The Blue Clerk Read online

  On the 20th of March 2003. The poem begins there but I had been thinking for a long time about it. I was sitting in my living room in a city of about five million people observing a city of about five million people being bombed. The menu on the television allowed me to watch this program as well as others. And I am sure if I had looked around I would have found on offer a romantic comedy or two, a situation comedy or two, a rerun of Law & Order, a rerun of Seinfeld, a nightly David Letterman, or the Tonight Show, etc….You could choose any of these entertainments. Or I could choose the war. In other words, nothing stopped for the war. In my city nothing was happening that caused me immediate alarm. The street outside was lit in its usual way; the neighbours weren’t out there. Of course it was March and cold, there was no noise that I recall not even the customary siren calling from Lansdowne Avenue where the drug trade took its usual shivering toll. Or perhaps there was a siren but it had been years since that sound too had faded into ordinariness as the Law & Order reruns at least, had a perennial dramatic arc, a resolution, unlike the corner of Lansdowne and Bloor. The local social and political emergencies of poverty and drug addiction and their criminalizing had been cauterized by a welcome social distance; not to mention a home alarm system, a disaffection with the politicians, a lack of faith in justice, and the meme of otherness that dissected into atomic units of us and them. There is in our lives a televisual remove that one is afforded as a consumer of everything, a spectator of everything. The great spectator of the world. Nothing happens here, at least nothing that is not entertaining.

  VERSO 10.1.01

  Will not pass the night the clerk mutters, wants a pilot, requires assistance, not visible from signal station, made a signal of distress…The clerk goes about indefinitely.

  VERSO 10.2

  So I was sitting there on the edge of my chair with a decision to make—pass on the war, spectacularly named “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (the first episode was called “Shock and Awe”) or climb the stairs, go to sleep, and, as with a tiresome baseball or basketball game, read the score in the morning. It would be a blowout anyway. Like watching the Raptors against the Lakers then. These are the sickly enervating choices one is offered daily, living where we live. And it is not that our days and nights are not filled with the anxiety of finding a job, a place to live, things to eat, dangers of violence, domestic and public, but our lives are also filled with a comfort and certainty of the truly catastrophic happening at a distance.

  Unfortunately, not yet immune to the real-real, I sat and watched with such anxiety, such nausea—it seemed/it was immoral to rise and go to sleep.

  The spectacle, of course, was for the grand spectator, we, libidinous for disasters elsewhere, hate and pity is what we find sexy. It was a light show of incendiary, explosive ejaculations of bombs against the dark amorphous cityscape that the commentators assured us was Baghdad. All day before we had been seduced by an anemic map of Iraq, its red corpuscles of towns and cities, missing—one great star-like cell representing the goal of our desired invasion/penetration. The real-real of that city lay secreted from us. No one inhabited that place. We are accustomed to this “no one” as you know, this “no one” is on our ongoing colonial reality show. So, we did not see five million people prepare themselves, raiding grocery stores, filling up water, going to the bathroom nervously one hundred times that day, phoning family, and friends, hunkering down, biting their nails, looking their last time at gardens and bicycles, deserting neighbours in the cold immorality of thinking; in the end I’ll have to take care of myself; becoming the source of suspicions, thinking too late of fleeing. Someone must stay awake, the clerk says, someone must dream them across the abysmal roads.

  The commentators, our avatars with the maps, the excited voices, the graphic designs on their studio walls, they were us, included us, all we watchers in their “we” and their “us.” We need not worry about “them,” there was no “them.” They did not exist—there was only a guy there named Saddam (now) (who had morphed, cinematically, into that other figure, bin Laden) who had to be apprehended along with his sons and his henchmen. A narrative we had ingested since childhood had to be enacted, so that we could enact it again. He wore a moustache, lived in a castle/palace, he was the obstacle between us and happiness; good and evil; he had weapons indescribably like ours. Look now how we were obliterating his city with them.

  VERSO 10.3

  At low water a red buoy, the western passage is the most dangerous, care must be taken not to be swept by the tide. Shows colours I can’t distinguish, the clerk says, checking her almanac of colours. Do, do, stock on deck. Transport. Very far out.

  VERSO 10.4

  One could not easily separate oneself from the “we” constructed and being constructed by the spectacle and its narrations or reiterations. And perhaps one ought not to be able to so clearly distinguish oneself from that “we.” The grim list of the clerk begins, We believed in nothing, the black-and-white American movies buried themselves in our chests, liquid, glacial, acidic as love. The poet admits culpability. This is not enough for the clerk. Don’t let yourself off, the clerk says, I have enough to deal with on the wharf, thick weather, appears to be, easterly outside. The clerk knows that admitting guilt is a cop-out, it’s like wanting to be noble without giving anything up, it is drawing attention to yourself as if you are in a soap opera. If the poet doesn’t do more, the clerk will be inundated by bundles of sheets tightly fastened with gnats and wire.

  VERSO 11

  …because the author, she is a fiction in a certain reality, a spectre in a certain dream, a haunt in a certain nightmare. Since what I might be is uncontainable. The clerk of course understands this uncontainability, it is actually an extension of simplicity. I am so simple an idea, the clerk says, it is very complicated. We are working with something that has already been concluded. It is not necessary to experience this body within the context of what is necessary in order to know it. It is conceived of before it appears or is investigated. I can never make such a mistake when I go through the blind shipment, the clerk says. That would be fatal. The author has heard this dissertation from the clerk about the freight, about the body, but is intrigued by the former sentence about the simple idea and its complication. When I say it is simple, the clerk knows the author’s penchant for first sentences, I mean, it already exists, that definition, that place you are so eager to live in. Must I be explicit—the human—it exists in the world. But it is occupied.

  The author is downcast, her instruments point toward the ground. But it is occupied by me, the author asserts helplessly. The clerk for all her vinegar cannot listen to this without pity. The author is standing at an estuary, the clerk sees, the tide is far out and the mouth of the river is dry. The thirty-six vertebrae of the author are about to fracture into dry pebbles.

  The Clerk of the Versos scurries through the bales on the wharf. She sweeps the gnats, disturbed from their indolence, aside. The wires come awake from the neighbouring bales. The one she is looking for came with no wires. She manages with great care to lift a page without rearranging its contents. The clerk’s face must remain indelible for this task. This page is without verbs. It is a page she intends to give to the author as a kind of balm. This page has unstable magical powers of the same type the clerk believes, as say, the situation where poison is medicine. An antivenin. Without verbs nothing can be done, nothing can get in the bloodstream. There’s lemongrass in it, if you like, there’s bitter bark too, but the page is birdless and worldless, and there’s a grand arithmetic and magnetic embryos and latitudes of where and where and here. Imagine the tenderness she must use, the held breath of the sea, the still dock, the tremulous bales alert, transfixed, the slight flap of the leaf, her watchful hand. Do you know the butchery it requires to skin the vocal tract for the soft, perfumed sliver of an h? The velar k, the bilabial p? Then, to circumlocute the corona of the tongue for T and Th and S? That is the clerk’s job, and then, with the same professional alacrity o
f a slaughterer, to apprehend the constituting words and sift these for the unchastened perceptions, the incurable knowledges of who we are. The withholding pages, all their interests and their cynicisms, the volumetric capacity worries her. The clerk examines the useless curses, the stray sentences on why a life must be lived. She hurries back to the estuary and the disarticulating author. She lives in the accretion of the author’s dreams. The author lives on the aggregate of the clerk’s senses. I am writing my way out of a nightmare, the author says. I am caught in a nightmare, the clerk says. Everyone knows how things get done in the world. The author is ready with excuses. The clerk turns to the author; the clerk’s face is flooded with life. I don’t, I don’t know at all. I only know what a liquid consonant can do. The clerk is inclined not to trust the author with this page, but the page has its own poison or medicine. The verbless page leaves the clerk’s fingers, floats down on the author’s hand.

  These versos began with three, then increased to seven, then elaborated to nine in the space of a few days. Now they are eleven. The left-hand page is not only chronic it is viral. The clerk retreats again to the wharf. Now they are fifty-nine.

  VERSO 12

  The clerk is a misanthrope. She really has no faith or liking for people, not even for the author. The clerk thinks this is fine since she does not have to deal with people on the wharf. She is the only inhabitant, except for the insects and the dormant and dead plants. She is indifferent to animals, which is different from disliking them. Here at the wharf she does not get to see them since they are not necessary for delivery of the bales. The author drinks wine, talks of books, and animals, ever since she read John Berger’s Why Look at Animals. To be fair, he confirmed the autonomy of animals for her. The amount of disassociation it takes to eat them. One time the author drank a whole bottle of champagne to boredom, bemoaning her life. This is the kind of person the author is, maudlin and self-pitying but basically a type of dishonest sybarite.

  VERSO 13

  Blue tremors, blue position, blue suppuration. The clerk is considering blue havoc, blue thousands, blue shoulder, where these arrive from, blue expenses…The clerk hears humming in her ears; blue handling, she answers; any blue, she asks the author, any blue nails today? Did you send me, as I asked, blue ants? The author asks, blue drafts? Perhaps blue virus, blue traffic would make a sense, says the clerk, blue hinges, blue climbing, these would go together under normal circumstances. The author actually doesn’t hear a thing the blue clerk says under these circumstances when the blue clerk sits in the blue clerk’s place making the blue clerk’s language. Systolic blue, any day it will be blue now, reloading blue, blue disciplines. The blue clerk would like a blue language or a lemon language or a violet language.

  Blue arrivals. Oh yes.

  VERSO 13.1

  “…and in the warped fantastic environment of our lives…For instance none of us had seen the outer world…we were the offspring of lovers convicts the poor and had been brought to this forest by the Factory Committee…”

  KAMAU BRATHWAITE

  It is here in the Black Angel that everything is said already, everything that can be said. The author sighs. How much you owe him! Quick radicles of green. And more, green life and green balance. Terra verde. Alizarin green. CuCO3(OH). Verdigris. That much green. The clerk goes on. Black arrivals, oh yes, black valves of black engines, black charges, black spins, black numbers, black options, black equilibriums. Condensed smoke of a luminous flame.

  Now you owe him the warped fantastic environment of our lives. And yes, the world I live in is not the world at all, it is, if I ever look at it as a place, somewhere where the years I manage to live will not be enough for me to live. I will have spent the years I live in this warped, fantastic environment of our lives.

  VERSO 13.1.1

  Brathwaite. Black equilibrium Black spun.

  VERSO 14

  Coltrane’s “Venus” and the Ossuaries’ tercets

  In “Venus” there are two basic elements, the author paces, the horn and the drums. They are working with double-ness; they are working with time. There is one statement at the beginning—the exordium—though this is not the beginning, but the state of things. And then the instruments proceed to deconstruct the statement in various ways. The drum serves as pacing for the horn, but it has its own investment in this state of things. It holds underneath, but its own project is to also find deconstructions. The drums, played by Rashied Ali, structure the horn and are in turn structured by the horn. Coltrane works on the first declarative syntactical unit. It is not declarative, the clerk interjects, it is provisional, speculative, let us at least try to be as precise as we can since. Fine, says the author, he dissects that speculative, provisional statement, each sound he breaks apart, technically. What is done becomes undone. He also enumerates its emotion. If you listen to it, it is romantic but mournful, sophisticated and worldly; it is elegant. And he pulls these notions apart; he tears the elegance to its limits, he rejects the mournfulness as redundant and he drives the otherworldliness to its outer-worldliness. To my way of seeing, says the clerk, it is more elegant when it is, as you say, torn apart. So both emotionally and structurally, the author continues, ignoring the clerk’s interruption (hearing it only as a faint sound at her side), he pulls the statement apart. There’s a point in the middle, four or five minutes of it where the project takes hold of him, where the music is fully realized as separate and sentient on its own. There is an uncontrollability to it, and you can hear it wobbling out, out, out, into distances and into a kind of unspeakable. At least in your language, the clerk objects. And then the sound breaks and breaks and breaks. Around that point at about seven minutes the former statement tries to return, to recover itself, to recover the state of things, and it doesn’t—so much structural and emotional change has already been accomplished. “Happened,” you mean, says the clerk. So much has “happened,” says the author, that the state, the register itself is now indescribable without its fragmentations. It rejects its former self, as well as it accepts that somehow that self like a shadow is embedded in it, in him. And what the drum is doing underneath, at that moment of complete disintegration, the drum sustains. Yet, yet, while the drum is attentive, the drum has disrupted its own discourse. “Venus” is like two travellers going out to an unknown. Not the unknown, says the clerk, they both have to pay attention, moving toward another, much more lucid, open state of being at the end.

  To me, says the author, the tercets are like Rashied Ali’s drums, consistent, sheltering, pushing; the three lines are completely steady. Though they never break from being three lines, they show that three lines can perform a range of acts of pacing. The tercet is conducting the ideas—the horn, the Ossuaries. You know nothing about musical structure, the clerk says. But I can hear, the author says. I hear it as rhetoric. Liberatory. Then should I still be here on the dock, says the clerk rhetorically, shouldn’t the ship have arrived, shouldn’t this shoreline disappear. Instead, I need more burlap, more paper, more boards, more dunnage. More of everything.

  The author ignores her again. The bitter-edged-ness, the global violence, one’s own violence, the recognitions of one’s own violence, the tercet anchors. Anchors, anchors, anchors, the tercet anchors. What colour is an anchor? The plunging clerk comes to catch her breath. What disrupts the tercet is the meaning. It is not regulated by rhyme or equi-metric length of line but by the sense of infinity or possibility, in-betweeness. It is indivisible by anything other than itself and one. The tercet is light, light as well as heavy. It can hold weight, as well as it can be sharp. It could be terse, and it could carry the weight of the ideas, and they could carry surprise. I might use them for a while longer, the author thinks, I don’t know.

  There isn’t a full stop anywhere, they say. The clerk is only trying to get a rise out of the author. But what do you need a full stop for? You have the end of the line. The full stop is irrelevant. A full stop is really not even a point to discuss. Why discuss a ful
l stop when you have a line? A line ends, and that is what that is.

  What also happens is expansion and contraction. So, like with “Venus,” there is this pursuit of a certain angle of the exordium, and then you go wherever that goes. But if I haven’t said this already…You have said it, ad infinitum, mumbles the clerk…it changes where the line is enjambed, where it calls for attention, where the statement trips along giddily, or where it is full of weight. The tercet has guile. Like the body of a snake. Or on the other hand a triangle, or, less ambitious, the clerk joins, but more cunning, a bit of elastic. I could use a bit of elastic. The next time you come by. I would dye it blue like this paper. Only a snip bit of elastic, the clerk says. I would dye it indanthrene blue. But the author is drifting off.

  Yes. And there is a mistake, the clerk says, a typographical one, somewhere there is a mistake. That is, a typo. I have it…But I just think those eight sustained minutes that “Venus” does is just so fantastic. You don’t know when it begins, and it ends yes as you say, but it doesn’t conclude.

  THREE

  VERSO 15

  The aphids move toward the light of these arriving pages. They do not make a wound, they leave no visible scar so you wonder why they are here on the dock. They land, they do not diminish. The blue light of the planet makes them rise, the yellow light of the young leaves makes them land. The clerk is a burning soul, she is attentive to the metaphysical survival of the stacks. She is a watching consciousness, her instincts are to survive, to order the bales, but not to “do” any more.