might thence return to this fixed place, the place not of but for certainties. The exhumed king is propped up, lolling in the last place, from where daughters set off with baskets and to where they return with flowers. I stole all courtesy from heaven, And dressed myself in such humility That I did pluck allegiance from men’s hearts. There is no course of action but this, and whatever I might intend, my wise sayings shall always be heard as approving. As I grant permission so I buy return. I have become like the ancestor curled as an unborn, buried beneath the hearth, a prisoner of reference and observation, or like the furious mummified ancestors lying flat and straight, awake forever, staring upwards, plucked at and weather beaten, tied down and laid out upon the roof. If I am to be consulted, then it is expected by the world that I shall bless every departure from the rule, and every exception to tradition. If the world comes to me, it is because I give quarter before the force of its demands. My middle, troubled daughters, all pilgrims, who are not my daughters, nor were they once or ever my wives, make an endless procession along the shining threads, each taking a turn upon the knotted platform or in the cell of tangles before me, and each beginning their address with, the same formula, ‘father, I.’ They approach me coquettishly, with flirting and coy misdirections so as to test the ground, to test if this is real, to test if I am for real, and only once they have observed my impassivity do they then make the spiralling gesture of resignation at the weight of their lives and then commence upon the oral culture of their eternal woes, oftentimes weeping. Where at last their the mighty flow begins to dribble and breaks off, I bless each of them, as if each were the first. They throw a bird into the air and as it makes its first flaps, these my second daughters forget me. I do not see any of them again but there is always another pilgrim on the road. Joab says: the bonds between us will change all the time for as long as they continue, but where they cease, where they are broken off, or otherwise abruptly discontinued, then they will stay exactly as they were in the moment of their terminus. I say: We are haunted by fixed things, dead ends, discontinued lines, fixed images, all the irreducible things stuck in the past. Joab says: These are the things that come back to us, in spite of attempts to metabolise them, dead things from the past which we can’t escape. I say: The stuck things, unchanging and fixed things, the dead things, are one of the type of things that cause the things between us to change. Joab says: And maybe, as I don’t change, and you don’t change, we should consider ourselves dead things and only what lies between us, this tomb full of luminous haywire, can be said to be truly alive, to be truly changing. I say: Then how do relations between unchanging things change? Joab says: They go out of phase, and in the field of all relationships there is endlessly responsive correction. I say: Where we remember the ghost of old relationships and are transfixed so we are as we were, and where we are inundated by information from new channels, it is there we begin to change. Joab says: We are the same in our memories but change in our experiences. I say: The two systems, memory and experience, run simultaneously, usually in parallel but then sometimes one system, as in Dickens, runs over and captures the other, a crab under sway of a goat - a bride indebted to experience distracted in the train of hermetic memory. Joab says: Within you are two spiders: the running spider and the web spider. I ask: Which wins? Joab says: The most hungry wins. I say: Or the other one. Joab says: Yes, the spider that runs wins. I say: it is the waiting spider that wins. Joab says: when others say, ‘your spider brain has won out over your fly brain’, ask unto them, which spider? I say: We have been struggling here to give form to what it is that is the opposite of soixante-huitism where that opposite cannot be dismissed as, or reduced to, the ‘establishment’, ‘authority’, ‘the bourgeoisie’, or ‘reaction’. What is the opposite, exactly the opposite, to becoming? Joab says: consider Borodino, consider the advancing that turns out to be a retreating, the defeat that seems a victory, consider the momentum of forces which approximates for us the thing that we have assigned the value of ‘unchanging’, but from which fragments, shavings, components are flying off and making a anew. Every ‘flying off’ is flung, and every flinging an anchor, a harpoon, is tethered by a glowing rope that may later be hauled back in. This momentum is itself a will moving so quickly, extending beyond its supply chain, that it is hollowed out and eroded of all features. It is the ship of Theseus caught in a degenerative ratchet, and all the more itself, ever more what it is, because its discarded parts are not replaced. Imagine a powerful and full-sleeved leader in the crescendo of his inexorable victory, always about to sweep his last remaining opponents from the field, but who is already aware, or is yet unaware, that he is to die of some wasting affliction. Imagine there is coiled within your coup de grâce a stone that was cut out without hands, which smote thou upon thine feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Remember the image of the bedbound and reclining Matisse as he lay painting with a brush on a long cane upon the wall next to his bed - ask yourself now why did he paint high up on the wall with a shining brush on a long cane? Imagine a sudden arrest of the momentum of empire and the resultant fragments, hanging by the thread of a single memory, at its periphery cultivating their own autonomies. I say: Each of us has given of our saliva into the ceremonial cup and each of us shall later drink from our fermented product that is returned to us, but none may sip of only his own saliva. Joab says: and what news of your third daughter? I say: she cannot heave her heart into her mouth. She loves my majesty according to her bond, no more nor less. Joab says: The problem of your senility, which is the question of abdication before the inevitable, is simply stated: you desire to effect a decisive break from your progressive decline at the point where you still have the capacity, and yet the capacity for recognising that point declines at a faster rate even than your capacity to act upon it. Your potential for action is thus situated always in the past. It is for this reason that conservation of dwindling resources through adjustment to changing circumstances, whilst bargaining one more day with your fate seems always, in the present moment, to be the better part of your vainglory. Thus we can imagine a dying, Lear-like, queen, deserted by all followers but a single and loyal page who asks her earnestly what dish he may bring to her as she has not eaten for days, and her enemies will soon arrive at the castle gates. The queen describes in great detail the preparation of a restorative broth made with sacred herbs from the forest which alone shall save her. The baffled but devoted page makes a pantomime exeunt all by himself and quickly returns carrying scrambled eggs with toasted bread on a silver plate. I say: As I was retreating or advancing through the forest on my ass, neither to the battle nor away from it, I was trapped by the neck in the forked branch of a tree and my ass escaped from beneath me. I was left alone and assless in the forest, hanging by my neck from a forked branch but still alive. Off, off, you lendings! / Come, unbutton here! Have I but entangled the fate of the Israelites in my hair? Am I worse, because banished from hubris, and thus not tragic enough, am I less instructive even than Oedipus? Then, after so many centuries am I still only a father denier, nothing more than another Absalom? If that is what it is, if that is all there is, then. Then. And in this order. Cattle! Daughters! Territory! Enemies! God! Wives! Heroes!
