The Blue Clerk Read online

  Let us be honest, women never talk directly to god.

  VERSO 20.2

  Mourning cloak. Black with yellow border. Nymphalis antiopa. Antiopa, people have no idea the effects they have on other people. Nymphalis antiopa, everything shatters, everything breaks to the touch. The green birth of the wisteria the author watches a spring long, the hapless sparrows.

  VERSO 21

  Xylem

  Reading Jacques Roumain…there is newness, there is an incredible newness of ideas and thoughts, because that is the challenge. I mean, I think that space is…I am going to follow Wilson Harris on that…Ellison is the only one who has written a book entirely of left-hand pages.

  VERSO 21.1

  You can’t really say that Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian writer. He is from Colombia, but as you read the work, the work expands way beyond this border. So he is also from everywhere else. No one notices? No one notices the cultural policing. The work that is produced and why, and in relation to what. It is always in relation to itself. What are you saying, says the clerk, of course it is in relation to itself. No, I mean to a very finite self, formulaic: marching to itself as the perfect society. And post the towers an even more finite self. There is absolute censorship. Some of us were always censored. A triangular trade of censorship, the clerk giggles.

  Marsalis, his jazz project…these are efficiencies, rationalizations, and we can’t fault them. How did we get to Marsalis? All are in relation. To continue, we must understand them as a kind of rationalization into nation. He has become an accountant, reminding them of the tally. The clerk is alert to the tables of weights and measures. The risk of not doing this accounting is to exit the discussion, to take your leave. The risk of accounting is to forfeit a bigger discussion, a bigger life. But you understand the impulse and the impetus, asks the author. I feel sad sometimes for him. He is wearing himself out doing this accounting; his own art is dormant. Let me remind you of your earlier dissertation of the aesthetic of imperialism, all our art is dormant, archival, fiduciary. Not about existence. I suppose he must have a clerk like you. I would hate to meet his clerk if you are any example. And I would hate to meet Marsalis himself, if you are any example.

  VERSO 21.2

  The clerk understands that this wooden dock is attached to nothing; no land, no town, no city. She notices the bryozoa colonies growing on the joists. Their starburst cilia waving, their gelatinous rooms expanding.

  VERSO 21.3

  Two, the clerk has said to the author, two people down to themselves is not sufficient. Then there is really only one. But really the clerk is solitary.

  Measures of surface, measures of weight, measures of solidity and capacity, fluid measure. High water and variation.

  VERSO 21.3.1

  The piece of art that they send to the future both spoke and didn’t speak of that place that they lived in, that particular local moment that they lived in. How to make tracing paper out of paper according to Cennini. How to tint paper…What are you reading. Some instructions to leaping beyond the time that we live in, or, natural blue he says exists in and around the vein of silver…

  My grandmother used to say you should wear a maljo blue near to your chest to ward off whatever.

  VERSO 21.4

  Ellison is the only one who has written a book entirely of left-hand pages. First, his clerk (we are acquainted) lived underground and selected many pages sent above. They arrived as he had written them from the world of the unseeable. They have been, as you would imagine, misread as in due course these versos will be. The protagonist lived in a world, as I, of the absurd, but somehow everyone believed it was credible. Just summon Baudrillard here if you like. The hyperreal was hyperreal already. For us. The protagonist lived as an avatar, a projected image. He performed some tasks, and sometimes in the book you can see how paper-thin the world is he is trapped in, as in the paint factory. Or, at the party meeting. Or, on the street with the marionette. There is a way of reading it all as if it were only of its own time, as if the protagonist is of that time; to read the crude regime that repressed the protagonist’s body as a morally legitimate space into which the protagonist desires entry is wrong. The more significant reading is that Ellison, like his clerk, was beyond time. Ellison wants us to take note of the repressive machine and its evacuating of the protagonist’s body and will. The book’s absurdism is entirely lost as the regime’s legitimation processes latches it to the conformism it jumps out of. This dock is my dock as the room of light is his. There were thousands of pages remaining of his left-hand pages. Ellison’s clerk and the author had many thousands of hours of debate and in the end they retained all those documents. After his death of course these documents were discovered and assembled erroneously, since the regime still exists.

  VERSO 21.5

  Harris. Palace of the Peacock. Another document. Every sentence ends in a paradox. But how do you read Donne climbing up to the palace. This way. I hope Donne never rises. Is never “I.” It is Donne who must become human. Donne dies in the beginning. Killed by Mariella. And is hung. And drowns. I.

  VERSO 21.6

  I want to agree about what Harris calls the “unfinished genesis of the imagination”; “involuntary association” though is trickier to make stand still.

  “A bias grows,” he says. Yes,…A bias grows which may profit from that hidden relationship in purely formal experimentation (Picasso’s formal, let us say, appropriation of facets in the African mask); but unless a genuine cross-cultural apprehension occurs of the unfinished genesis of the imagination affecting past and present civilizations, an innermost apprehension of changing, cross-cultural content within frames we take for granted, the involuntary ground of association…remains between privileged and afflicted cultures.

  There is the problem of course. Harris is hopeful. Why must you be so pessimistic? Well, I have had some time, you know, and an angle. Time has eaten me away. The hidden relationship? Yes. Look, if you want to, at my sides. And my toes. The sighs of the clerk whistle through the wood of her.

  VERSO 22

  Latifolius—broadleaved

  This is the truth. The clerk bows her head at this weary subject. She hears the prevarication in that direct object. I lose a lover every ten years or so. I don’t know how. Another sigh strafes the blue robes of the clerk. Her eyes become dim diamonds. I don’t know how.

  I went to the Museum of London Docklands on the West India Quay. There on the wall there were lists of ships and their cargo during the trade. I was startled to see a name. John Brand, he was the captain of a ship named the Mentor, owned by William Lyttelton, and on April 5, 1792, it loaded up in the Gambia with 141 people whom it took as slaves to Dominica. On this wall at the museum there were recorded three more journeys of the Mentor captained by John Brand to the Gambia.

  When the clerk receives this she asks the author, But this is perfectly respectable for the right-hand page. Why burden me with this too? Yes, the author said, but it is so tedious, this type of material is worn out yet it keeps flying around like love flies around in the head, so much debris, brain debris, like the memory of lovers or wives. It repeats without resolution. No one wants to hear about it anymore, but it stays in the air. I wake up and it’s there, I go to sleep and it’s there, I look out on the garden and it is there. It’s invisible like the debris around our planet now but it’s there, emitting shafts of pink and green light through the atmosphere.

  Light? the clerk remarks. I have changing weather, massive storms of many kinds, changeable in any minute. You have loves, you have wives? The clerk thinks about this for a moment. The clerk would like to have loves, would like to have wives, perhaps a bare house near the wharf, with a lantern for the evenings, a kerosene lantern with a round filament that puffs and lights when the lantern is pumped. Also a coal pot with a platein from which the smell of unleavened bread would rise; and a book with no writing in it, simply blank pages that the clerk might read and laugh with. She submits her weathe
red shoes and her inky hand, her tattered hem.

  I’ve looked for that John Brand but only found another who could and could not be the same; this one was a clergyman and a writer born in Norwich and died in 1808. He wrote a pamphlet called, “Conscience, an ethical essay.” I cannot find that. The essay or the subject. It would be perfectly normal to write such an essay, whose contents I can only imagine, and still steer a ship to the Gambia, pick up 141 people, and transport them, tethered, to Dominica, returning the profit to Baron Lyttelton. Three times. Three voyages undertaken by John Brand. Yet this could not be he. This John Brand took up a position at the rectory of St. George’s in Southwark in 1797.

  It’s only by chance that you found that on the wall of the sugar museum, you weren’t looking, the clerk admonishes, you must be more careful with this collecting of yours. Such an encounter only brings more grief than you can handle. At first with you it is wonder and then it turns into grief, just like your wives. Apparently John Brand was a writer and an antiquarian as well as a reverend; he published a poem, “On illicit love. Written among the ruins of Godstow nunnery, near Oxford” (1775). You have a lot in common then, the clerk said, going too far.

  There was a Thomas Brand, a Whig, who was in the British Parliament at the same time as a William Lyttleton, this Lyttleton was also a Whig and according to The History of Parliament was “listed among the ‘staunch friends’ of the abolition of the slave trade, the subject of his second speech, 16 Mar. 1807.”

  Well they would have made their money by then, I suppose, time to launder it in democracy. At any rate, at the moment I can do nothing about this, I need a historian. Because at this point it is ephemera.

  I wish this would be over so I can get on with my life, the author says. How long do these centuries last.

  As a footnote, hectors the clerk, in 1780 Robbie Burns was on his way to Jamaica to be a bookkeeper on a slave plantation. He published the Kilmarnock edition to sell and to collect funds to enable him to make the voyage. If not for its success…

  Why are you telling me of this? the author asks. Just to remind you that…it is possible that everything is washed in it.

  VERSO 0.1

  Strophe, turning from one side to the other of the orchestra, the act of turning

  I would like, therefore, to live in time and not in space. Not the timelessness that is often spoken about but time, in this world, as if living in an area just adjacent to air, a film of air which carries time and where I could be in several impersonations of myself, several but simultaneous. If there were time like this.

  But there is time like this. A pause from the author. The clerk lives in time like this, several and simultaneous. The author lives in place and not in time. Weighted. In place. I am always aware of myself in place. There is no universal me. I am specific. I am the critique of the universal, we live distances apart. We negate each other.

  VERSO 0.1.2

  I walked into a paragraph a long time ago and never emerged from it.

  “‘The house I was living in when I read that book,’ you think, or ‘This colour reminds me of that book.’”

  Rhys? Yes.

  VERSO 23

  At this point the clerk lay down, her hands on her face. The sea rolled in, in its usual way, as if a ship were imminent. The clerk dreamed for a moment of when she was nineteen or so, when all the things that happened to her happened in a feverish way. In this dream she felt a contraction of her heart at the thought that if she’d never arrived at the dock, the randomness of life would have enveloped her. Much as the dock was the burden of things, much as the dock’s great load weighed her down, she had arrived, intentionally and with something like freedom, with a satchel of air with a clasp on it.

  Each scene of the clerk’s life before replayed itself and she felt the hair on her arms prickle with fear. Suppose she had stayed at the telephone company on the night shift listening to conversations on the lines? About marriages, about babies, about someone stabbed in a parking lot with a pair of scissors, about long-distance love affairs between Minas Gerais and Oakwood Avenue. Suppose the boyfriend who slapped her and left her without her clothes in a motel had still been her lover? He worked in a plastic-making factory and eventually had his shoulder broken by the mafia, not for leaving her naked in the dim room in winter but for something else. Suppose desire in this kind of drama had never suddenly, one day in the middle of a cricket match at a savannah, become bald and disingenuous? Suppose she had not awakened one night to the curtain moving with something more than the wind, and the door sliding open in the living room and surprised the man who had tried to surprise her with a sound from her throat half bellow, half scream.

  And the bus, driving toward the other possible life. There is always a bus driving toward another possible life.

  The clerk shivered and waking looked at the ocean. Still as an inkwell. The dock was solid, the atmosphere slightly dry, a faint smell of smoke. The clerk sets off on her inspections. These bales try to set fire to themselves and that would be fine if it could be done but all they do is smoulder.

  VERSO 24

  You cannot live the same life as you imagine. You must live a smaller life, a more compact life. The life you imagine is too capacious, you will lose your balance. Driving home, I think this.

  VERSO 24.1

  Sometimes I am overloaded, too many people, too many thoughts, the author says. And these thoughts, these desires, are insensible anyway. A waiting room at the driver’s licence office is the worst place to be when you feel overloaded. Waiting rooms are, in general, places of suffering, of kneeling to bureaucracy.

  VERSO 24.2

  From the malls, the author has brought the clerk many stories. There are people, she says, who have cut off whole parts of themselves to acquire the elusive perfection that this city needs. There are people who have become quite ugly in finding that perfection. There is no delicate centre to them, just the coarse exterior of getting and wanting. Maybe they save that delicate interior for when they’re at home alone but in public all that’s on display is that violent wanting, the author adds.

  This is how the author would put it. I hate malls. They fill me with revulsion and hatred for everything.

  VERSO 24.3

  The author thinks that she is invisible, the clerk thinks. She thinks she has the right political distance. Of course I recognize that when the author’s name is called to go for her road test, her second road test, I will once again be dragged into the maelstrom of her social world. Everything is regulated, the author says, everything, and one cannot simply live as one wishes driving around the city with no sanction from the authorities—and even one’s most private thoughts are regulated by announcements everywhere and police stopping you for what they ridiculously call a rolling stop and then asking for your licence to drive. The man across from the author is looking at her intently and she wonders if by chance some thought of hers has escaped and is floating around her head like a halo. The author meets his stare. Then he looks at her shins and the author looks at her shins covered in her best pajamas, and it takes her a moment to grasp his disapproval and she looks at him with pity. How sad she says to the clerk. He has allowed himself to accept, rather, to be battered into some norm he expects me to observe. I can see his left cortex smashed in with this idea. “Your head!” she says aloud in his direction and the man inclines his head a degree in her direction but not his eyes. She thinks to say more, like, “What fucking business is it of yours how I’m dressed.” Or perhaps, “Don’t panic guy, I’m sure this room is full of women you’d approve of so don’t let it drive you crazy.” But then she thinks, that is precisely it, it does not matter how many people conform. It is the non-conformists who must be rooted out and who must be policed. The guy, to be truthful, looks like a common enough guy, the clerk thinks, like a guy on a tight lunch hour but the author won’t leave it alone because it is precisely this situation, precisely this kind of guy who is an enforcer for the powers of regulation.
It is this enforcer sitting here casually, quite casually, who carries out the daily work of bringing people like me into line. The man remains unmoved by the author’s thoughts. The clerk thinks of getting up and stepping toward him before the author does. Try to control your temper. Why should he commandeer the waiting room of the licence office with his violence, the author has lost control. The clerk gestures around the room and the author becomes aware of a phalanx of enforcers all sitting strategically with the same broken skulls, the left cortex smashed in, their bodies all concentrated in surveillance poses. So when the clerk’s name is called and the examiner turns out to be one of these guys, the author rises and makes for the door.

  VERSO 25

  In the mornings the clerk reads the obituaries. All these bales may be considered obituaries of a sort but we are talking about the regular obituaries where people actually die. Here on the dock nothing and no one dies. The clerk would like them to die the finite closed death of a real obituary of the type as the ones in newspapers. Aphids do not kill leaves, per se. They extrude the sap of them and they expel a sweet substance of their own called honeydew, etc., etc., on down the line.