* * * Tombstone of Apollodorus giving his child a toy. ‘Could bring tears to one’s eyes.’ (Pursewarden) ‘They are all dead. Nothing to show for it.’
* * * Aurelia beseeching Petesouchos the crocodile god . . Narouz.
* * * Lioness Holding a Golden flower…
* * * Ushabti … little serving figures which are supposed to work for the mummy in the underworld.
* * * Somehow even Scobie’s death did not disturb our picture of him. I had already seen him long before in Paradise — the soft conklin-coloured yams like the haunches of newly cooked babies: the night falling with its deep-breathing blue slur over Tobago, softer than parrot-plumage. Paper flamingoes touched with goldleaf, rising and falling on the sky, touched by the keening of the bruise-dark water-bamboos. His little hut of reeds with the cane bed, beside which still stands the honoured cake—stand of his earthly life. Clea once asked him: ‘Do you not miss the sea, Scobie?’ and the old man replied simply, without hesitation, ‘Every night I put to sea in my dreams.’
*******
I copied out and gave her the two translations from Cavafy which had pleased her though they were by no means literal. By now the Cavafy canon has been established by the fine thoughtful translations of Mavrogordato and in a sense the poet has been freed for other poets to experiment with; I have tried to transplant rather than translate — with what success I cannot say. the city You tell yourself: I’ll be gone To some other land, some other sea, To a city lovelier far than this Could ever have been or hoped to be — Where every step now tightens the noose: A heart in a body buried and out of use: How long, how long must I be here Confined among these dreary purlieus Of the common mind? Wherever now I look Black ruins of my life rise into view.
So many years have I been here Spending and squandering, and nothing gained.
There’s no new land, my friend, no New sea; for the city will follow you, In the same streets you’ll wander endlessly, The same mental suburbs slip from youth to age, In the same house go white at last — The city is a cage.
No other places, always this Your earthly landfall, and no ship exists To take you from yourself. Ah! don’t you see Just as you’ve ruined your life in this One plot of ground you’ve ruined its worth Everywhere now — over the whole earth? the god abandons antony When suddenly at darkest midnight heard, The invisible company passing, the clear voices, Ravishing music of invisible choirs — Your fortunes having failed you now, Hopes gone aground, a lifetime of desires Turned into smoke. Ah! do not agonize At what is past deceiving But like a man long since prepared With courage say your last goodbyes To Alexandria as she is leaving.
Do not be tricked and never say It was a dream or that your ears misled, Leave cowards their entreaties and complaints, Let all such useless hopes as these be shed, And like a man long since prepared, Deliberately, with pride, with resignation Befitting you and worthy of such a city Turn to the open window and look down To drink past all deceiving Your last dark rapture from the mystical throng And say farewell, farewell to Alexandria leaving.
NOTES IN THE TEXT
Page 18. ‘The Poet of the city.’ C. P. Cavafy.
Page 18. ‘The old man.’ C. P. Cavafy.
Page 39. Caballi. The astral bodies of men who died a premature death ‘They imagine to perform bodily actions while in fact they have no physical bodies but act in their thoughts.’ Paracelsus.
Page 39. ‘Held the Gnostic doctrine that creation is a mistake….
The imagines a primal God, the centre of a divine harmony, who sent out manifestations of himself in pairs of male and female.
Each pair was inferior to its predecessor and Sophia (“wisdom”) the female of the thirtieth pair, least perfect of all. She showed her imperfection not, like Lucifer, by rebelling from God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him. She fell through love.’ E. M. Forster, Alexandria.
Page 40. Quotation from Paracelsus.
Page 51. Taphia, Egyptian ‘Red Biddy.’ Page 53. Greek text. Пфбн иά вгῶ, ἄн дέн ἔчῃт цeленЬдб, цюнбоέ ме.
Page 77. Amr, Conqueror of Alexandria, was a poet and soldier. Of the Arab invasion E. M. Forster writes: ‘Though they had no intention of destroying her, they destroyed her, as a child might a watch. She never functioned again properly for over 1,000 years.’ Page 147. A translation of ‘The City’ is among the ‘Workpoints.’ Page 195. See page 196.
BALTHAZAR
The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.
D. A. F. de Sade: Justine
Yes, we insist upon those details, you veil them with a decency which removes all their edge of horror; there remains only what is useful to whoever wishes to become familiar with man; you have no conception how helpful these tableaux are to the development of the human spirit; perhaps we are still so benighted with respect to this branch of learning only because of the stupid restraint of those who wish to write upon such matters. Inhabited by absurd fears, they only discuss the puerilities with which every fool is familiar and dare not, by turning a bold hand to the human heart, offer its gigantic idiosyncrasies to our view.
D. A. F. de Sade: Justine
To MY MOTHER these memorials of an unforgotten city
PART I
I
Landscape-tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion-dust of desert: prophets’ tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake. Its huge sand-faults like watermarks from the air; green and citron giving to gunmetal, to a single plum-dark sail, moist, palpitant: sticky-winged nymph.
Taposiris is dead among its tumbling columns and seamarks, vanished the Harpoon Men … Mareotis under a sky of hot lilac. summer: buff sand,hot marble sky. autumn: swollen bruise-greys, winter: freezing snow,cool sand. clear sky panels,glittering with mica. washed delta greens. magnificent starscapes.
And spring? Ah! there is no spring in the Delta, no sense of refreshment and renewal in things. One is plunged out of winter into: wax effigy of a summer too hot to breathe. But here, at least, in Alexandria, the sea-breaths save us from the tideless weight of summer nothingness, creeping over the bar among the warships, to flutter the striped awnings of the cafes upon the Grande Corniche. I would never have …
*******
The city, half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory. Why must I return to it night after night, writing here by the fire of carob-wood while the Aegean wind clutches at this island house, clutching and releasing it, bending back the cypresses like bows? Have I not said enough about Alexandria? Am I to be reinfected once more by the dream of it and the memory of its inhabitants? Dreams I had thought safely locked up on paper, confided to the strong-rooms of memory!
You will think I am indulging myself. It is not so. A single chance factor has altered everything, has turned me back upon my tracks. A memory which catches sight of itself in a mirror.