I was in that state between waking and sleeping. From there you can wander towards either of the two. You can go away in a dream or you can open your eyes, be aware of your body, the room, the crows cawing in the snow outside the window. What distinguishes this state from that of full wakefulness is that there is no distance between word and meaning. It is the place of original naming. And from there I saw myself before birth, more than nine months before birth. The life-to-come in the womb was further away perhaps than death is now.
To be conceived was a call to come forward, to assume a form. Yet this prior existence, although formless, was neither vague nor neuter. (I say neuter rather than neutral for it had a sexual charge, that of an undifferentiated sexuality.) I was placeless and so innocent. I was unparticular and so invulnerable. But I was also happy. The only image of this happiness, the only contraband I could smuggle back across the frontier of full wakefulness, was not an image of myself—for that surely did not exist on the other side of the frontier—but an image of something akin to myself: the flat surface of a rock, a stone over which a skin of water flowed continuously.
We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky.
Where is Tony Goodwin now? His death proclaims that he can never again be present anywhere: that he has ceased to exist. Physically this is true. In the orchard they were burning leaves two weeks ago. I walk through the ashes when I go down to the village. Ashes are ashes. Tony’s life now belongs, historically, to the past. Physically his body, simplified by burning to the element of carbon, re-enters the physical process of the world. Carbon is the prerequisite for any form of life, the source of the organic. I tell myself these things not in order to concoct a specious alchemy of immortality, but in order to remind myself that it is my view of time which is being remorselessly cross-examined by death. There is no point in using death to simplify ourselves. Tony is no longer within the nexus of time as lived by those who, until recently, were his contemporaries. He is on the circumference of that nexus (the circumference not of a circle but of a sphere) as are diamonds and amoebas. Yet he is also within that nexus as are all the dead. They are there as all-that-the-living-are-not. The dead are the imagination of the living. And for the dead, unlike the living, the circumference of the sphere is neither frontier nor barrier.
The pulse of the dead
as interminably
constant as the silence
which pockets the thrush.
The eyes of the dead
inscribed on our palms
as we walk on this earth
which pockets the thrush.
The photograph which lies on the table in front of me has become incriminating. Better not to print it—even thousands of miles away from Turkey. It shows six men standing in a line, in a wooden-panelled room somewhere on the outskirts of Ankara. The photo was taken after a political committee meeting, two years ago. Five of the men are workers. The eldest is in his fifties, the youngest in his late twenties.
Each one is as unmistakably himself as he would be in the eyes of his own mother. One is bald, one has curly hair, two are thin and wiry, one is broad-shouldered and well-covered. All are wearing skimpy, cheap trousers and jackets. These clothes bear the same relation to the suits of the bourgeois as the capital’s shantytowns, where the five live, bear to the villas with French furniture where the bosses and merchants live.
Yet, with their clothes taken off, in a public bath, a police or army officer would have little difficulty in identifying them as workers. Even if the five half-closed their eyes so as to mask their expressions, so as to pretend to a commendable indifference, their social class would still be evident. Even if with the magical aid of certain djinn they assumed, with consummate art, the typical facial expression of a speculator’s mistress—an expression of sugared charm, sugared indifference and greed—the way they hold their heads would still betray them.
It is as if a court, at the moments of their conception, had sentenced them all to have their heads severed from their necks at the age of fifteen. When the time came, they resisted, as all workers resist, and their heads remained on their shoulders. But the tension and obstinacy of that resistance has remained, and still remains, visible—there between the nape of the neck and the shoulder blades. Most workers in the world carry the same physical stigma: a sign of how the labor power of their bodies has been wrenched away from their heads, where their thoughts and imaginings continue, but deprived now of the possession of their own days and working energy.
