— Killian Turner, from an interview with ZG magazine, 1981
Writing page after page, day upon day, remaking himself in a cabin in the woods. A manifesto, he called it. The usual doleful anarchism: ‘Systematic genocide of the native people. . Our forced march through territories of nothingness’, and so on. Bombast and idle threats. Shrouded in self-made myth and marijuana fumes, a face like the entrance to caves. This painstaking construction of a ‘visionary’ work. Nothing like a belated revenge, he thinks. Bearded and fervent, like some mujahedin.
*
The rooms the soldiers combed smelt strongly of shit and petrol, and something else too. Dolls and clothing strewn over a dusty floor. . They had entered the city after a wave of high-level defections. Now he peers through his binoculars at the outlying posts and the dunes along the horizon. Fraying fabric of the regime. ‘Everything is conditioned by necessity.’ ‘So much code eventually becomes theology.’ Medals of bone and charred flesh. Desert roads buried under dust and rubble. Villages stand deserted. ‘This hostile attitude towards all sensuous cultures. .’ ‘The White Man’s burden, pal.’ ‘The White Man? I remember childhood afternoons, the particular quality of the sunlight. Oranges dropping from a tree by the train tracks. So ripe, so heavy with sweetness.’ Sighs. ‘The absurdity of our dreams.’
That night they watched the first bombs fall.
*
Teenage lovers in a shopping-centre café, eating ice creams. Nicole pouts and rolls her eyes. ‘After all, there is a war on.’ ‘. . It’s just our insular labyrinth.’ ‘Are you saying it isn’t real?’ ‘Not exactly. We don’t yet know what kind of age is upon us. But it’s perfectly real.’ Nicole sighs as another song comes on the café speakers. He never gets it.
Then Mickey grins. ‘You’re still my soda-girl pop queen — they’ll never take that away from us.’
*
The bus trailed over the plains by night. Everyone had nightmares. At dawn they reached the outskirts. She turned to the man in the seat next to her (handsome and silent, he had been staring out the window for hours). Clutching his wrist: ‘Cities this vast must breed psychosis. All cities do.’ ‘I know. It’s always been that way.’ Somehow his words pacify her.
*
An unfinished novel by some frazzled drifter, ‘Rob Doyle’. He lives near the port. Drugs come in on those ships, I told him. They roll out of town in those trucks down there. (Watches from the hilltop vantage.) Enough coke, heroin and hash to feed this entire junkie nation. He says: ‘I think you’ve just seen too many films. Films distort reality.’ ‘It’s the other way around.’ (Howls of laughter.)
‘What was the novel about?’ I asked him once over kung-pao chicken. ‘A man who lives in the woods. There are cannibals, anarchists, and a priest who can’t forgive.’
*
Vienna at twilight, a sumptuous dissolution. ‘Everything is in decline, and always has been.’ From our hotel, a view over the canals, dazzled with evening light. ‘Sure, I’ll have to live without tobacco and sex for a time, but men have faced starker destinies.’ We read on the balcony till we grew tired. Then I turned to him and said, ‘Choose escape and individuation. . follow a lonely path, even if it leads to mountain-solitude where only lakes reflect you.’
Down there, the thieves disappear in the backs of cafés. Existence consents to its own ruin. That night he dreamt of landscapes we have never visited, at least not together — small towns, canyons, immense quarries. There is an inner core to him I’m no longer privy to, despite the telepathy.
‘He will never finish that novel,’ he says the next morning. He is my partner and I love him.
*
‘All works of art are unfinished, anyway.’. . ‘Faggot. A genuine talent impresses the women and subjugates the weaker men. Thrash about all you like, I know a drowner when I see one.’ ‘I write for posterity,’ he says, laughing bitterly.
*
In a drab provincial hotel room. Mingled smells of many vaginas. Other men’s sweat on this bed. (Thinks of a girl from the past whose vagina had an overpowering smell, vaguely aroused by the memory.) In Naples a whore sucked me off in a room like this, I couldn’t manage to come. . But Nietzsche lived in such a way, he thinks, dancing naked in a frugal room in Turin. Every day a ledge between the prison and the madhouse. ‘My love, all the world is aflame.’ Tenderly: ‘Ignore the past.’ ‘Love of my life!’
Watches films with no sound in scarcely furnished Belgian lodgings, or empty cinemas in undistinguished German cities. ‘All this furious activity. . Is it merely a prelude to universal war?’ She can’t utter the phrase ‘spiritual struggle’ without a sneer or tragic irony. Postcards to her sister out by the Pacific: ‘A sky bereft of sun, yet still blue, still containing birds. . Moorish cafés at noon. . “Beauty is a promise of happiness”.’ Twilight, late summer, the burning sun. .
Absurdity of our dreams.
*
He emerged from catastrophe clutching a red bandanna. Collaborators. Failure and destruction. That vulgar being, ‘God’ — son of a war criminal. . Recuperates in Paris for a few months, then slips back across the border to Spain to ignite the Republic. ‘No one knows — not even God!’ (Hysterical laughter.) A tormented community, but such beautiful women. . ‘I would gladly give up my life for one night with her.’ The older man laughs. ‘You may not need to.’ Inland, he enters the Basque Country. ‘We crouched around the radio all night when we heard the capital was falling.’ ‘My child, remember this day.’ ‘Yes, Papa.’ Gunmen with the certainty and zeal of youth roar slogans as they storm through the streets. ‘I’ve seen all this before,’ says the old woman. ‘Don’t ask me to applaud your fervours. Just let me dissolve like the rest of nature.’ (She’s seen it a million times, literally.) Piety and patriotism, the dignity of any creed at all. A nation is reborn.
I wake in a hotel room with the taste of petrol in my mouth.
Loch Ness
We were hitch-hiking on a freeway at the limits of the capital. The situation incited a fearful joy. ‘Cruelty? That’s just like you.’ ‘This is my country, I don’t have to tolerate anyone.’ ‘Natürlich,’ I replied. Cars zoomed past us, a monstrous violence inherent in the world today. We were young and in love and nothing else mattered.
*
Watching the dreary procession, standing over her grave in the rain. . I remember the day like a death sentence. ‘Nothing will ever be the same again.’ Once, during a trip to the provinces, she told me that being alive is just like staying in a hotel. ‘Then again, when you’re in a hotel, you may as well have sex,’ she added huskily.
*
Rob Doyle out walking along the cliffs on a grey afternoon. His lips move, he talks to himself, frowns for no obvious reason, makes sharp gestures with his hands. ‘You’re a tourist, and you’re disappearing just like this coastal land.’ He ignores my voice and gazes out to sea. ‘I wish I had one day of life to spend in pure happiness. I also wish I had a dog, having proven already that I can’t live with women.’
Still this struggle to write, fretful and serious in a house on the coast. Listens through the wall to his neighbour having sex, though he was under the impression that she lived alone. ‘Maybe she’s not having sex.’ One bad review and he almost dies of it. Doesn’t leave the house for nearly a week. I email him a quote from Ezra Pound: Ignore criticism from men who have never written notable works. To which I add, ‘For comfort, bear in mind the unreality of life.’