Breyten Breytenbach - Mouroir

Think. Such a man, he thinks, it was just such a rare bird with a similar plumcoloured face who at the time became entangled in the merciless coils of being black. How do you know it wasn’t the same guy? he asks himself, and removes his dark glasses to better study the basso profundo. Yes, truly, despite the sallow exterior it really is a white man. Because White is posture , a norm of civilization. White is the specific arrogance of power. White is certainly as caught as Black by the conditioning and calcification of these relationships. How did Faulkner put it again? “How to God can a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his black wife? And even if he could ask it, how to God can the white man promise he won’t?” True certainly, but equally certain from the mouth of Lucille Clifton:

girls

first time a white man

opens his fly

like a good thing

we’ll just laugh

laugh real loud my

black women.

Think. Black, they say, is not human — not yet; it’s kaffir , they say. The man, that fellow then who may well be the same one here, now, was cultivated and superior and pragmatic (but all abroad, entirely out of his depth) and he walked with wide shoulders and narrow eyes: therefore he must be White, they said; only, the pigmentation of his skin provided him with the ideal camouflage and out of curiosity and impudence he wanted to exploit this. During a police raid on a shebeen — which he frequented anonymously — it was the time of the revolution — he was arrested together with a bunch of genuine Blacks. In the process of sorting out, grading and classifying and partitioning thousands of people each week, a certain amount of confusion and some slip-ups cannot be avoided (made worse by the attempts of the ringleaders and the shrewd ones to obfuscate their true identities). The black White in the twinkling of an eye found himself in a harsh lock-up place, and from there, before you can say “knife”, in the death cell as part of a lot of sweating, chanting and feet-stamping black Blacks. You may say that he now ventured into a truly foreign cultural milieu. Also that his eyes were bigger than his stomach. Do you still remember what a row he kicked up, what a fuss he made, how strenuously he protested? Do you still see the flames in his blue eyes? High on the hilltops the fires spark against the moon. While the others sang to the heavens opening up above them, he, squeezed tight against the bars of the cell door, attempted to draw the attention of any passing authority. But nothing could be done to resolve the matter, the moths were blind, water was in the cellars of the houses. Ichabod, or something along those lines. Should one be bothered by the desperate and farfetched babbling of the condemned? It is not just a question of consequences and precedent and perhaps also quotas — there are finally also rules and regulations and a timetable that need to be respected. Struggling and screaming with foam-flecks around the lips, just like the others for that matter, a human being among the Blacks, he went up to the gallows room one morning at daybreak to have his neck stretched. Like a bow tie the rope was tied around his neck. As if for a dinner or a soirée dansante. But the pillory-cord is a pair of scissors snipping off life, he thinks along. You had an acquaintance among the doomed. It gives death another colour, another exultant visage, another smell.

What does this watery surface further remind you of? The stream of his thoughts is fretting the submerged and reticent stones of experience (like a beheaded cock). What does water always bring home to you? Easy, easy now my old one. The cock is in the head. Superlative tail feathers, no? Beautiful the red bubbling at the throat. . Remains the problem of your illegal entry, the complications. . That Christmas maybe? Remember. He puts his dark glasses back on, hides the eyes behind smoked lenses. It was along the Skeleton Coast and you were in that small coastal town — remember? Everything light and grey, the streets grey, the sky grey, the undefined sidewalks and the bedraggled gardens and the houses grey, and beyond the town the sand and the sea were grey too. A tremendous wind swept over all of this, brought fog-banks and veils of sand. It was cold with a bit gnawing through marrow and bone, a cold you can’t keep out of your body, which thoughtlessly and hypothermically takes possession of you in the same way that a thought infiltrates the wind, and without any positive effect you try to ban it. It cannot be chased off. Like ink in blotting paper it sinks into your fibres and the two can no longer be separated, all at once they have always been one. What is a “thought” after all? Isn’t it the incredibly complicated combination of partially body-own memories (inalienably part of the biological mechanism, ink in blotting paper, chopped-off head of the cock), and partly of the experiences and remembrances and projections of other creatures, of life — call it “reality” if you wish — of which you yourself are only a minuscule particle? Because you are lived, experienced through the reality, or rather the totality, and it is not you who live all raving and jerking. Even when you are isolated from any contact, even if you are without attachments like a dead eye hidden behind blue contact lenses, even then you are “conceived”, are you but a crumb of the thoughts of others. . The mind is an image of the cosmos, has its gravitational wells, its collapsars. The thought consumes the mind — or can it be the other way around, that the mind, that ever-expanding void, cannibalizes the thought? Without the realization the realizing experience-field does not exist. . And every act of taking cognizance has its gravity, its mass in movement, atom and quark. Which swells to a red giant slurping up its environment. Which inevitably must collapse into a white dwarf. Which cools, cools off, becomes colder, denser, blinder, more autistic, a black dwarf. The star is frozen. That’s cognition. Black crystal. Ah, which may blow up as supernova, shooting its neutrons at heaven, painting the final extremities in light, rotating deeper: pulsar. The mind goes beyond the thought, the thought wrecks the mind. And everything disappears in the black abyss. Also the black hole. Zero volume. Singularity. Where must it go to? Can “something” be entirely destroyed? Or is it at the same time there again, completely differently the same, as quasar? “Something” must die to exist. . The brain, the encephalos, the mind (which is a vibration of perceptions) is a black pool circumscribed by a happening-horizon, an eternity-skyline. You travel, you travel: always you remain the same nothing and never do you return to the original. . In this way exactly were you transpersed by the cold. Everywhere about you the layers and crusts of salt, each surface has its edge. As if there had been an ocean which drew back, evaporated, perhaps only became invisible, and deposited this salt all over. But the salt keeps growing, it is crystallized from the wind and the fuming light, crackling, and with the cold rim and rhyme of root-fire it covers everything. The town, that Christmas night, was deserted. Most of the houses were shells only, ruins whistling at the wind. Or otherwise they were uncompleted. It was a luminous night. Although there was no sun and therefore no etched or ironed-out shadows, one could see very clearly and very far. Most definitely the waving fog-clouds brought the light along, and the ugly diamond-fire in the salt crystals. In a side street you came across the parked open-roofed little sports model belonging to Am and Starlet, grey and stain-fiery under its incrustation of salt. You understood that they must be somewhere in town and you took off your rucksack and put it on the back seat of the car. Perhaps you can persuade them to take you with them, away from this region of death, you thought as you continued walking. It was nearly midnight. The wind continued ringing like a soundless bell. Several street blocks along you came across them: Am dressed in an impeccable white tuxedo, of a white which complements his teeth; Starlet had little patches of salt in her hair. They invited you to their home and there was, to the best of your knowledge, not another living soul in town (and not even any dead souls). No, no sweat, it was selbstverständlich that you could ride along. With pleasure. It’s just that the house had to be put in order before leaving. With Starlet you started washing the floors. In some spots the water flowed several inches deep over the floorboards. You each had a handful of stalks, charcoal sticks, and these you rubbed and rubbed over the floor. The sticks were fragile and the floors extensive — it was a never-ending task. You remember the black finger in the white palm of your hand. Starlet’s evening gown was soaked from hem to knees. Then the telephone scattered the silence. It was an urgent call from Johnnysburg: Am was suddenly recalled, there was some important business which couldn’t wait, or he had been elected to play wing in a very important rugby game, or some such event. And then? Ichabod?