the way of all flesh

The way of all flesh is to grow with splendour for a while and then turn grey, the way the clouds in the last moments of the sun's light one by one lose their colour and inner vivacity. The wheel turns and the clouds freeze in their fifty shades of grey.

There is no peace in the depths of my heart, that old well in the far corner of the estate long since sold, the memory of childhood locked up under the dust of an attic in someone else's house.

Pessoa here sounds like a Bedouin: the abandoned camp, the ashes in the desert, the trace of the remnants of human warmth, laughter, fellowship preserved only in song or in a faint memory that is stirred to life by the smell of tobacco on someone else's thick and rough coat. The smoke in the mirror of life is like an unlived truth. I carry with me a flag, the flag of my defeat to Fate. The face, the face behind the mask rests on her bosom. She carries in her heart many such faces.

What can all this mean? You live a life as if time would automatically return you to some state of innocence and understanding, as if you had some kind of personal arrangement set up for you....instead there is only bewilderment and confusion in middle age. 

My hands grow darker with time. 

It is not leading a double life that troubles you but, rather, leading half a life or, to be more accurate, being led by those fractions.I remember the hours clearly when I am dead. 

~~~

We sit at a swanky restaurant under the stars, our chairs and table placed near the sea. The stars and the wind and the sea the permanent background to our fleeting conversation. The wild blue-green shore of our lost lives. You remember your days of tramping through the city with sandwiches wrapped in silver foil. The hours of silence and rest in parks and bookstores, as close to being invisible as is possible for someone who doesn't suffer, a monk of the streets, oblivious of all that glitz. You catch your dark reflection in a window and stand still in the day, where you are. Is this what you've been reduced to, this caricature? And how will you ever find yourself again. My father, my Jew, would have placed a coin in my hand. I may have lost forever my umbrella and the dignity of my soul. He will stand in front of the sun and offer me a shade in which I can catch my breath, remember an image.

The inner shadow of our lives is encapsulated in a name you do not utter. I fumble in my pocket for a chestnut that fell early, in late, late summer; I keep it safe in the dark and know its contours like the back of my own hand. 

I sit in a garden cafe or on a bench next to a graveyard, the warmth of the sun on my back, the degrees of light perfect for recollection. My hair grown long, my shoulders rounded like a whale's. You have learned very little from books or other human beings. In fact, like Launcelot Gobbo you mouth off to power without any forethought or seriousness.

I am the prisoner and the jailer who has forgotten the key.

There are days when I follow the diagonal out of my life. This Saturday was full of death and the talk of death and words spoken in the wrong way, at the wrong time by the wrong people.

~~~

I sat on a grey chair with little r. "Where is God?". He is in heaven. "Is He dead?" No. "Why can't we see Him...is he very small? " Don't say that. "did He colour in the whole world?" Yes, I suppose he did. "What is He doing now, then?" Having a cup of tea, I suspect. 

It is like a Sunday from my own childhood, the hours after the newspapers and before Sunday lunch and The Big Match. Mint sauce and lamb is being prepared, and much of Wales is in disarray. The dark country of our childhood glistens blackly. A kind of peace that is not earned but just falls your way, crosses your path like a tramp. Or so it seems. The way of all flesh is like our memory, too.

There are days in your life that are full of blank spaces, conversations that you never had. Your heart like a library of unread books. No tree grows out of the green shadow. And I am there, by the coal fire, with my scrap book pasting in the silver badges, shielded from the fierceness of the day, from any consciousness of time.

'All is fixed and root.'

(words by Pessoa and Lavinia Greenlaw)