Napoleon's Roads (4 page)

CROW THESES

People behave badly. It is not always their fault, and they don't always know it or see it that way. But they do behave badly. It stuns you sometimes, to find that this is happening, that it is going on again, but it is. And the people who behave badly in this way I call the crows. Sometimes it seems that they are landing on you somehow – on your arms, perhaps, or shoulders – and taking small pieces, bites, that other people mightn't see but that leave wounds nonetheless. I know it is unfair to talk about crows in this way. I know that they are just birds, if you can use ‘just' there at all, and that it is not the birds' fault that they are the colour they are, or that we humans have this thing about that colour, that blackness, or about the sound they make. But we do have it, and they
are
that colour, they
do
make that sound, and they
have
come to have connotations. Their sound, especially, doesn't help, nor does their habit, in sheep country, of waiting while a ewe is giving birth, to peck out the eyes of the newborn lambs. I'll admit that other birds have raucous cries, and other creatures have habits like that. But not so many of them are black, and they are not crows.

~

The heart, spread out in time, wanders through some strange country – deserts, mountain passes, forests, nameless composite cities, but mostly deserts, often deserts. It seems to me that if there could be a map of such places, to show where the heart had been, to show how, alone, it had fought there, survived there, the crows might begin to understand, might begin to be something other than crows. But men – especially men – do not talk of such things. Only sometimes some event, some predictable occurrence will make them speak, if ever they can find the person to speak to – the deaths of their fathers, their mothers, the deaths or illnesses of their lovers, their wives, their children, or even, sometimes, the devastation that a sudden, unanticipated desire can bring, erupting from a place they had not known existed. Then – in broken sentences, unfinishable sentences – they compare notes and experiences; then the possibilities of a Map begin. A landscape seen as a crow might see it; distances measured ‘as the crow flies'.

~

In a film I once saw, of the rituals of a desert tribe in South America – I never did find out what country it was in – a shaman was calling down crows. He was dressed in black, with black wings strapped to his arms, and moving about in a circle, dancing slowly while he chanted, lifting the wings and letting them fall. The sky in the beginning was clear but soon the crows began to arrive, appearing as if out of nowhere. After a time there was a small flock circling about him. When he moved to the centre of the circle he had made, and let his arms fall, they settled on the ground about him and stood there, watching. But what kind of shaman were they watching? The Crow of Loneliness? The Crow of Woundedness? The Crow of Unrelenting Desire?

~

I have a friend who is driven to confess to crimes that he has not committed. That is, he does not
think
he committed them, although he is harried by dreams that seem to point in their direction, of severed limbs, of disembowelment, of people he has known, or seems in these dreams to have known, weeping inconsolably in familiar rooms. It seems impossible to him that these dreams can have nothing to do with him. It seems to him that if he confesses to a crime – any crime, so long as it is a crime that might somehow fit these dreams – these dreams might go away. I would not have thought about crows at all, were it not for the vision, as he described the persistence of these dreams, of the dark wings circling him, flapping about his shoulders.

~

It is not a good day. Incivilities occur; people act as if their mood were all that matters; things happen that shouldn't and it's hard to say why. At last the mail arrives. From one of the envelopes, as I open it, a crow scrambles, all angles and feathers, claws scratching my hands, taking off quickly through the window, circling, returning eventually to perch in a nearby tree. Later, trying to find out about this, I hear crows at the far end of a telephone line. Before I can stop them one or two have come through. For hours they caw about inside my mind. Nothing I can do will silence them.

~

A crow settles on the balcony rail and stares at me through the glass. I go out carefully to talk to it. It does not fly away. I try to explain myself and it listens to me with its crow eyes sceptical, wide. I tell it that the birds I speak of are metaphors only, that I would not presume to speak of crows-in-fact. I tell it that it is not
it
I name, but a part of a system within and about me, in my own human space, and that it is welcome to treat me, as a human, in much the same way. As a symbol of poisoned corn, perhaps, or bad weather, a storm. I tell it that it is a matter of colour alone, a strange prejudice we have. Perhaps that, and what we can only hear as a harshness in its cry. Which it will repeat, as it flies overhead, as if it would not listen to anything we said.

~

To predict the actions of the human, reflects the crow, one must think with the mind of the human. Walking down George Street on an overcast morning, late winter, there is an edginess at the side of things, hovering beside me as I pass a confectioner's, retreating at the recessed windows by the Strand Arcade, disappearing into the stone wall of the GPO, flashing in and out of a blind-spot with a passing car.
Hypocrite
, I want to spit at it,
familiar compoun
d
! Black shoes, black jeans, black jacket, flash of white from my shirt front. Nobody listening.

~

The way I see it, which is the way I sometimes imagine others see it also, I have committed many crimes, but they have always been crimes of love. They have always been done
for
it, and
from
it. And I have wanted to say this for a long time now, if only to that other crow, that soft crow, that crow-without-beak-or-claws, that spreads out its wings, to sleep each night on my eyes.

What are the crimes of love, anyway, but fragments of passion broken from their moorings, evidence of a kind of shipwreck? (But what
kind
of ship? Where
was
it? What was its
name
?) Or crows, a flock of them, high in the air, fighting against a wind that no-one can see.

~

When I lie down at last, far into the night, the darkness seems to leave me and, retreating to corners, the space under the bed, assumes a more natural shape, eventually filling the room. In the early hours I realise that a crow is there, perched high on the suitcases up on top of the wardrobe, a bit like Poe's raven but also not. Crows are not entirely responsible for their crowness, it is trying to tell me: often, within the mind of the crow, there is a flock of crows circling, driving the crow towards itself. If we could see into the minds of these crows, it is telling me – the crows within the crow – we would find, in many of them, flocks of crows, circling or moving about on the ground there, grown hard and sharp with the warring of the crows inside them.

~

I stare at the page, thinking of nothing I could readily say. Words, in my abstraction, begin to lose definition. The page begins to exceed its borders, becoming as wide as the sky. A white sky, as it sometimes will be in winter, and in it a flock of crows, in obscure formations. Hieroglyphs. Moving slowly.

We dream of honesty, of openness, but openness can be lacerating. What can be more honest than a crow's cry? What can be more open than a crow's wings as it hovers above a cornfield?

A.

Over and again one comes to the City, like the death of one's father, one's mother, worst love, the worst or the greatest pleasure, a thing one can never adequately write about although one tries all one's life, over and again shuffling the disparate fragments knowing that somehow they belong together, never finding the key – a place exotic and unapproachable, though time after time one comes to its gates and stares inward, through the dark, weathered timber, at the steady weight of sunlight, the slow, ordinary movements of the ordinary, familiar people on the streets within, the dogs, camels, donkeys, sheep, and the coloured awnings of the stalls, the goods being taken to and from market.

They say that we carry deep within us a memory of all the places we have ever lived, of all the spaces that have made us their familiar, and that this memory in its turn shapes and colours the places we afterwards might dwell, but when was it that we all – that I – first entered A.?

There are many ways of getting there. One of them is simply to set out and to keep moving until you find it. Another is to gather together all of those moments from your life so far when you have come across a site or smell or taste or thing which you have seemed to know intimately, but for which intimacy you could find no explanation, and to accept them as glimpses, as the beginnings of A. Another, of course, is to record your dreams. Still another is simply to look within – at your mind, your heart, your small daily habits, the way you shape your sentences – and to find out what kind of place it is you have hidden there. Even if that is only the faintest sketch of a place, the merest trace. Even if all that remains is the initial, the letter only in the alphabet of the mind, the lofty arch of it, that pointed attic space, the broad, hearthed room beneath it would return us to the time that gave it origin, no mere trick of rhetoric, no sleight of text, but the first letter, the beginning of all. One sees pictures of an ancient city of the Sahara, perhaps, or Kazakhstan, and says Yes, that is it. One sees a painting of Innsbruck – the cobbled streets, the outdoor market, the spires, the turreted roofs – and knows it is there too, a confluence of our deepest images and desire, a place every heart, every mind, every unconscious turn of the body somehow unknowingly knows, shaped no more by experience than by the first touch of the lip on the mother's breast, the first glimpse of light, the first searing breath of air in the infant's lungs, and all the cognates of these things: the first colour, the first word, the first knowledge of that other – that father – who also made one.

Yet A. is also distinctive, also entirely one's own. There is something arbitrary even in the selection of the initial, although also not. The letter itself occurs in word after word, as if to remind us that the beginning is always with us. But that is not why I have chosen it, if in fact I have had choice at all. I call it A., I sometimes think, because it is a city like Alexandria, or rather, since I have never been to Alexandria, what I have imagined that city to be like, from all the images I have seen of it, all the things I have read. If this makes it sound as if A. is also something in the mind, a kind of process of thought, then well and good, since any city must also be such a thing. I don't only mean the way we carry deep in our minds the maps and shapes and atmospheres of the earliest cities of our experience, so that any subsequent city is also in some part these cities, too, since it is perceived by the mind itself that these cities first taught to see, although I do also mean this.

There is, let us say, a harbour in A., but you need not live on the harbour. There are also hills behind the city, but you need not live amongst them. Within the perpetual alternation of the dry heat and the heavy winter rains (winter? is it ever winter there?) – in the palm-shaded courtyards, the narrow alleys behind the great central market, the airconditioned rooms of the luxury hotels – there is a considerable variety of climates and weathers, but you need not experience them. Doubtless those who live and work about the harbour think of A. as a harbour city, just as those who work high up in the hill mines think of the harbour as serving them, or those who live in the dry, flat reaches on the desert's edge think of A. as an oasis from the heat and sand, a place at the end of a trade route, controlled by transactions that neither the harbour nor the miners consider. A. is all of these things, a different city for everyone who reaches it, a different memory for everyone who leaves.

In a system reflecting and perhaps integral to all of these things, A. is governed, unobtrusively, sometimes almost tacitly, by an assembly of poets and philosophers – which is to say that it is hardly governed at all, in the usual way of arrangements for garbage collection, approval of roads, provision for municipal taxes (these things are left, as perhaps they should be, to administrators), but governed nonetheless, impalpably yet almost utterly. The assembly meets annually, for anything from a few days to two weeks or more, in a large hall built for the purpose almost eleven centuries ago, a building with a great cupola and high, unglazed openings so arranged as to let the dusty light fall naturally on the floor beneath it into a circle the size of which has always determined the size of the assembly. It might hold fifty or sixty quite comfortably – somewhat more if the occasion demands – but in fact there are rarely more than a dozen. I call them poets and philosophers, although these terms, loose enough in themselves, only approximate the nature and function of the legislation produced here, and might belie the very real sense in which these people are self-selected. It is not unusual to find amongst the assembly a banker, say, or a midwife, a nurse, a priest, a housewife, a cooper or a digger of drains, each of whom has found themselves called by what they themselves have construed, or perhaps it is simply
realised
, to be the poet or philosopher within.

In the shadowed places far below the cupola, between the columns about the lighted circle, people gather to listen to the proceedings, almost always in silence but for an occasional murmur of approval, puzzlement or dismay. Sometimes these people are many – again it depends upon the issue – and sometimes only a few, but it is often from these shadows that a new member of the assembly comes, having attended perhaps for a number of years, sitting or standing outside the circle, and learnt, and thought, and found at last the confidence or need to step out. At which time, it should be said, they are never questioned, for this is the manner in which so many of those already there have also arrived. There is no romance in the work, no
kudos
, no power that one can readily utilise or see, no statesmanlike name to be made since names are so rarely carried beyond the confines of the hall. It is not for these reasons that people step forward.

Rather, it is that their minds have been caught up in an ancient and intricate discussion, the rules and assumptions of which, contained always within the collective consciousness of the assembly, have passed down from generation to generation for over a thousand years. If the assembly is always open to the newcomer – and there are, as I have already intimated, those who enter the circle for only one meeting, or who come and go almost without notice – it is always guided by its elders whose minds, over the years, have become vast repositories of the discussions that have passed.

The first and strongest of these rules, determining the fate and course of any new subject or idea, is that no such thing may be ventured upon without preface or precedent within the discussions of the assembly itself. All things must connect. Every new idea must be demonstrated to have its seed or origin in a previous idea; every new subject must begin in a subject somewhere before it; any new thought must be taken to the venerable river of thought that has run down, in this manner, through the ages. Thus the discourse itself can be seen to determine its own paths, accepting or rejecting what is brought to it by force of what it has accepted or rejected before. The poets, the philosophers who would take part in the government of the city have freedom, but only within the parameters of what the past will allow.

This is not always as confining as it might at first appear. Individual poets or philosophers wishing to introduce new matters of concern need not themselves present the precedents required, but may call upon the collective memory. If precedent exists, one or another of the elders will find it. Nor, intriguingly, is this the sole recourse. Now and again, some say, an idea is raised that through sheer force of intellect or circumstance cannot very easily be rejected, although it appears that no precedent can be found. In which case something else may happen. A few days may pass in which the matter is not mentioned; sometimes a full year passes, or more; and then someone – it is usually but not always the most senior of the elders – will raise the matter again, having thought carefully meanwhile, and having remembered, now, something which had at first slipped their mind. A thing said by one of those who had attended only one meeting, many years ago now – probably no-one else would remember – the pertinence of which has taken some time to make itself clear. And a name will be given, or some personal detail, for such is the way these things must be. And then the elder will spell out an idea or formula, carefully constructed so as to provide a bridge between the ancient discourse and the new idea whose worth had proved so irresistible. And at this point, jogged by this forgotten link, convinced by its logic, its rightness, others will begin to recall. So that, given force enough of desire, a new idea can create its own precedent, the present augment the past, an old man – so the cynics say – bring into being someone who had never existed.

It's this that I have been wanting to tell you about, the invention. I had wondered all along why there were poets as well as philosophers, but in the light of A. it now seems so clear, and that in reality there is little difference, or that it is a difference only in degree; that the ancient battle between the poets and philosophers is a battle of the same. That now and again the philosophers need the poets to cover their traces, or to imagine the way that, imagined, becomes the way. And that without them it might not be the burning possibility that in the core of every one of us it is.

This, and the ancient custom of the place, long abandoned, of the voluntary blinding and sequestrating of elders in memory of one of the earliest and most venerable of them – he who is claimed to have founded the city, and to have been blind from birth – so that thereafter they could not see the city they were asked to talk about, but only hold it in their minds, as perhaps did that first founder, never quite letting the actual city of A. eclipse the city he pursued, through all his long eldership, so ardently in his mind.

Sometimes, in the midst of an assembly, like a reminder of something the poets and philosophers can never quite put their finger on, one of the doves or pigeons with which the streets and the eaves of the city abound will get in through a high window space and flap about in the great dome above them. People, at these times, wonder how it will ever get out, and fight the temptation to run about after it, trying to capture it or usher it through one of the lower doors, but somehow always it escapes, as often by going up and into the middle darkness as by flying back down, of its own accord, through one of the open spaces, as if there are secret openings there that no-one could reach even if they wanted to.