ULICA LUTK

The gods inhabiting doubt don’t seem to be inclined to show themselves in manners resembling anything we normally would consider divine or any purported demonic opposition, but neither do they feign to assume human garb.  What then are these creatures (though they be not creatures) and how do they inhabit?

We shall begin with an experience i had recently when drunk in the alleys of Seville, that despicable administrative region of the nation of a doubtful Slovenia.  Nothing had gone right that day.  My father called to inform me my mother had cancer and would die within three months.  My ex-wife called and said she wanted to get remarried.  My brother-in-law called from emerg to say my sister was having a breakdown and was being interrogated by psychiatric interns with no direct experience of the mind’s stranger choreographies—only textbook systematizations and rote vocabularies and envied paychecks.  And in the wee hours of the early morning i had resumed a sexual relationship with a woman who was into extispicy, expired air ventilation and quitting smoking.  Naturally when night came i boozed.

I knew the alleys sufficiently.  They turned into each other like deranged marshmallows.  Transactions occurred of a nature so dubious, so outside the law, that any jurisprudence would have to entirely reinvent itself to take them into account.  By daytime, though, the alleys were exuberances of commerce—wallets flashing like pedophiles, scarves and cravats and bootlaces, fractal romanescos and sexy kuritakes and swabs of turducken terrine with dates and plover eggs and seasoned bustards spilling over coloured tables, and everything singing with the excess of itself.  Near nightfall the shoppers would thin and disappear and the merchants would then hastily pack up and fold their stalls and scurry out, as if they were cockroaches and someone had flicked the light on.  A limbo then occurred in which nothing happened but a silent waiting for the night and its tangled cultures.  It was then i would enter, inebriated, desperate for respite from the arrows of routine, from the protocols of opposition.

That week i sought a friend skilled in the arts of such matters.  He lived in a garret off the Ulica Lutk and mumbled the fragments of sages into broken carafes.  His name was lost and i called him Substantive, as a euphemism and term of endearment and joke, though neither of us laughed.  Interrupted by unhinged doors and tomblike corridors through which ghosts lolled like dustbunnies, there were uncountable twisted stairs to his forgotten hovel which he could only afford by doing free curses for the landlord—long horrible affairs, rife with decibels and spittle, that terrified those in arrears to steal or prostitute their daughters or murder, as long as rent was paid.  We had met in the theater at the opening weekend of The Thing, he with fantasies of doing domestic work at the South Pole, me with a ticket i had found while recovering my glasses from behind the toilet at a soggy waffle place near the condemned sanatorium in which Lucia had finally fully lost her mind a few years prior during that spring in which the blossoms danced like hesperides and no one got the flu.

Haven’t suffered enough, he said, after we had settled into Turkish coffees as thick as madness and he had rearranged the taxidermy specimens so that we could squeeze ourselves into rough spaces between once loved or beaten pets on lumpy dolorous couches which seemed to chant in low scratchy voices of springier and firmer days.

What has that got to do with it?

Haven’t suffered enough, don’t see them.

What happens when you’ve suffered enough?

Not there, they’re inside you—hardly suffered, suffered enough.  The in-betweens, they make them appear.

It’s too easy to blame it on the booze.  We all know that at some level alcohol speaks the truth more ripely, with more imaginative precision and imagistic exactitude, than the tinny truisms of sobriety.  That’s why we drink.  Not to open legs or forget the whipped horrors of existence or even dance with more limbs than we thought we had … but to glimpse what is, however shady, veiled and smelly it might be.

Most truth—the common kinds that cause lukewarm heads to nod lukewarmly—is like an uncooked head of cauliflower.  True and not imperfect in its cruciferous and fractal glory.  Yet it is not the truth that drives us humans on.  Something must be done to the cauliflower.  It must be chopped and garlic added, maybe a bit of reggiano and olive oil, a plop of parsley, roasted until hot and golden, eaten to the tunes of Arvo Pärt and arguments over the attributes that distinguish film from literature or whether religion and secularism are the same.  Booze does this.  Booze is a cooked and wondrous cauliflower.  It shows us what is there.

So i step into the Sevillan maze, that medley of alleys, drunk and desperate, eager for truth.  The smell of merchants has begun to dissipate and the air is expectant and stiff.  Brick buildings of indeterminate age, their windows viscous and unopened, sit stolidly on the sidelines, devoid of any signs of life, as the sun does its daily dance into the grave of the heavens.  There was little discussion of the alleys in the polite society of Seville.  People talked of bargains, of having whittled the price of some haberdasher down to something one could boast about.  They talked of under-ripe avocados and fuzzy fungi and the latest lace.  They talked of days.  They talked of sun-sanctioned fiscal-driven business-blessed products, and then they stopped, like clams, and spoke of happy exhibitions in galleries, and maybe the price of theater tickets and the increasing quantity and quality of weddings and, if efficacious, one or two of the deceased.  The alleys i am entering are entered more than spoken of, and those of us who enter aren’t normally invited to the parties of Seville.

I saw him next under the destitution of a full moon in the smoky geometries of an undecided evening by a polluted creek on the outskirts of love.  Jackalopes, squirradgers, wombines, elephaffes, pysons, donmels, vulphins, and raphonamites lurked in the fuliginous night, gnawing on each other.  He was in the crook of a tree, screaming at unseen enemies, in a loincloth, stuffed with vatic wisdoms.  I threw some pinecones, drawing his ire and attention.

le bruit des cabarets la fange des trottoirs! verfremdungseffekt! petite madeleine! anosognosia! inter alia sophrosune sub-iectum! une riche et inutile survivance! wie es auch sie das leben es ist gut! reines bewusstsein! die schwärmerei! ho hum! l’éphémère ébloui vole vers toi chandelle crépite flambe et dit bénissons ce flambeau! ertrinken! versinken! unbewußt! Höchste! Lust!

He howled like a cloven moon, ripped off his loincloth revealing an erection which began spouting into the skies an aurora borealis of semen, greens and reds and blues of holy sperm, and threw trees and vivisected animals onto the earth like a crazed and animate piñata and i ran back to Seville, to my small apartment, and wept.

Upon his first encounter, Augustine had called them lahars of confusion, and returned to them to castrate himself over a pagan font in 392, swollen with repentance, committed to the plank of clarity, spilling the hideous blood of his testes, those thick and questing hydras, in exchange for the aseptic blood of God, returning to Hippo, never to tread again on Seville’s miasmic earth, never to look back at those purple indulgences, that tumescent sin.  In 1244 Aquinas, smitten with his vocation, ripe with holy passion, slit them off with a broken wine bottle and screamed the names of God in Spanish, which he did not know.  In 1119 Abelard, bereft less of Héloïse than of himself, sought the alleys with a butcher knife and did the deed.  Origen, apophatic and pulsing with the cries of Jesus, began the tradition in 209 when, flexible before the Lord and elastic with righteousness, he arced his body and bit them off—oh snake that devours! oh sacred sacrifice of purity! oh love!

In 1858 Baudelaire wandered in without shame or pity and lopped off the sac of a Portuguese sailor while in very congress with a corpulent Sevillan whore who smelled of turmeric and myrrh.  In 1985 Edmond Jabès, little known to history, having trekked across the desert to the mirage of questions and drank his fill, snipped them off with sheep shears and didn’t weep and died within seven years.  These are the records of castrations of the alleys of Seville in the name of the western gods and under the blankness of a blackened sun.

So i enter them, booze in my sex, a member neither of the holy nor unholy orders, neither tepid nor a scholar nor a citizen of anything resembling knowledge.  Did not Margeurite Porete write, “Are they not a miracle of an architectural prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness, an intersecting of myriad relations?”?  Was it not Julian of Norwich who said to a budding anchoress, “Have they not within them less the mirrors we are seeking and more the labyrinths that are lost?”?

Signage is absent, the forks and interstices are wayward and seem to shift with each visit.  Like Habana, without cars or people and of widths only allowing two fattish people to pass while gently melding.  But there are people.  Yet not in any normal sense.  One sets one’s constructed personhood aside as one enters, and becomes a person of the alleys, an unfamiliar, experiencing by not experiencing, feeling the discarded subjectivities that pass as long and loosened hair, like fallen rain.

The nights melt the alleys down to a single spot that, like a mad tuba, starts all of the heart and all of the soul vibrating. But no, this uniformity of black is not the most beautiful hour.  It is only the final chord of night, when the vague and temporary citizens of the alleys have forgotten why they entered, in the deepest pangs of twilight, taking every shade to the zenith of life that, like the fortissimo of a great orchestra, is both compelled and allowed by the alleys to ring out.  Then one sees, though in an instant, though one forever doubts and though one knows most deeply, what one has come to see.

I finally found him in his laboratory in the forbidden districts of a simulated CERN, wearing only a dirty labcoat and mumbling in languages i did not know.

was scrawled on a whiteboard and he jumped from testtube to marker to vodka to testtube like a bonobo between lovers.  I sat for what may have been hours, half-watching, shifting between dream and what is ostensibly reality, while he bounced around and scrawled and drank and yelped.  I found him next to me, pawing my leg.

There, finished.

Finished? What’s finished?

Suffering formula.

You’ve solved suffering?

Solved itself.

It’s over?

Always does.

We shall begin with an experience i had recently when drunk in the alleys of Seville, and we shall end there also.  For i accidentally found myself at a soiree of a Mrs. Bimble B. L. Bomble, of 382 Rue de la Luna in the Celestetta District, not far from Nomz Bar, an absinthe haunt of mine.  Placing myself innocuously in a corner, slurping aquavit like San Pellegrino, i forced myself to listen to the conversations.

You’ve heard that Alyson’s son received the scholarship?

It was not unexpected.

How is Frederik taking the news?

Naturally, he is upset.  He can’t see past what he can’t help but feel as a betrayal.

Of course.  He should take a trip, go to India or something.  Forget about things.

The storm in the Pyrenees … do you know the total damage?

In the billions, now.  Over 3,000 dead.

Horrible.

Dr. Vertenvoken’s recent book—what a masterpiece!

I hate to say it, but I wasn’t that impressed.

Oh really!  Do tell.

While I appreciated the textures of its plot, the typically finely drawn characters, I found its sense of irony overblown, its passions pretentious, its climax unrealistic.  Too much like Flight of Magenta really, a bit of a waste of paper.

Oh Henri, you’re too harsh as usual!

The truth isn’t always pleasant dear.

She’ll die of it.

I think so too.

Soon.  She’ll die of it soon.

All the better.

We’ve had enough.

She’s gone too far.

It’s all anyone can take.

You know what they say … what you reap is …

What you sow.  It’s so true.

His best work is from his final 10 years.

Unusual.

A late bloomer they say.

What matters is the product.  Life follows its own schedule.

Magnug is doing well.

Far better than expected.

Do you think it’s time to sell?

I’d wait a week, see how Bryzon performs.

Ah, you always were a savvy one Vasiliy, a savvy one.  I like the way you think.

It’s served me well, I have to say.

An asset to our kind, you truly are, an asset to our kind.

I think we’ve finally found one!

I’m so happy for you! Who?

Pierre Lemish.  He actually played once at Wimbledon!

Really!

Didn’t place.  And I’m sure he uses the fact to bump his fees up.  But the twins love him.

It’s been such a journey for you.

She heard it from Seeba and then heard from Fransi but didn’t put two and two together and when she found out … !

I pushed my way into the middle of the crowded room, raised my hand and yelled, Friends!  The room hushed.  I am not a stranger to Seville but i am a stranger to these gatherings.  I have been in the corner—that one (i said, pointing)—listening to your … your … communication.  I have heard you talk of awards and death and charts and justice and art and the gamblings of the privileged and tennis teachers for one’s children.  Most curiously, i’ve heard no one mention what is central to Seville, what grounds and circumscribes your lives and talkings—the alleys, their effects and architecture, the society and business that transpires there at night.

The room grew quieter.  The alcohol stood still.  Ginoo Alabos, debonair musician and member of the professional avant garde, a respected professor and member of the guilds, drawing his recent tour of Hungary on Daw Jia’s lovely naked forearm, stopped and frowned.

I am a frequenter of those alleys.  I have sought God in its garbled corridors and madness in its trampled air.  Yes! God! God who is dead and yet never dies! The god who is gods and no-god and no-gods and none and all and neither.  I have sought that which cannot be found and can be known only when it is not known.  I have sought the annihilation of myself in order to find life.  I have sought to see the possibility of repairing the deep injustice of the divorce of the sacred and the profane, that life is still possible for the human.  I wish to share with you the occurrences of my most recent visit, i wish to speak of the blood on which we walk … the grammar of our walking.  I do not know if i am mad.  I do not know if the alleys are real.  I do not know what i have seen, I do not know if i have seen it, i do not know …

… We have heard all this before, Encik Mllad, a Senior Civil Servant in the Carlosian regime, interrupted. The architecture in question, since it has been mentioned, is being sealed.  Each year, fewer enter, even fewer emerge, the portals of ingress diminish, the doors of egress are closed.

There is no escape, said Zonjë Tsis. Things change.

The Councils decree it, said Gospodin Wǣs-Wǣs.  It is the only way to progress democracy.

The Ministers have approved it, said Ssi Sui G.

The remaining Monarchs have blessed it, said Whaea Wei. We must let life take its course.

The International Bodies have confirmed it, said Mevrouw Vilipa. Its time is done.

The astrological charts don’t deny it, said Seeydi Habibubad.

The computers compute it.

The scientists validate it.

The therapists, psychologists, general practitioners, specialists, neurologists, psychiatrists—with the full support of their attendant lawyers and accountants and lovers and children and masseuses and nannies and poodles and customer service representatives—systematize it and erect a program of wellness to achieve it.

The scholars profunditize it.

The artists sacralise it.

The tweeters and bloggers blab it.

The …

They didn’t try to stop me as i left or seem to notice i had gone.  No one followed me as i departed the Celestetta District and no one mentioned my having had appeared.  Daw Jia’s forearm gratefully recovered the soft map of Ginoo Alabos’s Hungary and Vertenvoken’s oeuvre continued to be explored in tones not unreminiscent of reminiscings of reminiscings.  No one found the testicles of an unnamed diplomat.  It wasn’t reported, the police knew nothing.  I went to seek my friend but he was nowhere and so i left Seville and crossed the old-fashioned way, on a ship, to New York, where I got a job as a night waiter at L’express and found a girlfriend and went to movies and made up stories of a former life.

So gods inhabit doubt through suffering, and suffering lives in the inebriated alleys of truth.  This is what i discovered in the nights of Seville, that despicable administrative region of the nation of a doubtful Slovenia, with the aid of alcohol and a man whose name is lost.