Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there

Live, in what state, condition, or degree –

Adam is cleared of doubt. He is a simpleton — this too Milton makes obvious. (His eloquence, particularly in his plea for a consort, arises from Milton’s inability to write poorly.) Adam’s mind is made for easiest living, freed from intricacies, liberated from perplexing thoughts. He shall be busy in the prime wisdom: everything that lies before him is his; everything not is fume; it belongs to God.

It is taking me a long time to read Paradise Lost : what time I can afford is used as much for contemplation of the poem as for reading it. I allow lines to arrest me. I scribble them on a piece of paper — or whatever is near by — and set aside the book and pace around the house. If it is sunny, I open the blinds and all the windows, and lie on the couch with sunglasses. I wash dishes and do laundry. I eat. I smoke a cigarette. I cannot believe in Adam — I have no sympathy for idiots. I believe in Satan — overconfident, revolutionary, sick of obedience. And tormented: he does not even know why he is sick of obedience. His reasons contradict each other. I watch — in my imagination — his army gathering in the north. Satan was the first hyperborean. Heaven sends a force exactly equal. Michael, prince of celestial armies, fells him on the first day; on the second day they push heaven back. All this is illusion. God has scripted the stalemate for the glory of his Son: He did not mean to quell the rebellion; He meant to make it more worthy of epic poetry. So on the third day Satan, as Hector when Achilles reveals himself outside the walls of Troy, understands that he was never, not for a moment, in control of his fate. Satan was a slave when he was obedient. He remained a slave in rebellion. Christ, grasping ten thousand thunders, knocks the adversary’s astonished army nine days out of heaven.

I cannot move on until I have explored the lines within my own memory, until I feel as though I have written them. I cannot help but think of Menard’s Quixote , and the absurdity of my actions, but everything is autobiography to me, everything — reading especially. To read something is to write it — but I do not recreate the work; I recreate myself. I re-establish the boundaries of the world. All my memories are adjusted, like a man going through a slightly vandalized museum of natural history, repositioning, standing a few displays back on their feet, dusting, polishing.

In February, Evelyn and I went to Riga for a long weekend. I had hoped we’d get snow; instead it misted and rained for three days. Evelyn wore a long white coat with a furry hood. I had a black overcoat. I thought the city would be packed with tourists; it was empty. Everywhere we went, I asked locals where everybody was. They told me it was not unusual.

We got a room in the Europa Hotel Riga, a gigantic space with high ceilings and dark green walls, and views above some unremarkable streets. Evelyn doesn’t smile much; there is always a long distance to her gaze. She is the kind of tourist I like to travel with: she is tuned into the eroticism of everything. We dipped into empty bars and kissed; she put her hand down my jeans in a booth; in an alleyway I slipped my hand inside her jeans and put two fingers in her cunt, then let her suck on them. There was nobody around. We had nice meals in empty restaurants. We discussed her fantasies about other women: she wanted a woman to lift her dress up and straddle her face, then let her dress fall down, and in that privacy she would lick and drink the woman’s wet cunt. We shared fantasies of her being fucked by other men while I watched, of double penetration, of her kneeling between me and another man, sucking both our dicks. When we came back the first night, she took off everything but her stockings and high heels and said she wanted to be spanked. We moved onto a little couch. She sat on my lap with her back to me, then leaned forward, so that her elbows touched the floor. She put her legs back — her legs are long and fine. She told me she had watched a television show about spanking, and would like to be struck very fast, but not very hard. I did so, and she made the same noise she does when she is being fucked — something between a grunt and a breath. A minute passed, and her ass was bright red on both sides. She asked me to spank her harder; it didn’t hurt. I began to, and soon I was battering her: her ass became purple and speckled. Finally I stopped; I could not possibly hit her any harder. She was trembling. Wetness was pouring out of her. I wiped it all over her ass. I put one finger inside her ass and she pushed backwards to drive it in deeply. Then two fingers. I told her I was going to put my entire hand in. She did not answer, but became very relaxed. I got five fingers in. Half my palm. I told her I would push my hand into her stomach. I touched her clit, lightly. She came, I released, and she dropped to the floor like a snake.

I wanted it to be colder: I carried my gloves and hat in my pockets, but I didn’t need them. I had a camera with me, a Christmas present from my mother, but Evelyn refused to be photographed, and I had no interest in the buildings. Locals hail Riga as the Paris of the Baltics. I took pictures of some of the Jugendstil apartments on Albert Street — I had heard that it was rather grand — but I found them unremarkable; perhaps I don’t know how to appreciate architecture.

On the Sunday we had a few drinks in the Skyline bar at the Reval Hotel Latvia, twenty-six storeys up — austere, straight lines, soft brown-and-violet lights. The city lay in light fog; we were above the fog, looking down on the city, which was grey and black and full of lights. The previous days we had mostly wandered around the Old Town, and it was striking now to see how small it was compared with the rest of the city — we had really seen nothing at all. Evelyn wore comfortable runners, jeans, and a ratty jumper. She drank a few cocktails slowly and read a guidebook to learn something of the places we didn’t see. I read the cocktail menu a dozen times, in between long and silent observations of the view. Our flight was much later that night, and there was nothing to do but wait for it, and wish we had another week. I knew then we were doomed to separate — all we had in common was dishonesty and expiring lust — and it was only a question of when, and what boundaries we would cross before it ended. We watched light dwindle out of the sky. From time to time, raindrops spattered the glass, which, in the dimming, grew harder and harder to see through. Soon it was just lights and our reflections. I remember almost nothing of the rest of the evening, except a quiet drive to the airport. Evelyn’s eyes were closed. The night was wet. I thought of myself as a boy, on a rooftop with binoculars. What would he make of me in Latvia, in a speeding taxi with a beautiful woman with white skin and black hair? What would he have worried about, if he had known this was the future?

This memory is forever altering. It shape-shifts. It changes colour in the light of my endeavours. Milton must have desired Eve — his verses lust for her; they make love to her. When Satan, within the serpent, spies her alone in the garden, she rapes him — Milton’s word — of fierceness, enmity, guile, hate, revenge. This is the immensity of the beauty Milton paints: momentarily she makes Satan stupidly good. Milton owes his own lust to the corruption; he is not the child of Adam and Eve, but of Eve and Satan. We are all in this condition. The image of Eve naked drives Milton to ecstasy. It drives me to ecstasy: that is more precisely what I mean to say. Eve is the force of human rebellion, the desire for equality with the gods. She is Satan’s lover. She is the poem.