Wednesday, 10 February 2016

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"

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