The dream of Belisarius

0. Yarmouk C.E. 2016

The satellite’s eye, compound like an insect’s,

glistens with pixels of doped silicon. Perched

upon an obsidian pillar of geostationary nothingness

high above any air that would support a vulture’s wings

it spreads its solar panels and watches modern battlefields,

and the refugee camps that blossom all around them.

It is the perfection of blindness

because what it lacks is not function.

The bright metal orbs stalks the sky with immaculate precision.

Technical marvels of bandwidth convey prompt updates

so that disingenuous politicians can persuade parliaments

and sorties can be scheduled and bombs can be dropped

with a pinpoint accuracy that proves it functions perfectly.

No. What is lacking is compassion.

We lack the very thing an eye is for.

We have become mere detectors.

I. Ecumenopolis

Once we could withdraw within stories,

but now the strong are gone and there are no more tales to tell,

no deeds worthy of song. The weak must defend themselves,

and so mere economics must now ensue, unsung,

while the world's ruin is wrung out, strung out,

strip-milled and shrink-wrapped in neat piecemeal parcels

for general consumption. We reciprocate each other’s deceit

and eagerly share in our routine and unremarkable victories

and with grand commonplace fanfare the meagre spoils

are distributed far and wide, losing meaning with each allocation

and re-allocation, re-hypothecated until all value has been drained,

to finally become a subject for the disputation of squabbling gulls,

reeking in land fill with the inevitable oxidation that is our legacy,

as the plots and portions of the world we have not burned

slowly rot instead, spooled and spilled from the bound

and unwound world whose ragged axis bleeds,

whose splintered spindle snares us, snags and drags and tares us

into decaying orbits, entwined in plummeting plumb line trajectories

seeking the sea fall and final loss of deprecated satellites

whose orbits rattle in the black socket of night

like a roulette ball seeking the double zero that blinkers fate,

discarding the centuries and rediscovering the weight they had,

crashing into the age of Hypatia.

Exaggerated celebrations of trivial triumphs resound

with shrill cash-till campanology on late and weary market days,

and complacent, apathetic, exhausted veterans

of equality, justice and democracy, bear away their petty prizes

and nurse the sting and solitude of promise and regret alone,

each behind the great impregnable walls of their own Constantinople,

where the hot and heavy night is loud with the shouts

of prowling fools at the docks, each fiercely guarding

his own bucket of chains, tethering the night's obscure cargo

to corrosion-blistered bollards with sinews stretched

and muscles bent into a gnarled Eucharist of labour,

licking rust-scabbed towers of iron blind with dreams of gold,

but failing to disentangle the doomed ballistics of hope, 

as the hawser lightly slips, and all is lost,

and a hard-won and tightly spun gist drifts slowly away, unravels, dissipates.

The Bosporus rests with the ancient imperturbable stillness

that met Io when she first forded it long before time began,

couched in the horst and graben of an ancient rift

that still gradually grinds the time-chewed ground

beneath the waters that have flooded it long since.

That expanse of space we now criss-cross with voyages

that bind our world, routes that sew shut the eyelid of our age

and make of it a barren map where imagination's fabulous bestiary

is trapped and traded by empty vessels taking nothing nowhere,

and lost hopes linger with Leander in the tarry starless molten dark

of the Hellespont's anoxic depths, which surge as slow and slick

and black as the blood's dark rush in the eyeless brain, its pulse

and dull blunt thud expounding the captivity of dim hulk-knuckled minds

upon the bulkheads of their sunken capsules

where day's last light

lies contained.

The dance and jostle of days, the summons and discharge of seasons,

the rising dawn’s bright brisk bubbles detached from our stricken sinking vessels,

spheres of air that rise to become the Moon's true metal

through the brimstone of grim chalcogen alchemy,

in grander globes geared with equants and epicycles,

primed and teeming with swift bustle, while on earth below

our hollow histories drag, propped like laundry

that sags between catastrophes, tattered and trailing

over the rubble and rummage of the toiling trummerfrau,

gathering dirt and nursing her wrath. The sultry hours

of this great city of surfaces strips its paste and paper layers in the heat

to reveal the ceaseless superimposition of empty and appalling appeals

of competing conceits,

and torn pennants peel, waft and beckon with wasted urgency

like the discarded threadbare banners of a scattered cavalcade.

The small-print bristles with weaponised words entitling the rich

to strike their coins at our expense, lies scrawled and stamped

on the backs of ancient and long since unintelligible codes

and maxims of honour, now used only to provide a mute substrate

to strident deceit, to promulgate laws that are a deranged origami of lies

for citizens who ignore you unless they think you owe them something anyway,

inmates of this shape-shifting, costume-changing cosmopolis,

this orgasm of marble, where facades, billboards,

and every glowing surface are all folded,

cut and shuffled interminably,

and the people are dealt their beguiling illusion of choice.

                                                               

II. Eos

But these dross coins are strange metal moons whose orbits I elude,

whose countenance I shun, whose face does not preside over my dreams,

monuments to nothing. My muse is constant. She steadily inhales

and exhales the light of the month's long night,

unlike the rapid random flashing phases of these tokens

spun upon an axis of tawdry chance: pale flat inert metallic glaucomas;

tribute pressed on polished ivory eyes as white as the clenched teeth

of a shield-biting berserker in the Varangian guard

defending the dead and painted statue of a mad emperor

against the turbulent mob rioting in the hippodrome.

My muse smiles as the star-scaled gleam of dawn

stirs within the unsettled silt of night. Elusive filaments of light

sift and till gardens of cloud, and a restless unborn dream

stretches and hesitates behind shuttered eyes, and shifts its weight

from foot to foot as it balances upon an uncertain retina.

The nippled sun leaks gold upon the world's edge until its weight

tips that wider disc away from night, the sky spills its inky amniosis

and a misty vernix clinging to the land's dark declivities

is rinsed by the slow light that summons us from sleep at last

to mornings woven from birdsong, laughter, games,

and sights knit and minted in love.

I was a child when, with my grey bearded guardian,

I played in our courtyard in those new hours.

I ran my fingers along his battle scars in calm and peaceful gardens

on summer days. Had his wounds been hewn more deeply

he too would surely have fallen like his brother,

defending the city's high walls, or extending the emperor's reach

far beyond, to the shores of Italy and Africa. But he survived

to smile and join my games and laugh as he defends himself

in peaceful days against my wooden sword

and smile while only a child's curiosity interrogates his flesh,

and only a child's imagination populates the worlds

mapped by violence upon his skin.

III. Apophasis

A blind veteran sits alone on the steps

between the rigid fluted columns of the basilica facade,

a rag wrapped round his empty eye-pits.

The temple is inhabited by dust, and the flicker of tallow,

cupped in bowls of light, wilts as its wasted incandescence

spills among the shadows. Space is expressed

by the reverberation of a tentative novice's faltering plainchant.

He has escaped the popular heresies of his village

for the rigor, certainty and spiritual hygiene

he finds within the simple step-wise melodies and intervals:

this is a sound he can be part of, at last. Once he was defined

by jeers, mockery and ridicule of crowds and peers.

Now he can live in a space filled with sound that exalts his isolation,

invoking original sin to obliterate their innocent hatred.

Slant stiff straight sleeves and crutches of sunlight, slipping in

through the high seldom windows, laying their feet upon the mosaic floor,

putting their shoulders to the walls, buttress the edifice with luminous air,

and the novice imagines himself a revered stylite

thrust to prominence atop a pillar of pure light.

The blind and ancient beggar dwells outside

in an accidental hesychasm, his bowls of light

abruptly emptied in a fit of spite to leave him exarch of eternal night,

exiled in the enforced leisure of a strange and anxious Arcadia,

a sunless, fraught, unsought and songless idyll. He was not born blind,

but sight no longer presses through the reticulations of his mind

to gently seep and soak into the creases of its fabric and stain his dreams.

Now his skin is the surface of his memory, carries its colours,

tinted by touch, and in the gentle thrust of recollection he remembers

the burden of the slightest garlands of Rome's last triumph,

reflects on the withered laurel, what he once was, now is not,

and what survives this bitter commutation.

IV. Obol

We passed the basilica, my uncle and I. "Fools think

to ascend to heaven coin-shod upon a stair of beggars' palms,

casting alms to clatter like metal rain upon the steps,

coins they then must roll into pins and rivets to fasten shut

the wide, immolated eye of outrage and make a closed furnace

of their morals blazing and bursting in their tight minds

that gives them headaches they blame on too much sun",

he told me, laughing with the merry generosity of a survivor,

and I laughed too, not with understanding, but with love

of the lavish unassailable grandeur of his presence

and his acceptance of my own rude youth,

but then a sudden shock halted him,

a convective fever seemed to shake the veil of air

and he stopped, and whispered "give Belisarius an obol"

and passed me a coin

The beggar received the obol honestly. It bore the emperor's brow.

but no memory of what the metal once was before the coin was struck

remained there now. The intricate and intimate artifice

that had once gently stroked and teased it into elaborate conceit

to adorn a finger, wrist, throat or forehead,

given and received in love, was shed when it was sold

and cast into a forge for the value ore retains in crisis

once the pretence of ornament has melted away,

the basic and most debased tribute that all dignities owe

to the voracious, insatiable, raving delusions of wealth:

and so a coin was struck from its wreckage, and memory

was left crippled among the dross and tailings.

Worth withers in exchange. To survive

it must remain secret and unrequited, pressed

between the palms of two hands clasped in private fellowship,

hidden even from God himself, passed in silent commemoration

of other imagined cities where fortunes are reversed and acts ennoble,

rescued from the limits of transaction, the meagre means

and bitter ends, the all-consuming moral amnesias of trade.

This is how the honest obol was received, without obligation,

without scrutiny: for if one did look into the eye of the emperor

whose image is impressed upon that flat dead disc,

what if one discerned another coin there, a Stygian toll

levied for what is lost in gain, bearing another imperial impression,

another eye, and inadvertently cast oneself

into a pit and vertigo of infinite regress?

"Am I mired and weak, the sad summary of a man,

whose strong bright presence briefly illuminated the thrones

of Carthage and Ravenna for a day apiece, in lieu of he who paid me?

You think you find me diminished by my losses,

but we are what remains beyond all limits of transformation,

and I am what has stayed, when all that there once was of me

was washed away. There is no further decrement of self,

time's chisel finds no glint or purchase

against the polished black Anatolian obsidian of my heart,

my soul's infinite ash within its shattered urn engulfs every insult,

and this knowledge raises me beyond the stars.

"There is no need for you to enter through these pillars to offer prayers.

You will only find scholars who treat wisdom as a watchword

for their banal conspiracy of egos, and their condescension

is the odour of dead brains vivid with the breath of grinning vermin:

chattering clubs and cliques of self-congratulating cunts. No,

this shape before you now, this empty space it occupies,

has been cleansed and made sacred without prayer.

My extinguished ego no longer tethers me to its unruly

and overgrown temenos, no longer confines me in surly patrols

around the ferment of its smouldering precincts.

My sight has passed far beyond the tyrannies of beauty,

my soul beyond desire and regret,

my mind beyond the epic sorrow of memory,

my tears beyond the deepest grief drenched by the final star-set

beneath the dry and emptied skies

that now reside within these hollow sockets,

"for beauty is mere relief when the ego survives

and is not crushed utterly by the precipitate world

the instant we suddenly become truly aware of it,

the trauma of truth, the blinding reperfusive shock

our narrow nerves constrain, our dim eyes attenuate,

our self-centred stumbling prevents, it is not truth,

not the insignificance that thrills and pursues us

when we see the world at last, it is a dissonance,

it is a mischief of our partial and parcelled sight

within a world of infinite light. It is a reprieve
and like all reprieves, it is only temporary, 
and if you can't see that you are as blind as I am, 

"and so what use have we, the annihilated, for beauty? 

We scrape beauty from the soles of our shoes in passing,

and are equally untouched by squalor. Once, in former times,

I found myself terrified by innocents: their indifference and ingratitude,

their blindness to necessity and the efforts made on their behalf.

My most astutely considered exertions were unappreciated,

and the one in ten thousand who did not flinch upon this point

when made most strenuously conferred the hint of void purpose,

of null sense, and I have only recovered from my terror

after I have endured and survived the horror and the glory

of my own insignificance. And it seems that Victory is not satisfied

until the victor himself is overthrown, and She delights

in a blazing revelry of arms that consumes us all without reservation.

And in all his meagre squeak of power, Justinian cannot muster

the glory of the gutter in which I sleep, anointed with this knowledge

of my nothingness. The emperor of this city is just a tramp, this town

a bag of broken people on his back, but every night

I meet and dance with Melusine by moonlight"

                                                                                                                               

I don't know what had prompted him to speak.

Could Bellerophon forgive the gadfly? Perhaps

a sense of unfortunate confraternity with my guardian,

born in shared atrocity when together they placed their feet

across the throats of Vandals on the briny soils of Carthage

by the tenth milestone.

V. The dream of Belisarius

I am old now, and plague and war have wrought their alterations

upon the land and me since last my innocence encountered this man.

Our borders are buffeted by invasion, our lines are depleted by disease

and our forces collapse in disarray before the onslaught,

and before I prepare to put on my uncle's ancient armour one last time

to defend in all futility the depleted coffers of this decrepit empire,

before I die, I dream. I spend the night before battle alone and rest
and I reflect again upon a dream of mine which Belisarius inhabits,

his absent gaze drawn once more by the lure of lingering noctilucence

upon a painted sky, his empty eyes now furnaces filled with aurorae

that shimmer and ripple across his dry retinas, a flickering livery of light

upon his inner firmament, and in this dream the cavalry of night

charge across the Moon, while on Earth mountains of ice gleam

beneath the polished breastplate of advancing dawn. I awake,
put on my armour, and review we who defend the ruins of empire.

VI. Yarmouk A.D. 636

I contemplate the forces assembled at dawn on this first day

of the six days of our downfall: men rallied by duty, religion, cupidity; 

other names used to conceal one hundred thousand secret motives.

I understand now there is no such thing as freedom,

nor is there such a thing as captivity.

We experience one moment succeeded by the next

like a butterfly alighting upon the tips of spears,

We drift between worlds we connect with a fiction we call time

to make sense of our haphazard trajectory,

but there is no such thing as time, or free will, or its denial.

The armies of emperor and caliph oppose each other

but there are no opposites.

We feel love. We feel fear.

We know authenticity. We know alienation.

We are the singer and the song, unconstrained

only in the inevitability of who we are, completely free

only in the scope of the limitations we impose on ourselves.

I look upon the shining ranks arrayed in armour.

Perhaps all beauty is a premonition of death.

The patterns in which our substance is finally subsumed,

the world showing itself to us the way it will be

when we're not there, every conquered summit

revealing vistas where we are nowhere to be found

and we descend into valleys not unlike this and speak

in reverential tones of beauties witnessed from afar

as we looked upon the world at its most naked

but keep secret about the only thing we truly discovered,

conceal the sudden shame it makes us feel,

because the best witness we bear beauty is silence

and the words of men were only made for boasting.

The shining orb of fame is suspended from the stars,

and swings out of reach of all but the greatest men,

but myths of greatness need armies to maintain them

and are punctured by that single arrowhead, fired by a peasant

who may remain forever anonymous and obscure,

that finds its way through the warlord's visor,

and brings that bright orb crashing down, to fall and shatter,

its silica reverting to the sand from which it was taken,

on which the rust of blood will crackle until the next rain,

the sun-dried scab-cracked surface of war's aftermath

crumbling beneath the hooves of rider-less horses

and conjoining the ranks once drawn up against each other on it

in a common obscurity,

and all our efforts to reach up

and constellate our deeds in the sky

remain tethered to the earth

while an inaccessible, unseen and indifferent eye

looks down on us from the future and the past

and sees where we cannot and must remain blind

and we can only hope it finds a purpose in what we do

once our intentions have unravelled in the wind

with the tattered banners of yesteryear.

My comrades turn to me for encouragement,

but I can only repeat what the beggar told me,

as if it were a whispered madness, as if it were a secret doctrine,

careful to avoid any suggestion of hope or inspiration:

after all, we make our last stand on ground already abandoned

by those who brought us to the fray and told us that their fight was ours.

VII. Tetelestai

"You will never find me, not in this space nor in these words.

Do not fool yourself into thinking that I speak these words:

you will never find me in their loud silence

or the knuckle-kneaded emptiness of my flesh.

"Words are disposable things, chewed like the half baked bread

dispensed from the ovens of Uruk, where the priests once doled out

their doughy substitute for food from temple granaries,

while the idle elite dined on venison,

back when the great city-swindle started, long ago.

Since then our cataphracts have bathed their hooves in the Tigris

by the towers of Nineveh, and words have been re-iterated

in an endless repetition and variety of cuneiform, uncial, unicode,

but always with fundamental and unseen subterranean shifts,

tectonic slips and spills in their burden deeper than the mind can delve,

and only a barely perceptible meniscus of meaning remains

in the greasy-edged mouths of men, words over-written so often

that when all the various nuances of deceit are over-laid

they add up to a flat black redaction drained of meaning,

completing at last the gradual blindness of the mind.

"We perform mere repertoires of knowing now by another river,

and are like the figures that decorate our own funerary urns

with their parade of immaculate forms and meticulous exploits.

Knowledge is just a pause to catch the breath, a moment's rest

before the urge to understand compels us

and expels us from the brief respite of certainty

and takes its grip upon us once again, propelling us

beyond the poise and stiffness of the athletes on our urns,

into the rout and riot of the real, and the obsolescence of all effort

where death is the only certainty to which the scattered self can rally

in a final gathering of our intimate and abandoned ashes.

But be glad: some worlds end by stealth and slight degrees

of declination and a slow diminution of all that seeming sees.

Our end is swift and our conduct just. I have been spared

no chance or time to confine and defile the broad emptiness

which my heart shares with the cosmos

in mere words, no chance to perpetrate the elevation

and exaltation of my narrow self in speech

and so will elude all kinds of death that speak the tongues of men,

and as for every other kind, well, I am and always was already dead"