The Lotus Eaters - Joseph Robertson

Questions milling rampant inside of questions. Air opens, broadens, thins and filters itself from presence. A vacuum, there is space. The urge to become, to become whole and endless through vain acts of unbecoming, the dire Primordial Urge of the I Am is deepened, flogged, made still more urgent. This is a place of torment, a limbo for limbo's sake, a purgation. Here, dissidents bed with cynics, an act of daring and of autocratic disdain, all mumbling and chattering in a whisper of the thinning common night. In a torrid chill, on the blue brink of first light, their activities play to dispense with harmony altogether:

Let's bastardize each other's last hopeful clammering of identity, to see where it leaves us! This is a holy ordeal, and let's not forget it!

A word from the leader of the dance. Try now the maudlin offices of gain. Attempt to recover. Save oneself ex-nihilo. Profit by having let emotion fly. Against authenticity.

This the official story. She was nothing if not lost, almost entirely lost. Had they only met, this prince and his Magdalene, that very night? was she some imperishable, bitter fruit of the Deal, the false providence? had he known her for centuries and only now met the Croc, unlikely, unflinching sage, lyrical lizard spilling hard truths? had she been his in the most comfortable incalculable way? Questions milling rampant inside of questions.

A new stage. New physics. Hoaxmath in decay.

Resignation became sport. Pain would become a muck of nonsense and platinum turpitudes. Fragility was beginning to nest in his sights, on the surface of so many bits of mirror-glass, close to him like a second skin bejeweled, lamenting. Sadness in the smell of incense, dusky stone, things falling apart, the duplicity of cathedral ash: scented offerings, the decay of a glorious edifice at time's command. Lamenting.

Under lone tamarind, lone marginal suitor of belonging, icy sylvan self begins to see... the observer, the Prince, the dream-being becoming dream, in seeing becomes the apparition seen /
apparition becomes sight /
sight becomes sense /
sense suggests mind /
mind sees mind /
mind bends, urges eye to speak /
eye remains silent, vulnerable, certain /
mind overlays mind with speech, icy sylvan dialogue /
mind names mind: I: I Am: agony and relief... finch: small things, detail (plural, manifold), alphabet, cupfull of silence:
Rabbit in Minutia,
self attempting selfhood, ignoring alternatives... self (mind sees mind): imagination of a specific past, assertion aided by alphabet, cupfull of silence... past: the key to becoming, apparition, sight, sense, mind, mirror (Masque), self: becoming...

Verboten unfolds beneath lone tamarind, amid cathedral ash, in mind seeing mind, a memory unclaimed, past (plural). Panther (plural) are Rabbit made muscled and massive with Lotus milk, and finches are Rabbit in Minutia... do they share a past, or are they only now becoming the divergent past (plural) they always were (to become)?

Becoming mind (the multiplicity of form [plural] and voice [plural]), mind the forgetting of not-mind, learning as forgetting, becoming as erasure of the thing become... what name (plural) could hold here? hold true? be static? mnemonic? unflawed? being as being lengthened, dug-out, colored-in, and multiplied by the ever-more-ample understanding of the infinite possibility (plural) of not-being... infinite possibility as impossibility, life as the enjoyment of being's absolute necessity (truth, evidence)...

Reeling (plural) revelation, a music entirely without folly, Gravitus, satiety steeeped in the and geometry of the tamarind grove, its continuity, its fruition, its shade... murmurs mutually belonging to desire and hoaxmath, distant sounds descend... one imagines a spectrum of pitch projected into flesh... the landscape falls away, disintegrates with the density of distant sounds descending... one lone mind remains under lone remaining tamarind, everything stone and cathedral ash and sound, a murmuring moonscape surrounding, descending upon, becoming one lone mind beneath the solitary, ancient tamarind... there is hope... spectrum of pitch projected: a dialogue of distant fleshly realities (hopes): finch and panther, lightning apart from obsidian void, sin (as speech) and silence (as seeing)... (plural) finch ask of panther (plural) the past: the panther are frozen in vast pantherine silence... sentinel goldleaf, tarnished, on details on memory... lightning spirits willful (aimless) amid cathedral ash... finches croon... there is hope...

The eye opens...
The tamarind have returned. En masse.

It was a labyrinthine struggle, a trundle of breathmist, under method... and method does not exclude accident. The boy found himself in a tavern of goddesses, two lights: one constant, one constantly flippant, no longer wounded by the Prince's gaze. Mnemonic vagabond. Chronology in constant evaporation. And so the fabric of worth is dyed. Ancient visions, a place for the making of lies. He did not yet understand that he would someday be called 'the prince'. He would wear the dyed fabrics of worth, a testament to things basest and most complete. Witness to the tavern dance and the dye, he would learn of implicit methods, learn to pretend to mastery... and mastery does not exclude accident.

In that tavern, skirting the dance, he was conjured by his own will into an ancient vision: he saw himself immersed in a state of profound delicacy, an almost warlike impermanence, and there and then he felt both an unspeakable fear and also at home in himself. He had visions of two faces close in the night, visions of exhaustion and serenity, a necessary asymmetry... but it was nothing so offensive as the destruction of lives.

Room diffuse with blue light, governness sits astride chaos slight, pungent herself before a maze of her own likenesses, one mirror and much imagining. A record skips. Blue light, Silt Palace, window burning, room of blue ether... dear blue silhouette forms crown on greying horizon, as if decades hadn't passed. From this momentary interior, one hears the laughter muffled, the mirror-wall shattering still, outside, muted, glass clanging mingly on the air, hushed, abandoned the governness to other, louder thoughts. Her meditation is frenzied, still, cat-like. Feline witness falls upon the scene, bewitched, bewitching: the air seems at once the breath of a siren and the wayfarer's ecstatic immobility. Feline witness: the cat is near. Against what exactly should Nature herself make a sane comparison? Cat checks watch on silver chain...

Clues... time(s) desired...

Dreambeast, where are you, when all the air is ringing? She enquires after the prince, after his death and distance. There is always a rift between Fortune and her words... and so she sat, wondering after mad Eugene, singing by inertia:

I could have been a pretty little goddess.

She was maybe incongruous, maybe sullen, her mind bent on the silted truth of her inactivity, her not-doing, not-weeping, not-knowing forgotten, pungent and perched before the mirror... nothing so offensive as the destruction of lives. Surely. She recalled, between the closing and re-opening of her right eye, how he had fallen, the prince, straight from the sky to a bed of broken primrose, cement and ink. She recalled that he had dreamed that she had dreamed of this fall, one winter afternoon amid the bare and gasping tamarind. She would often thereafter gaze straight through some metaphysical extension of herself, a plasmic passage born of the eyes, into her own reflection... to try to determine if she was anything more than a dream, her imaginings anything truer than a double-bodied lie. She remembered his being tangled in an inky tumbleweed, forgetting his strength, shouting he wanted to wither. She remembered reaching into the scraggly muck of his dreams to pull him free, into himself.

It was the death of their shared provider that had been the ultimate disconcert, the start of an unbounded, almost immortal decadence. In the mirror, it was never clear if Eugene had shot the driver. It could have been a tortured winter's dream. Everything could. In the mirror, it was never clear...

It was the Coke-blossom battlements, star-wagers and spur-whispers, the strawberry rum and the amber din of the tavern of goddesses, it was this terrific sanctity and a bill from the purse of one Signore di Giordano that brought Eugene to the edge of dynastic decay. Most secretive codes, interwoven, cannibalistic symbols, hieroglyphs. The dynasty was a young and ancient thing. This decay had brought Sergei to shoot himself, closing the roads in the most intimate sense. Without a driver, our prince, his governness, her cat, and the blasted jackal would eat only tamarind and rabbit and wine. Ominous the winds as she recalled his dream of her... dream... the irreal ending of Sir and of Sergei, the winds which blew that night when the Prince first met his Red Croc. Mythic figures all. Surely.

It was that compulsion, that final encoding, the word that was supposed to respond to security, to announce the accomplishment of security, but always signalled instead the presence of an insecurity, the imminence of a disaster dream. The vines tremble and quiver, hushing sonorous, balanced and strewn with the weight of their ivory fruits.

She is still, this majestic void of a woman, this sacrifice of the flesh: a governness inert, she stared and only stared. She had no more questions. Cat watches her, eyes tossed between wide and slit, almost human with sensuality, surpassing the mood, as if to call her out from some unusual darkness. This same cat had romped a thousand times through thistle and sesame, as now she lay the question with unwavering but uncertain (surely) starkness in her eyes. There were moons and frozen moments of doves taking flight, EVERYTHINHG waxing and waning, a sublime melody in those cat's eyes. Poor luxurious, temporarily Socratic cat would have to swat across the governness' reflection to wake her from the dream(s). Soon it would be morning, and the prince would be wanting some eggs.

She was not tears; she was stillness. He could remember, as one remembers between bouts of fever, with unusual and necessary clarity, how she had pulled him together, fashioned him into the sort of individual he was beginning to suspect he had actually wanted to become all along.
The term in common usage was Governness. It was her role. There was to be no admitting that she was in some way assigned to be Priestess, Harvest-minion, and most importantly, Giver of clean milk. She could easily have been called his Nursemaid. They liked, as all well know, the richness and musicality of archaic idioms. They were tools to assist in the family's pretense that they would not be held captive by the conditions of the present world.

Human aspirations.

So, it could have been Nursemaid, if the winds were to shift, if something were to be let go.

She was after all a provident figure, nutritious epoxy, absurd and perfectly Freudian and inevitable. She lived a beautifully incestuous servility, so much had she penetrated into the young boy's mind. He imagined her at his age. A thing he might love, turn over, uncover, dis-assemble. He imagined himself knowing her the way only she could know herself. Knowing every instant. And he hid his imaginings. She was Verboten, and Verboten's hinge. She was never guilty, save in the exercise of excessive love.

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