we bounce in contrarian voids
— What’s it about?
— Escape from nothing and into nothing.
— Can’t be and it can.
— Meaning?
— There is none.
— I don’t believe it. I live it.
— J’ai deja vu. Infinite loops.
— No, spirals.
— What’s it about really?
— Craving love.
— A trip from about nothing and no meaning to love?
— Arises from its giving, dies from grasping.
— I don’t believe it. I live it and I don’t believe it.
∞
I think of you, Ari, my partner, friend, who hung around Kings Cross in days of Yellow House and Whiteley.
You who before sell-out crowds, though never a star, always stole the stage.
You who let your ideas languish but helped others soar.
You admired the edgy ones — those who broke new ground.
It was art that thrilled you, and talent and people, not their reputations. Artophile: artophiliac. If art was anywhere, you were there, exploring in all senses. If the production was terrible, you sat it through in case the end redeemed it. Afterwards, you'd whipper-will backstage to give feedback: honest, constructive, generous. They loved you for it; you gave them recognition deeper than applause.
Your essence brooked no rule, no routine, no yoke. Instead, you extended your elven ears, your throat, stretched your elastic heart, and never missed a note.
Part Antonin Artaud, part Beckett, you could flip from Lucky to Pozzo and back, knowing Godot never existed. You could go ultra-yogic slow Butoh like Min Tanaka, take one unending hour to cross the stage on your tum, undulate in invisible waves, tender prone as a caterpillar in camouflage. Your claws rat-scrabbled futile attempts to escape from existential limbo, like Nam June Paik's soundtracks. Tick-tock, click-clock, the metronome chimed, recorded and overdubbed so the rhythms contrapuntal jerked hither and thither, interspersed with nick knock and clatter of clutter, in trick tracks that never… let up. You bounced in the void, devoid of meaning or purpose, and bounced back on a pogo stick. It was astounding, mesmerising, heart-rending. You refused to give even a meme to the deepest of meaning-making mechanistic minds.
Your body, a strange chimaera, changed with angle of view. Frontal stance akimbo, you were da Vinci's man wracked on a circle, but for rickets-shins, crossed-eyes and snaggle teeth. Sideways you were Quasimodo, hunchbacked. With flute or pipes, you were Pan dancing on balls of feet, wind lifting silk black fur of your back, priapus impaled by unrequited loves.
∞
Pogroms haunted your pasts. You bore that brunt — millennial generations of historical, ritual, cultural diaspora trauma. In Poland, your mother half-starved in basements and attics; father skeletal survived Auschwitz; in random picks, parents, siblings, first spouses, children, and friends lost to the ovens. Your chance of future life hovered in that edge-zone between the paradigms of power and death. "Dance me, dance me to the end of love," sang Cohen. Anya and Heinrich met in survivors' camp and conceived you, their resurrection hope, while they waited for Israel. Heinrich schlepped business in fiscal drought, vague absent father till his heart failed. Anya, witch, Baba-Yaga, adored, loathed, depended on, feared, tried to make you a good Jewish boy. She, unwitting, taught you rebellion at the glimpse of a bridle.
It began at four, though probably before.
"Enough!" said Baba Yaga, "off to home for disobedient little chłopcy.”
Women stripped and hosed you naked before strangers’ eyes, humiliated you. If you refused food, they forced it down your throat. When you vomited they held your nose, forced your mouth open, spoon-fed the puke and made you swallow. Forever then, a woman's power was abuse or rejection, the power of intolerable pain.
∞
Such a mind with such a body held you penumbra bound in liminal, lime-lit edge worlds.
The Coca-Cola sign hangs high above the Cross; untouchable curlesqued calligraphy light-housed the district – day and night round mundane, its electric gases inert but not its Stars and Stripes flagged purpose.
Broken women came to you for comfort and when they'd healed stayed friends. Then moved on. You thought you were gay because so many men wanted you, though your lingam never longed toward a man. A man you knew well flattered through your defences. You let him; it repelled you. Bewildered, you whirled amid maelstroms of the Cross, consoled yourself by consoling others over coffee at the Sad Clown and the Piccolo. When love failed, you sought sinsemilla, Kahlua, and bagel or strudel.
Till you discovered Buddhist meditation, adopted the precepts and then…
we met.
There was no instant attraction —
only those echoes of similar values.
Do you remember how Madeleine played Aphrodite,
goaded you to ask me out again and again?
I was just another mangled woman, haunted by chronic depression.
Resigned, I let you drag me around the gigs. They struck too close. I was raised atheist, existentialist, empiricist, rationalist, libertarian. Your performances forced me to feel it raw. Afterwards, I'd wait, alone, shivering in the cold, while you talked backstage.
∞
"Qua qua qua qua," said Lucky in his soliloquy in Waiting for Godot.
No one knows why.
At the core of his speech, if one eliminates all the words that don't make sense, lies a conundrum of opposing theologies.
On the one hand, "Given the existence of a personal God who loves us dearly (with some exceptions) and who suffers for reasons unknown… (but time will tell)… it is established beyond all doubt…" because of "the labours left unfinished…” each human “wastes and pines."
but
"Given the existence of a God" who is impersonal, apathetic,
unable to care,impartial, incapable of being upset or excited,
has "athambia," is impartible because he cannot be parted from himself, cannot be divided,
aphasic, unable to understand or utter speech, unable to heed or communicate with us, hence never omnipotent — "it is established beyond all doubt"
That each human "wastes and pines…unfinished."
Lucky's well-brewed stew of words brought tears. Is it always so? Ultimately? That either way, each person must ever weep?
∞
Later we learned our resistances.
You thought I lacked adventurousness and spirituality.
I thought you lacked intellect and creativity.
It took us six months to get to making love.
I liked the lack of prudishness in you,
and the absence of double standards and misogyny.
You were natural, uninhibited, generous, loving.
We each thought we were marking time till the Right One came along,
thought our partnership happened by accident.
Our shadows knew otherwise.
You were totally non-violent. I needed that.
You could not stand the idea of commitment,
yet you seemed to love just keeping going on.
It took me three years to realise —
when you were silent
it meant you were in a rage in your head.
Longer to get you to talk about it.
We broke up three times but always stayed friends.
This is not a story. Maybe it's a sketch of you, or of us, or perhaps only a de facto reflection of me. If there's love story in it — then truth has little romance. Days of chores tick by. Years are consumed. It's mostly the hard slog to learn how to communicate — or that's how I see it.
Contrarian our quarrels.
Frustrations erupt when habits with consequences boomerang back.
— Yes, you did!
— No, I didn’t!
— Look, see, this is the proof.
— I see it, but I don’t believe it.
— You know what I meant!
— How can I if you don't say what you mean?
And when you don’t mention the when, where, what, how or why of it?
Love needed listening and I-, not you-, statements. But it took new and better habits to break old ones, and an arsenal of skills of awareness to take the velocity out of the racketing boomerangs we’d made.
∞
We left the inner city for the spent-fire dawns of rain-prismed hills.
I shied from people, grew food, worked in land care, felt like a hayseed. You joined every green movement in the Caldera. Now you organize events, connect people with each other. Like a synagogue shamus, because of you, things happen. If we want time alone, we must stay home — unhook your mouth from the telephone.
After 35 years, mostly together, our bodies wither. A few months ago, cancer strobed your eye; radiation killed it. Younger generations rise post-Beat, post-existential, post-modern, post-alternative, on the edge of climate extinctions that might bid we all die. You and I stretch out in the void, devoid of meaning or purpose. The elastic bond snaps us back. Paradox. In death, return to the infinity of nothing.
After 50, I gained a kilo per year. You hated the fat.
I learned how to lose it, keep it off, am still losing weight —
but the wrinkles make me a dry old sack.
Your benign prostate plagues you.
I lost my lower incisors to periodontitis.
Denture-less, that sight shocks any eye,
and yet you can still tongue my hole-filled face with love.
My once perfect vision now needs glasses. Your thick lenses grow thinner.
We live with a risible litter of inconveniences.
Your black hair has turned white. Your teeth are screwed into your jaw.
Groin-mesh holds your innards in.
You need a cock-and-balls-ring when you're in the mood.
I need slathering of oil.
Like bumbling virgins, we learned to defeat the losses of hormones.
At my worst, you were always there for me, still are,
and vice versa.
Despite the years of conflicts, we have helped heal one another.
We bounce in contrarian voids,
but now we sift out the stinks,
propagate the aromas,
and savour the umami.
It is improbable that there could ever be anyone else now — for either of us.
©Manna Hart
“Heartfire” Tyalgum
22 April 2019
