MILKY WAY

MILKY WAY    

There’s a road in Africa that must have been laid beneath a channel running through the stars because at night migrating birds roost on it confident they remain invisible as they always are to us when voyaging through those fissures in space, and there passing trucks knock them over like ten pins, what is traced by these rows of birds still unseen by the drivers.

 

     Black night, chthonic rumbles through my soles.  Dangling from the mainline which has come from Jo-berg this 3 a.m. and now is being sectioned by the shunters and filed over the acres of the rail yard; cars difficult to trace unless the number-taker, me, rides with the train to see which sidings will be berths.  The mainline.  It has its outgoing counterpart assembled in this Durban yard by these same shunters. It gathers power in an arcane, satanic way as it is assembled, becoming restless, the unit rocking it back and forth to pull the couples taut, tons and tons of metal rocking silently. When it finally leaves it coasts off smoothly without the castenetted warning the cars usually make, as if the cars have been ingested.  But, you feel its departure.  The arrival, of course, inevitably, the unit hauling it wakes a shivering in the ground though it is pulling into the yard at only the speed a man can trot.  When it leaves, not through your senses but by a gap in your memory, a cavity you teeter on, you recall its departure.  The cinching up, the lithe patience, somehow the actual time always has out waited you.  The line of a hundred cars has vanished.  The mass has converted to force, slipped its chains.    

     In the line of cars, there is one with slits through which a guard can fire a machine gun.  It is carrying gold bars from the Rand, mined from a mile down in rock too hot to touch.  On Sunday the black African miners are fabled to climb the huge slag heaps and there beat each other senseless in stick fights.  Legend has it that Jo-berg will one day be swallowed by the chambers that have been hollowed out beneath it.  A Gotterdammerung for the children of gold in their golden city.  It is devoutly prayed for, a covenant to be realized. South Africa is lousy with religiously titillating images of miscegenation, some of them secret: lust for a particular African, for the beautiful colored girl, skin rich as caramel, who works the counter at a diner, the stools filled with white men nursing coffees, others a national bond, the grand redemption of a losing cause:  “We'll all wind up brown", they tell you.  Jo-berg will fall into the dirt.  Twilight is coming; dusk will suffuse these blonds.  This is underground, Plutonic commerce.

     Dangling from the train.  The feeling is like free fall.    The train is its own astronomy; like astronomy, nearly disembodied, purified into principles.  Though carried along, I lag slightly, no more than a breeze's worth, but it gives direction to my weightless fall.  I could be looking up the dim side of the train, looking up from a well, or I could be looking down, the train plunging into a shaft and passing into cosmology.      I have become fey, sailing a velocity in my near extinction, dangling over a death so exaggerated and complete it is no longer personnel.  I am volunteered, given over to this night tide.  I am near a state of ecstatic grief, sad for my loss of self, joyful at this lifting of fear and the snags of contingency. 

     Leaning out from the shadow, swinging the lantern to spur on the engineer across the parsecs is the shunter who is separated from the rest of us because of virtue-a translation of form into action. His introduction to me begins and ends with him in glissade on a moving flat car, his strides, elongated by the speed of the passing train, as insouciant as an ice skater’s.  He looks Italian to me, large brown eyes, full mustache, an immigrant whose identity is frozen at the year his father left Europe, but he is probably Portuguese, and the Italian I see is from a romance I have about the spellbinding canals of Venice.

     It is perilous on a moving flat car, nothing to grab on, and the shunting engineers are notoriously reckless, smashing the cars together so they lift off the tracks, animated ballast become drunk and unruly.  Not much to being a shunt conductor.  Learn the layout of the yard, gigantic yes, but simple, and memorize the hand and lantern semaphores. But, he is outdoors, sky overhead and horizons with the harbor on one side. A chance for us in that space to regain loft if he can prove the untrammeled step. It's this then, what is left to those descended here, and is sometimes, at the very most and again at the very least, a possible gift or recovery.  Or can be:  The correda of the elements.

     Lucky for me I never talked with him, words would have diluted him.  Between the reflexes of a free nature lays the rest of life, redundant, endured, culpable, and ultimately waterlogged by our sympathy.  A life without details is what I require of him at the last subtraction of the grid, where the cyclone fence is left widely gaping and the final two rails set off in bleak scrub to that most distant point where parallel beams again converge.  How could anything added to pure reflex have not been an adulteration?  Wife, family, probably; certainly the South African damnation, he must have been sentenced to these.  Let that damnation serve for all the others we have made for each other.   

     I glimpse him on a flat car, unfettered by gravity, loose in the world improvising lyric on the dull clappers of the fallen day, and place him as a beacon on the dark train plunging heavenward.    

     Other inmates of the rail yard:  Stanley for one, an ex-cop reputed to have shot five people, white people, including his wife, before being expelled from the force.  Summoned still fastened in hysterical risk to the front of a loco, just back of the grate, maybe drunk, his face beaming, or maybe driven insane, or reaching for it as a permanent intoxication, a noble man deposed and sick of himself.  Cold bloodedly ludicrous where he hangs now, like a monkey, nodding to me under the bill of his little cap, smiling his gap toothed, loopy smile.  Not far from suicide, a giggle would do it, the androgyny of a giggle, maybe ending with a shriek and a demonic smile, Stanley become an organ grinder's monkey in that debasing black uniform.  Ex-cop, ex-soldier, ex-husband, demoted to this bogus regiment. 

     And the boxer: I bump against him like a statue in the dark. Here he is, flattened nose, cauliflower ears, standing in front of me.  He has just told me his curse.  I'd know him as a boxer without the deformities or the story.  It's the simple, complete sense of tragedy that is converting him to stone.  He could not have fought at more than middle weight, and probably lighter because he was younger then, and the world was not yet piled on his shoulders.  There could have been no mistaking him; he must always have seemed inured to pain.  And sluggish somehow, that is where the guy who baited him made his mistake.  He broke his skull open with a punch to the forehead.  He's joined to that guy forever.  There are monsters down here, products of curses and judgments.  It is odd, but they seem to reveal a hand at work more than happiness might.  Their longing, these monsters, it is as close to wisdom as I have come, and purity, and as close to faith. They have been transubstantiated; life has converted their flesh to revealed parable   Compared to them, all comfortable men are nihilists. 

     What particularly is here, in the rail yard, at wharves, at loading docks? I think grief.  The stalled passage, the siren of heroism and pity, the destiny of men is set in their form: We end as Calibans of grief.  The heavens and horizons whose lip we stood at, they called, and holding back, we fell. That’s the feel in such places, elegiac without psalm. 

     Can only a foghorn or the bell on a buoy, or a train's whistle be heard across the void, or could a single pipe from a calliope been placed at the bow powered by a crank, and even knowing that wind chimes loom sad airs from the wind, couldn’t some maidenly tinkling been added to the knell without sacrificing range?  Or, does the blind pilgrimage require from us these throats?   I think of the necessary word forced on us. By itself it is complete, like a musical note, and like a note it is received in passage, a core section of a continuous stroke in voyage through the black.       .

     There’s hurry in a boy to be marked by experience, to wear some scar of bravery and omen. Being young seems too light.  But, within these fallen realms in which all things that are quick above are changed in state to solids, light and grace remain, and it seems to me these tune the call to a harsher, stoic beauty filling the darkest of forms.      

     The lorry road quit a couple of miles ago.  I have been walking in the dark on footpaths.  I can barely see.  Outside of the cities in Africa light is a species of genie.  You bargain with it, and it requires offerings.  I hear other people in the dark. My whitish face must glow a bit; I feel the rumor of a white man walking these lanes is preceding me, bringing people out of their huts. I think it is possible that the sight of me is uncanny to them. Nightmares have dominion.  My body feels transparent, an outline sketchily traced by pleasant coolness on my translucent skin and by weightless steps below.  The night saturates me.  I don't know the taxonomies of African superstitions: hobgoblins, banshees, zombies, werewolves, vampires, but whatever they might be it is in such a state as this while dissolved in the night that they would be met, having an equal immaterial valence. 

     At a place where the path passes under some trees, a man with a lantern steps out of a hut and walks over to me.  I remember him as being bald and dressed in school uniform shorts and white shirt. I put glasses on him and give him a fretful, grammatically correct air. He is insisting on guiding me to the mission.  He is not a man who is comfortable out in the night in Zaire, but part of the distinction he feels, what makes him anxious but that keeps his head above the depths, he owes to Belgium.    

     Holding the lantern in front of us, he led me to the mission. Certainly he was connected to the mission, a grounds keeper maybe, a graduate of the primary school who was misfit for life much past its walls and stayed close.  And the place it was:  on the wall in the room I slept was a composite photo, like one from a high school yearbook of an undergraduate class, and these seventy or so faces were the missionaries that had been hacked to pieces a few years earlier by the parishioners who I'd been ghosting past in the dark. 

     Let me try to imagine the thoughts of the Samaritan, who I can only picture by lantern light in my own night: sandals, shorts, knobby knees, white short sleeved shirt punitively clean and hand pressed by charcoal iron, arm raising the lantern in front of him.  Has he chosen denial, or is it a ritual?  Break the simplest act into nearly infinite steps that can never reach conclusion in disaster. The path to the mission ingrained in him, and each tuft and tree root and water rut lifted complete and alone by the lantern without enlistment in further narrative. Or, did it make sense to return a ghost to its stable?  Let me suggest another view other than a parody of refinement.

     Slaughter in the church.  The next morning, the icons missing, pots and pans from the kitchen gone, bed sheets, farm tools, are all looted.  Left behind, mutilated corpses and clouds of flies, and..Everything the church said about redemption through suffering. A hundred martyrs, each one freed from the tangles of colonial politics, finally purely dedicated to a church fulfilled as a conduit for the spirit.  This church, like few others, has become solely a house of spirit. This is one church that cannot be razed; a church cleansed of its perishable body to leave echoes promising charity, forgiveness, love.

     Charity, forgiveness love: other, possible impositions on dumb matter, other vapors or excavations. And my guide? Clairvoyant to these inspirations.

     I slept that night on the floor of the mission. We may happen on the place smeared in the offal of the inner light, and in that place we cannot see inside ourselves.  I had no dreams. I had believed the dreams of the good would be the world transparently seen. Comforting to believe the migratory call is heard in a choir, but I am not surprised to hear it coming from the blood, a magnetism pulling at the blood's iron, a single sinew of gravity threaded through the pulse.  How could I dream a single dream at that fountain? Dreams are recalled in reverse by teasing at their ends. Travel by its nature is the reeling in of memory ahead, an active reversal of our usual experience-now we are facing into the past and experience its birth rather than its wake, and all the emotions of reverie arriving from ahead are intoning destiny and transforming a journey into pilgrimage, a waking dream. To sleep at the enshrined end point of a hundred dreams-a portal jammed open on the furthest reaches of emptiness-is to wake into genesis, the darkness rent by soul that pealed creation. Ringing there was the silence, tragic and joyful that compels our hearts.  

Lake Tanganyika

At night the fishermen hang lanterns from the bows of their boats, and like serenaders, bring the fish out of their chambers and into their nets. A fish is moved as fatally by the moon as a lover, both with a conception beneath conception and driven by violent force to find beauty in the dark. It strikes me that the body is not the chrysalis for light-I do not think we must earn death. Life instead seems to me to be light's wings, and true biology is the study of dreams, the migration of light through forms.