Text 3. Dream of Spring
“[T]his time it’s I must go.” (110) No return, no going on. And yet, there is going to be a departure, it’s just words, it’s a journey, an imaginary story forward, future-looking (above) not an imaginary memory backward (above) as in Text 2. I must go, and a man with body must come, but fails to come in this story, this mere story. My eyes woke up;//It was cold and dark
The words, voices, say there’s going to be a story. First, build a body, with “a cluther of limbs and organs” (109) “then back here, this inextricable place far from the days” (110). Again, the possibility or impossibility of adventure and return, a mere phantom story and return to here. Words build a body, feet, hands, skull. “I’ll wait for you here, no, I’m alone, I alone am, this time it’s I must go.” (110) I will build a man, he will be a man. He’ll have a nanny, no responsibility, “if only it could be like that.” (110) I dreamt of love returned. I must use words, or the voices speak, “it’s time to go, to say so anyway.”
I wonders: “What matter how you describe yourself, here or elsewhere, fixed or mobile, without form or oblong like man, in the dark or the light of the heavens, I don’t know, it seems to matter….” (110, 111) It matters: there is a great difference between I here (here, without form, in the dark) and He there (mobile, oblong like man, under the light of the heavens) – if I and He are two sides of the same “being.” I and He live different lives, have different characters, if they are one body, a similar but not the same nothingness, man above mere appearance, moving about with arms and legs and motives, I below phantom-like, closer to reality perhaps or to nothing, but here, unseen, beyond what is or can be visible. The Mock Suns. I’d be better off in the dark.
And again, as in Text 2, I cannot go back above: “And if I went back to where all went out and on from there, no, that would lead nowhere, never led anywhere, the memory of it has gone out too, a great flame and then blackness, a great spasm and then no more weight or traversable space.” (111) There led nowhere, the memory of it gone too; there a great flame (light), and then, here, after I recognized himself, blackness; there a great spasm (of motion) and then here, no weight or space (no experience of body, time, space).
“I’ll speak now of the future, I’ll speak in the future, as when I used to say, in the night, to myself….” (111) I or the voices invent a bare embodied I above and a “crony,” a friend, but no, a crony would “prevent discouragement from sapping my foundations.” This crony, by his encouragements, would distract I who otherwise, as invented man above, might be able to concentrate on his own no-horizons, “which might have enabled me to throw them under a lorry.” (112) But the obligations! of living a life, to call this living, no escape, even if one just stands in line at the bar to make a bet day after day. One has to always be somewhere above, doing something.
No, back to here, see “what’s happening here, where there’s no one, where nothing happens, get something to happen here, someone to be here….” (112) Story versus here, just words, voices. Wouldn’t it be nice – to have a head and the two legs, to “set out from Duggan’s door, on a spring morning of rain and shine, not knowing if you’ll ever get to evening, what’s wrong with that?” (113) “It would be so easy. To be bedded in that flesh or in another… what’s wrong with that? I don’t know, I’m here, that’s all I know, and that it’s still not me, it’s of that the best has to be made. There is no flesh anywhere, nor any way to die…. Here, nothing will happen here, no one will be here…. Departures, stories, they are not for tomorrow.” (113) And when the cocks crowed//My heart woke up;//Now I sit here alone//And think about my dream.
“And the voices, wherever they come from, have no life in them” – no body, no past, no future, a no-man’s land, as opposed to I, I here, if bare, having nothing to do with words, behind words.