The Avignon Quintet (176 page)

The Falling Leaves, Inklings

T
HE GIPSIES KNEW OF THE TEMPLAR TREASURE
,
EVEN
to its location! The knowledge came from Egypt – landscapes of cork oaks ravaged by yellow ants. Honeysuckle grown clear into trees as if it had had a mad desire to perfume the sky. Desert cobras conferring king-hood, smiles like a breath over embers. Tawny dunes, rock doves, hoopoes. The Bedouin shared their love of gold ornaments, the spoil of rifled tombs, sold to the Templars! Lapis lazuli, amethyst, alabaster, tiger’s eye, turquoise from the workings in Sinai, mummia!

Notes scattered to the winds of old Provence. Reality is what is completely contemporaneous to itself: we are not completely in it while we still breathe but we yearn to be – hence poetry!

Sutcliffe
loquitur
. A little tipsy? Yes.

Good writing should pullulate with ambiguities.

Whose dead body buzzing with flies?

The dimensions are four but the aggregates five;

Open-ended reality coming alive!

Questions concerning the individual’s rights in the matter of buried treasure occupied the waking thoughts of Lord Galen for many weeks, months, now! He found the ideal man to cope with this ticklish matter – a dark, hooknosed man – nostrils flared: a lawyer who smells the perfume of litigation. He was a Jew from tragic Avignon who had somehow escaped the searches. A Jew is only a Brahmin with a foreskin. Snip. Snip. Snip.

In age of clones and quarks

Bless our radioactive larks

Quinx in her religious quest

Will one day tower up o’er the rest

A star-y-pointed pyramid

To point to where the Grail lies hid

Within the poet’s begging bowl

Last metaphor for the human soul!

Once poems were nuggets of inner time but we have become experts in not listening – experts in not growing up.

Sitting on his balcony in the Camargue Blanford thought: “The past has just finished becoming the present and here I am. I am still here un-dead. But the desert has covered the breathing and the night has covered the best. Everything (look around you) is as natural as it can be. All nature consents to the code of five. (Five wives of Gampopa, five ascetics in the Deer Park, five skandas.)”

Proust, so attentive to history as Time, as chronology, as reminiscence, never seems to ask at what point the limpid noise of the water-clock or the gravity of the sun-dial’s long nose was replaced by clock-time marked by a machine; surely this must have registered the birth of a new type of consciousness? His immortal tick has become our tock.

Blanford sealed up in a poem like a virgin’s womb.

“Subsiding from zenith like an old sand-castle,

The sea-lick washing me away balcony by balcony,

By keep and drawbridge, tower, bastion, ravelin and ramp,

By mote and sannery, and so back to dune soon

And then forever dune prime, and then sand, sand, sand,

The endless and uncountable sand.”

“Eh, Sutcliffe?

“Can’t you understand?

“I am blind sometimes, like old Tiresias,

My eyes are housed in my breasts

This interloping insight is all I have, outwardly

But inwardly whole new kingdoms are there,

Whole new kings and queens unborn,

But alas my eyeballs were scorched out by sea and sand.

Salt-burned, turned inwards upon the Shades,

While someone I may not name or love

Leads me about like a dog.”

Her heart and mine have begun a whole dialogue of sensation; is it possible after such a long time she is going to acquiesce and love me? Our hearts are like kites with entangled strings. (Blanford on Constance.)

Miss Bliss who taught him the piano long ago had a very classy Kensington accent which when she had a head cold transformed things – singing “The Berry Berry Bonth of Bay”, for example, or reading from
The Furry Tails of Grimm
or
The Arabian Nates
. The Prince revered her memory. He often thought of her and smiled puckishly. Lord Galen told him about one of his business partners. “Someone told him he looked Jewish when he was asleep, so with great astuteness he stayed awake all through the occupation!”

Capstone of the sky, blue Vega the darkness

Like an unharnessed cat – blue star,

The vane and lode of sailors once was fixed,

Who now aim at Polaris, their masts

Vast in erection, riding the simple sea.

“Aubrey, you will soon be beginning your novel. At last! And I shall be leaving you after all this time together, body and soul plus soul and body. It’s been great knowing you, and I hope the book works as a metaphor for the human condition, though that sounds pretentious. Only remember that those two seducers the striking metaphor and the apt adjective can turn out to be the poet’s worst enemies if they are not held in check.”

Tiresias, the old man wearing tits for eyes,

Deep in his vegetative slumber lies.

Her voice lives on in memory

A bruised gong spoke for Livia

Lessivé par son sperme
was she.

In the Hotel Roncery the slip hatch

Into Grévin with its wax models

Showing more pure discernment than intelligence.

Sutcliffe took the Prince on a binge or

Spree – a pig in clover he rolled about in

A garden of untrussed trulls.

A sex in her sex like an alabaster dumpling!

Her knickers smelt of gun-cotton, a

Moth-bag of a woman shedding rice-paper,

Powder, cigarette ash and paper handkerchiefs

Which she had twitched once about her lips.

A characteristic groan as he paid in coin.

You’d have been surprised by the tone

He took, the young Catullus with Julius Caesar;

A Tory untrussing a parvenu, dressing down

A political bounder, a tyke. Then later,

A heart shedding its petals, Latin verse.

Sutcliffe’s poetry hardly varies ever:

“Come pretty firework untruss

And let me grope thy overplus,

Between the horns of either-or

Be my dilemma, purple whore,

If spring be through, the season’s pulse,

Let’s teach each other to emulse.”

The ego (Affad used to say) is only a sort of negative for the superlative esoteric state – tiny glimpses of wholeness; as if light passed through them, printing out a different reality. He also said: “Love won’t live on charity, its demands are absolute. If she won’t love you then your ship is down by the hull. Aubrey overheard asking S: “What can I do to make you seem more real?”

Birds do it like young Lesbians do

As lip to lip they tup their tails

In an adhesive swift caress,

The oviposter’s carnal hue,

A member short I must confess

They cause each other sweet distress.

But arms thrust to the elbow up

Is how the modern hardies tup!

Mud … Merde … Mutt … love-bewitched in old Bombay – my think is spunk when thunk … chunks of thought thunk spill spunk. Blanford to Sutcliffe: “Reading your verse is like dragging a pond without ever finding the body.”

Tomboy with a clitoris like an ice-skate seeks rational employ. Sutcliffe: “To oblige her I had to bark like her Pekinese long-dead, run over, buried at the bottom of the garden. Until I was hoarse, my dear fellow! Gustav was the name of the Peke.”

Paraplegic frolics, geriatric revels! Once upon a time Truth Absolute dwelt with the Sublime and poets knew where they were or thought they did. Now?! And if you can’t get your breath because of your asthma how will you cool your nymph’s porridge? Man is so weak that he needs the protection of a woman’s desire.

I married a fair maid

And she was compos mantis,

We bought a third return

On a voyage to Atlantis.

“Happy New Year!” the roysters cried

While clowning clones their cuddles plied.

Gaunt Lesbians like undusted harps

Hung up their woofs and coiled their warps.

Woof to warp and warp to whoof

They like their whisky over proof.

And so one day we

Reached Atlantis,

Outside all peacock

But inside mantis

Ecco puella corybantis

Primavera in split panties!

The new day is dawning – women have become sex service stations: no more attachments, just distributors of friendly faceless lust. Modern girls whose body-image is smashed by neglect. Neither caressed enough nor suckled without disgust nor respected and treated with the awe they deserve. Pious loveless lives … Anorexia nervosa the name of tomorrow’s nun – spite long ripened in a sense of inadequacy. Insolent lurching looks when flushed and a bit drunk. Man is noble, man is marvellous: he can be monogamous for whole moments at a time!

Poor Blanford with his eternal note-making and note-taking. “Proust, the last great art metaphor in European history, is relative and contingent in its view of life; ego, sensation, history … The sign manual is memory, the central notion is that being is advanced through memory – through what is kept artificially alive. History! But history is simply gossip from an eastern point of view – the five senses, the five arts, are its plumage. For after relativity and the field-theory bleakness sets in and the universe becomes cosmically pointless. Relativity does not bring relatedness!
Monsieur est ravage par le bonheur!
As Flaubert remarks somewhere:
“Moi, je m’emmerde dans la perfection!”

The fool waits for perfect weather but the wise man grabs at every scrap of wind, every lull. When he was young he headed for Paris, capital of synthetic loves. Tall beauties like well-trained rocking-horses. Love was a jubilant relation, placental in rhythm; we danced the foetal swirl, the omni-amni blues. A thirst for goodness becomes unhealthy. Let yourself embark on the music’s great white pinions into Time!

The worldly life is the enemy of the poetic science! Alchemy will out! But holy structures when they go mad plunge into infamy!

The vatic mule, our German Poet, where was he when the killing was rife? The language is so glutinous that it is like investigating the nervous system of a globe artichoke.

The post-war world has started to form itself in Provence. In the village, Tubain, they have started drinking
pastis
with the old tumefied air, and playing at
boules
. It is reassuring. Even the human type has come back – the true Mediterranean loafer – sleep eats into him like an antacid into a dissenting Anabaptist! A purse under each eye and one under his waistcoat which stirs when he breathes as if a mole were trying to surface. A huge brown nose like Cromwell, full of snot. A Protestant mind packed tight as Luther’s big intestine with golden turds – alchemical fruit. The minority dream is to make the parochial universal – the whole universe a suburb with an
accent fauiourgienne
! Whiffs of red wine and underclothes – the love calls of a mouthful of dripping crumpet. An analysis of figments! Here, honey, chew on this crust, death!