Anthony Blackwell |
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tale
OYSTERCATCHER
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Anthony
Blackwell |
They had to get to know one
another all over again,
acquaint themselves with the
people they had overgrown
into. They spoke of Destiny.
He was the first one to use
that word. In any case, it
was not accidental, their
reunion, and their farewell
had been negligible.
It was a mild April evening
and, walking through the
city of Dublin along the
quays, she wondered which of
the passers-by were good
friends of his. The woman
was in a strange mood and
she was talking to herself
like this. I think it’s just
because I’m so tired. The
best way I can describe it
is apathetic. I just want
the world to fuck off and to
leave me alone. I thought
why couldn’t I just walk
around the area, soak up the
sights even if they aren’t
all that great and just get
out and wander for a bit.
Just be happy with my
thoughts. So that’s what I
did. I’m feeling very
relaxed and at peace with
the world now, somewhat
serene. She thought it had
something to do with him.
She hadn’t gone far because
it was becoming dark but she
had felt the need to walk so
she went.
When he called the first
time she recognised his
voice immediately but told
herself it couldn’t be him.
On one occasion he sounded
cheerful when he phoned and
the last thing she heard,
before they were
disconnected, was his laugh,
which made her feel better.
The days when she didn’t
hear from him at all were
the longest. The worst was
just not knowing when she
was going to hear from him
again and she was just
sitting around, waiting. She
would have never forgiven
herself if she had missed
one of his calls.
The weather had been nice
but she did not like the
city. After all, she was
from someplace else. Dublin
had been tolerable when he
was there. In his absence
she found herself wandering
aimlessly around town
becoming increasingly upset
because there was no
possibility of seeing him.
She missed his company. Her
thoughts all seemed to
revolve around him. Standing
in line at the tax office
she broke down and cried.
She was worried by his
absence and was waiting for
him to come home. He was a
sweetheart. He was the
craziest thing to happen to
her.
In a quiet, unimportant
place a man was standing in
a public park. Alone, at
night, he stood in the
centre of the park
surrounded on all sides by
large buildings. The man was
from someplace else. The fog
that had descended upon the
town on the morning of his
arrival refused to lift and
he had taken to going for
long walks, uncertain about
the nature of his solitude.
Was it, in fact, an illusion,
boxed in, as he was, by the
vapour? He encountered very
few people on his walks and
they were reduced by the fog
to passing blurs. He stood
upon the grass, listening.
He remained still but heard
nothing save occasional
distant noise. The man
raised his eyes in the
direction of the sky,
peering into the illuminated
greyness, looking for the
moon and stars. It was then
that he remembered something
he had either read or heard.
One should not look at
anything. Neither at things,
nor at people should one
look. He thought he
perceived intelligent,
intermittent lights,
aircraft beacons, perhaps.
He could not see the stars;
he could not see that far,
nor could he be expected to.
His eyes, unsurprisingly,
could not penetrate the fog.
He would have looked to the
constellations, to Orion,
Taurus, and Pleiades, if he
could, to navigate an escape
from this oppressive place
so similar to what he
imagined the Lüneberg heath
to be like. He recalled
something he once read on a
poster. Ultimately, the
universe itself is a symptom
that will disappear. The man
thought he was going crazy.
He had withdrawn into his
own thoughts and had
wandered away, abandoning
her, prolonging his ordeal
and proclaiming his own
defeat, accepting a
diminution of himself. He
was thinking how, in a
Platonic sense, she will
exist for as long as he
lives, as an idea, in the
atmosphere of this place.
He continued walking,
talking to himself like this.
I don’t want anything from
you. Just to know you. I
don’t think we’ll ever meet
many people where this kind
of thing happens. Perhaps a
few in the course of a life.
I shouldn’t have frightened
you. He should have been
more careful, using a word
like that. He hadn’t meant
it in that way, or had he?
He couldn’t tell. In any
case, it had been an
ill-chosen adjective. He
believed love was a
regulative concept, an
irreducible novelty, the
word was too arbitrary, and
he was only half-serious
about the Destiny thing. In
fact, he feared love more
than anything else, more
than existence itself.
He hurried through town,
shrouded, with the
arithmetical attitude of a
man who is counting and
calculating, distracted and
quietly despairing, sure
that he was but one of many
solitudes,
uncharacteristically
unimpressed by the many
lives that moved, changed
shape, transfigured his
environment, the blurred
shapes of human movement. In
a strange town he loved to
throw himself into the
traffic of the throng and be
made anonymous and mobile in
the multitudes. This time,
however, he did not pause to
consider man’s miscellaneous
nature, the concentric lives,
the impossible range of
feeling suggested in the
distant cacophony of human
noise.
The woman was walking west
along the quays, looking at
the horizon of plant life on
the opposite bank. The sky
was rosy-fingered. She
remembered the last phone
call and wasn’t sure whether
he would call again. He had
rejected her in the past,
before all of this. When he
asked her whether there was
anything she wanted to say
to him she didn’t know what
he wanted her to say so she
said nothing. She still
didn’t know whether that was
the right thing to do. I
just don’t know, she thought.
I don’t know how I feel. I
can’t explain it. I don’t
know what you want from me
or what exactly it is you’re
thinking. Sometimes I think
this is all for the best and
there’s no point seeing you
when you get back, if you
get back. All I know is that
it’s terrible being away
from you, or you being away
from me, as the case is. I
can’t even think straight. I
sometimes wonder what it all
means.
She decided to remove
herself from the quays, from
the violence of the passing
buses, and walked through
Quartier Bloom, the
burgeoning Italian district
she referred to as the
Galleria, thinking of Milan,
(she knew one of the models
from the Last Supper and
liked to look on the rare
and significant other life
bequeathed him by the
photographer) and along the
Luas track, passing the café
on Capel street where once
they had shared coffee,
looking at the counter where
they had sat, vacant now,
all the counters vacant now,
in T. P. Smith’s and
Keating’s too, and the
public benches on Wolfe Tone
Square, passing St Michan’s
Church, reflexively thinking
of ghosts, and as she
approached Smithfield Square
she remembered a
conversation they had in
Thomas Reads on a night not
too dissimilar to this one.
The bar did not seem to
belong there, at the time,
on that square, amid the
nascent development. The
mahogany furniture, the red
carpet, the professional
clientele, created a
transitory impression. One
felt foreign there,
stateless, sitting, drinking
in an anteroom, as it were,
a half way house. It had an
air of displacement. The
kind associated with airport
lounges and hotel foyers,
train terminals and
industrial estates. The same
sense of wholesale vacancy
and timelessness.
At a table by a window they
interrogated, through
exchanges of raillery,
consciousness, the
phenomenon that was their
friendship, the indissoluble
synthesis, its peculiar
structures, laws of
appearance, and meaning.
They struggled to grasp the
essence of the phenomenon.
Sometimes I wonder what it
all means. They talked about
Lévinas and the wisdom of
love and about dying. He was
talking a lot about dying at
the time. It seemed to her
he apprehended the world in
this manner, juxtaposing it
with its extinct other, the
other that we are born into
when we die, as if it
preserved and maintained him
and defended him from all
human emotion. She was not
at this point aware that he
had already decided to leave,
had put plans in motion. He
spoke like a suicide,
describing his ideal funeral,
asking her would she visit
his grave, if, that is, he
chose, in the end, or,
rather, before the end, to
be buried. He asked her
whether she would be sad, if
he died. She said she would
miss him. He became angry
then. Not because of her
answer, he had barely heard
her, it seemed. His mind was
moving forward, imagining
the funeral, identifying the
mourners’ faces, displeased
by the attendance of certain
acquaintances, satisfied
that a guest list would do
the trick, thinking of the
funerary industry. He said
to her, In any case,
funerals are little more
than occasions for people to
demonstrate how little they
really know a person. He
continued to imagine the
ceremony, the reading of the
lectionary, his family,
little knowing the
disservice they were doing
him. He thought of all the
people he knew – personally
– had died. The ones he
remembered, at least. So
many people, it seems, die.
He remembered the occasion
of his grandfather’s death,
the deathbed scene. His
grandfather, the renowned
and widely respected
entrepreneur, who, like the
cross-eyed, left-handed
gunsmith from Tula, was
gifted with his hands, and
whom, through free will -
the remaining potentiality
for action after his
religious and civic dues had
been paid - and his life’s
work as an horologist, set
out to acquire the greatest
degree of autonomy possible
for the future survival of
his family, effectively
guiding them through a
Sinai, providing the basis
for their respective careers
and personal achievements, a
patriarch, playing his part
in a lineage begun time
immemorial, destined to the
fate of old age, destined to
lie in a palsied fashion,
emaciated, beyond
self-conscious, perhaps at a
stage that was prereflective,
a castaway, surrounded by
other doomed survivors of
the wreck.
She asked him what he was
thinking. What I’m going to
do about you, he replied. He
wondered whether this was
the providential meeting he
had so long been waiting for.
Only it was late, so late.
How does it go? Ivan Bunin.
See if I can remember. From
year to year, from day to
day, in our heart of hearts
there’s only one thing we
wait for – a meeting that
will bring happiness and
love. That hope is all we
live for – and how vain it
is. She wanted him to know
how much he meant to her,
sitting in the chair
opposite him. They had been
through a lot together in a
short space of time. His
presence had shattered the
dreary sameness of her days.
She admitted that she could
never do the things he did.
She had come to rely on him
for inspiration. Since they
met he seemed to have had a
profound effect on her. He
brought to the surface
something she could never
access herself, a desire to
see and experience and learn
things. Throughout her life
she had been convinced that
this impulse was beyond
reach, that she would have
to travel the world or
become a completely
different person. She just
didn’t think she could do
it. She asked him how he did
it, how he lived, that is –
the one question, it seemed,
that truly engaged his soul
- and he told her that as
far as he was concerned the
end of human life consisted
in strictly and unreservedly
following truth, that it was
but one prolonged moment of
contemplation, of inaction
in the midst of action, and
all one can do is try and
draw profit from what one
knows. It was hopeless. She
could never truly know this
kind of man, or could she?
She wondered whether if
things had been different
she could have made him
happy. She dismissed sex as
a course to that ideal
union, that clawing attempt
to enter a person, that
ultimately shallow,
unsatisfactory penetration,
the libido, an inexhaustible
impulse signifying our
fundamental unsuitability
for happiness.
She decided to return home
then. She guessed she was
not as happy as she
originally thought she was.
Walking east along North
King Street she passed a
barren terrain, a space of
fenced, fallow real estate,
a wasteland in miniature. A
custodian of places, he had
introduced her, she
remembered, a relative
stranger to the city, to the
Castle Gardens, explaining
how his father, who survived
himself in the existence of
his son, used to play
five-aside football on that
very site, before it had
been re-developed, when he
was stationed in Dublin
Castle. They were sitting on
a bench. The sun was shining
in their eyes and he had
been silent for a long time.
It was a warm day and there
were many people visiting
the Chester Beatty Library
and stretched out upon the
grass and a couple of young
children were chasing each
other. Were those tears in
his eyes, she wondered.
Again she had asked him what
he was thinking. He found it
difficult to respond. He
hoped the sun could explain
his tears. How could he make
her understand what he
himself could not, how an
unprecedented vulnerability,
it seemed, had undermined
his stoicism, how he could
not look upon a Monument or
Wonder of Nature or Work of
Art, nor, for that matter,
upon any person’s face, upon
whose countenance was writ
the contestation between
mutability and durability,
without feeling the need to
cry. How does it go? Shelley.
Nought may endure but
mutability. Even still
objects, he decided, are in
a state of flux. He watched
the children playing. The
boy chased the girl and when
he caught her, as he
unfailingly did, would
clumsily kiss her. Before
either he or these children
were born, he thought, his
father had chased a football
on this field. He watched
the children with tears in
his eyes. He knew she was
waiting for an answer to her
question. Right now, he said,
at this very moment, I think
I almost love you.
The man walked resolutely
through the fog, through the
unimportant, relatively
quiet seaport town – a
tarnished universe – knowing
what he needed to do. He
hoped she was at home. It
was impossible for him to
think of her without
thinking of Dublin and
reducing it to its illusory
dimensions. He remembered an
afternoon at Arbour Hill. It
was a beautiful day. The sun
shone brightly from behind
the trees and by the wall
men in suits walked in pairs.
Around a corner a man was
playing with a racket and a
ball among the headstones
that lay flat upon the grass
like tiles. Solitary
dog-walkers, too, moved
among the graves. He
remembered thinking that if
the meaning of life was ever
to be found it would be
discovered through the
observation of our
cemeteries. It was then he
saw the Oystercatcher. He
knew it was called an
Oystercatcher because he
looked it up in an
encyclopaedia of birds when
he returned home. What was
it about the bird that so
fascinated him? He could not
remember seeing one before,
even though, as he later
learned, they were an
indigenous and perennial
presence in the country. He
marvelled at the name, after
he had learned it, that is.
Oystercatcher. Was it
because it was a compound
word? Or was his fascination
related to the vicissitudes
of the word as a transmitter
of meaning, that it was
named, in human fashion,
after its occupation, the
guild of birds it belonged
to? Haematopus. But he could
not have known these things
when he first saw the bird.
He had yet to discover its
nomenclature. It was the
bird’s appearance that
re-directed his attention,
the little black and white
bird with the bright pointed
bill tip. Was it male or
female? Obviously it
originated someplace else,
the coast or some local
estuary. It was probably
breeding at this time of
year. He marvelled at his
fortuitousness to have so
serendipitously encountered
the creature - had it been
an epiphany, the grace of
revelation? … Having seen
the bird and realising that
nothing more significant
could be expected to occur,
he had walked in the
direction of the city-centre,
descending Arbour Hill and
crossing Manor Street at the
corner of The Belfry. When
he reached Smithfield Square,
passing beneath the awning
of sails and guided by
nostalgia, he glanced
perfunctorily at Thomas
Reads, before disappearing
into the environs of the Old
Distillery and, on Church
Street, his destination
dictated by a posthumous
fidelity, entered St
Michan’s churchyard and
descended the narrow stone
stairway into the cool, dry
air of the vaults, where his
father had often brought him
as a child in the macabre
quest of mummified remains.
He remembered, also, seeing
the bird on a second
occasion when, travelling
between Malahide and
Donabate, riding on a DART,
he looked down upon the sea
where the water lapped the
sand that adjoined the rails
and beheld, in abundance,
the bird he saw at Arbour
Hill practising the
occupation for which, it
seemed, it was named. Late
that evening, returning from
the beach, having walked the
length of Portraine Road to
Seaview Park, exploring the
twelfth century ruins of St
Catherine’s Church and its
small, almost residential
cemetery, and, then, walking
along the cliffs, studying,
without expertise, the
stratification of the
exposed rock; making a
detour into a neighbouring
field, onto the grounds of
St Ita’s psychiatric
hospital, so like a moor, to
appreciate the one hundred
foot round tower,
constructed in 1844 in
memory of George Evans MP;
the rusting iron gate which
acted as an improvised
ladder partially bridging
the fifteen feet to the door;
the graffiti, condoms -
detritus of teenagers
occupying their particular
eternity; the
disproportionately long
shadow pointing to the sea,
cast by the tower over the
long flowing grass; he
reached the beach, picked up
a shell and carried it with
him. He walked the distance
between the beach and the
village against the wind
along New Road, the long,
straight, unspectacular road
that was also being used, at
the time, by a lone joy
rider. The sky was
prematurely dark. It
threatened to rain. The
clouds were smoke-grey and
becoming black. He passed a
roadside grave, a funerary
marker; evidently, a black
spot, and, after a moment of
deliberation, deposited the
shell upon it in the manner
of one who would light a
votive candle. He offered
her the shell, the deceased,
for death does not prohibit
tenderness, (why did he
remember her as a girl?
Would he have left it for a
male? The body, it seems,
cannot even attribute
meaning to its own actions),
nor does anonymity, as can
be attested by all the
nations’ unknown tombs and,
locally, by St Ita’s private
cemetery, where, for most of
a century, some five
thousand residents of the
hospital were buried without
towers, marble, or
conventional phrase, without
anything to remember them by.
This night, however, he
arrived before the
fantastical façade of a
train station located on a
square that featured as its
centrepiece a memorial to
some past blood sacrifice or
other. A light escaped the
open doors of the station.
He walked up the steps and
entered the building. The
station was silent and
motionless. A row of public
telephones was located along
the wall to his right. There
were things he needed to say.
He had memorised her number.
He picked up the receiver of
one of the telephones and
commenced dialling. No
answer. He looked over his
shoulder. He tried several
times more and then hung up
the phone. Staring at the
ground, he thought of
nothing. The night was dark
on the other side of the
window; he walked to where
the heavy wooden chairs were
located and sat down. On the
walls were hung photographs
of Local Monuments and
Methods of Transport,
enshrouded in fog. Works of
Art, vast, colourful murals
representing decisive
chapters from the town’s
history covered the ceiling.
Under this canopy he began
to think again. Recalling
the wisdom of a Tetrarch he
thought, He who leaves Rome
loses Rome. This, he decided,
was the wisdom of love. He
wondered where she was and
what she was doing. He
wondered, too, what he was
doing here - a voluntary
admission - in this
anthropogenic habitat, this
Siberia. He had lost track
of time. He could not
remember how long exactly he
had been here. Was it a
matter of days or weeks? He
thought about his
grandfather, the horologist,
who, during the first half
of the twentieth century,
cycled the length and breath
of County Cavan repairing
its public and private
clocks. He thought about the
heavy wooden chairs, the
train station, the buildings
he passed in the course of a
day, the important and the
unimportant ones, all of
them possessing an
historical metaphysic, the
melancholy of buildings
meant for eternity. He
thought about the
illusionistic and illusory
relationship of time and
space, and how, ultimately,
a moment was but one
modality of eternity, and
that eternity too was
relative. Time, it seems, is
but one prolonged moment. He
was talking to himself like
this. In the end all of it
will mean nothing, or it
will mean everything. It
will prove to be the cradle
or the grave. He walked back
outside with an intuitive
knowledge of himself,
directing himself towards
the world, and could feel
condensation on the features
of his face. He was,
afterall, standing in a
cloud. He felt the
unbearable tension, the
weakness and disarray, the
diffuse upheaval, and the
heavy, undifferentiated
pressure of the whole world
upon him. Gradually he
walked away from the
building, towards the
monument of martyrdom in the
centre of the abandoned town
square, a cenotaph, wishing
that he could be salvaged in
his entirety, in his
specificity, but intuitively
knowing he would see neither
her nor his city again,
postponing their reunion to
infinity, that abyss of
indifference.
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