The birds were tired, she said. It was not enough to escape, not enough that everyone hated your politics, because you understood things, dared to understand, not enough that no one was willing to conjure a semblance of luxury or joy: the birds had grown tired of trying to sing, when all that was left for them to sing was a complaint of Nothing/Nobody/Nowhere...

There was little if nothing to be scavenged in the public squares, or even behind stores. Nobody plied the crowded edges of the avenues, headed for important, productive occurrences.

This center of commerce and human import had become a solid brazen frustrating nowhere, and the birds with the throngs and their vital occurrences, departed. Every scrap of everything available had always been consumed, because there was hardly enough; the prosperous signal of too-much garbage, which had crossed ably between the human and the animal worlds of meaning to speak of the paradox of a crushing lightness, a success upside-down, was forgotten, relegated to a nostalgic realm of the unreal and the otherworldly.

Terrible to see a vibrant imaginative people disintegrate into an agitated paranoiac pot of laborers and labels.

It could be ambition, or emotional instability, or a mind with a habit of coming apart, that makes an individual lay claim to all the lives around him. The motives of a tyrant are sacred, taboo material, and are guarded with all the clout of his dark capacity for terror. Once it arrives, there is nothing to do but try not to believe it.

Lone cardinal on a windowsill. You can see the sadness of squalor shattering his gaze, fragmenting an already skittish mind, telling him that he, like all the others, like the absence, is nobody. The sharp red hue of his plumage is all the more drab and vulnerable for its vibrance, all the more a sign of withering.

The dubious ambition of universal military precision had brought on this state of... this incredible state... had made life vanish from the city streets, had closed the cafés, the music halls, had prohibited entertaining and ecstasy in every form.

The birds were just tired, she said. There is nothing more for us here, Mani.

Even her use of a proper name at that moment seemed alien, overwrought, optimistic. Shouldn't we have known we were tired before driving satellite avian populations to it? There could not have been anything for us, when the only name we were allowed to answer to was 'Nobody'. You begin to talk about these things when nothing else, nothing concrete is permitted... it becomes a visceral necessity to discuss at length, with grand theories and vows attending, the constant echo of a nothingness that sounds like your own name, being called to sacrifice for a cause you cannot comprehend.

Something new. Anything. It was the moment to immerse oneself in the creative impulse. But nothing is so easily gained, nothing so easily found, and least when you want it as badly as on a deserted city street where all of your prior knowledge is suddenly useless.

People were still around, but they were hiding, wearing quiet clothing, doing quiet things, swept in a quiet velocity, sipping their respective customs as quietly as possible, desperate not to arouse the slightest interest. It was not well-liked to be putting forth shiny inventions, of reason or emotion or otherwise.

Nevertheless, or all the more, I liked the insistent struggle to make jazz... she painted. Everyone hated our politics... on the outside... because we understood, we carried comprehension around with us, and clarity, like any unseen force, was feared in those sticky summer days of precision, days of the terribly other. Clarity evoked a guilty noble sense of the possibility for change. Nobody wanted to be blamed for what felt impossible or for giving in to the feeling.

We could only hope the crisis would be brief, and that a fit of drunken rage, some bloody infighting, some improbable screw-up, would end the junta... and it did, in a way, one night when in the midst of our burnished and absurd discussions, fretted with gold and fire, encouraged by rum that is, we decided to escape first to the hills, then to the country, then to the coast, then to any Elsewhere that presented itself.

We would go in search of the natural luxury of afternoons full of birds and talk-without-fear and permissible unthreatening slownesses.

© 2002 Joseph Robertson

 

NOTHING/NOBODY/NOWHERE
JOSEPH ROBERTSON

Still Lifes Cover Page Home Page Aesthetics Cover Page Home Page Portada