Moon Dance. Brooke Biaz

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СКАЧАТЬ like marble beneath the surface. A head crowned in black Roman curls is shaking and the curls spring out and corkscrew. Before he’s finished he’s as angry as Hell and stomps off in the direction of the municipal library.

      A Student for a Democratic Republic

      Man! what steamed a young guy up so much that he shucked off exhaustion and swore to God outside a hall of particularly charismatic beach missionaries that he would deal with the matter forthwith. WIDOW TRYMELOW’S LODGERS WILL NOT RETURN TO FACE THE MUSIC . . . No! No! Rumor it isn’t. Made-up headline of the divergent route of the lodgers (Has Maurice Manticora been granted his license to write copy again? As I’ve told it so far he hasn’t yet lost it!) BOB DYLAN TELLS HIS FAMILY “‘SEE THAT MY GRAVE IS KEPT CLEAN” No! No! Babaloos are rightly concerned that the truth is being stretched and gather up close and quiet and ask, “Was it news of the dunnycans?” Sweet innocent . . .”Was it news of fishes?” Ho ho! . . .”Was it about the missionaries who frighten us when they visit?” . . . They give you that line about becoming engaging little lambs, huh? Don’t worry they’re speaking in metaphor. . . .”Was it jokes, papa, about brothers and sisters?” “Was it words concerning the blessed Daffodil and also that Mr. Tito?” “Was it news of who is our grandfa . . . ?” No no! And, I must remind them, “Tito Livio, after all, is simply the first on the scene. There are two more lodgers to come and one of those you know already. That’s right: he’s the one who just growed and growed.

      My babaloos, poorly housed in the hospital next door (land on which Bibbidi Bobbodi Boo made a solid twenty-five per cent). Guinea pigs. Children for whom empiricism has dealt a poor hand. You at the forefront of modern science. Look at you, tightly bandaged, fed by fluids in yellow and pink and puce, some of you in chairs which run on electricity, from the shaven patches on your heads things spring and jiggle (I am thinking now of Mars, the red planet). All this to discover the secret of long gestations!

      What can I say? It was none of these things. It was not even the monthly synodic bulletin of Pastor T. B. Bull who in those days was principal at the school in the Vale, waster of water, chaser of fruit bats, teacher of Alice (‘Meanwhile,’ Maxim reminds you, “shhhh. Do not ever take what your mothers” say for granted . . . and you should not be afraid of the charismatics: they will appear in time as heroes in the rescue of lambs, fishes and, of course, loaves—and in the confidence they exude. Do not, babaloos, ever ever fear singers.”) What Tito Livio read was this: Men are not Angels.

      “Men per se,” he read, “are not of Heaven.” . . . My childhood memory of a charismatic document folded in four, pages bug eaten, stains of tabouli, a taratour sauce: “If there are men with enormous wings I have not seen any. . . . What do you say, citizens? Do you believe the story of Pelayo and Elisenda who came across an archangel in their garden and found the creature unresponsive?” Now sauce covers and makes it unreadable but if we ignore this and read on with dyslexic’s eyes, the next section continues the tone of address: “ . . . to which Robert Owen, the industrialist, made due contribution and in later life found solace not in spinning cotton but spinning the community together in a love of . . .” And again, the page adulterated, but not this time by sauces or bugs. The writer himself has crossed out this line, double, (scrubbing a story of a tailor who tried to sew flies into coats) and leaves us only with, “ . . . freeman or slave, patrician or plebian, the sun representing the light by uprising attainable” and now further obliteration which does indeed appear to be bug-food “ . . . who might heed Daedalus’s warning and the son’s wings melt on this evidence alone. Men, ditto, not being angels. Nor birds, I must say.” And now the age of the speaker appears perfectly obvious because he describes in some detail the miraculous differences between one species and another and though the hand is light and large and swirls out its words it is also selective and sometimes cramped and leans forward as if wishing always to get to what is coming next. The owner of this hand must be as old as Darwin himself! “A bird’s beak,” it says, “is not a man’s nose. A man’s hands are not a bird’s feet. Hair is not barbules. A man’s bones are not hollow. Arms are not wings.” And the weight of a not so welcome logic begins to mount up and the hand leans leans, and when it has been forced to prove that men are not birds it begins, tentatively, to argue that they are similarly not butterflies but already there is a shakiness, a shimmer in the strokes, a desire to ignore the facts, swirling, hurrying on, denying, questioning like catechism until finally it ends abruptly with “ . . . is love” and the signature: Dr. (pending) Roszak.

      

      (Discovery of my fetal years: age lives right smack in the mind of the beholder.)

      Out the front gate of the Roszak property this Dr. (pending) Roszak drove. Call him, if you like, the second of my grandmother’s lodgers. But this is too plain a picture. There was more that lived within him than I ever understood. Something that stung or burned or pecked at his insides, turning him bilious and jutting his skin along this bone and that so that, from where I was due to start growing, in the obreptitious womb of my mother, he was an impossible mountain, an edifice of a thousand plateaus. Thoughts, curled like black snakes beneath his ledges and crevices. Political conjecturality went whirling through his caverns. Social pandects and convincements bloomed in his rookeries and scarps. Philosophies so hyperborean and fierce carved alternate histories for the diverse tribes of his valleys. . . . But enough! Suffice it: he was a DeSoto speedster of twenty-one and, since he’d grown up as a respectable mirror image of his father, a local municipal councilor, had been teaching Sunday School at the Charismatic Church on The Esplanade for some years. On his mind now: too much! The truth is, he’d received exam results in the midday post and was calculating, by way of clever additions and anfractuous percentages, that he had become, that day, honors graduated.

      So does he cry out in delight? He does not. Does a graduand loosen his bateau neck or undo his jerkin? Uh uh: he is wearing a cardigan with a black Mondrian stripe. Does he drive like Maxwell’s famous molecular demon which, possessed of one hot side and one cold, creates perpetual motion and therefore breaks the Second Law of Thermodynamics? No. The one compensation to his new status: the car radio up uncharacteristically loud on the BBC World Service. . . .

      Because, what was an ending was also a beginning. To be graduated meant also that he could be post-graduated. Preliminaries over, Siemens Roszak would move on in the new year to the position of respected doctoral student.

      O fine pending gownsman! O scholar illuminati! O Roszak moonshee! He’d been four years in the making and now could show himself well-made. He teased the pedal a little and the DeSoto scattered gravel.

      . . . On every side of South Steyne universities were blooming like sunflowers: big-headed, oily and brilliant. In the north, where the cities were industrial the universities were tall, like smokestacks, and made of high-tensile steel, of glass and of concrete in shapes hyperbolic and paraboloid. In the south: low lying universities like fields on which wheat or barley might grow or goats graze. In the East “Let a thousand blossom!” performances reminiscent (Roszak records) of Berliner Ensemble (though he has never actually seen . . . ), ditto all this talk of Godot, pipe columns, pure geometry, spires which rival . . . While in the west—but the west was no more than desert! In the west, haulpak lorries sailed away from open-cut mines, like bright yellow container ships carrying continents across the sand—the universities there were sparse and, where they struggled up, their shape was dependent on the whims of self-made mineral magnates and threaded with spinifex and stuck together like conglomerate. President Domino (this being his most popular but not his only name. Also: Sir, President Pig-Iron, No! No! not Roosevelt) whose vision was this: Education for each and every deserving bod! Advanced learning and attention to the upcoming. Ball games and so forth by which can be judged proper men. “A strong nation depends, boyyo, on healthy minds and ahem healthy bodies?” And schools too—these should be sufficient that no vacant lot sits without casting shame on us all—because it could be a school. It could give birth to a brilliantine future.

      O sure, babaloos, your brilliantine uncles and aunties are all on the СКАЧАТЬ