Imagine a monster in a cave, stamping and howling for food.
Imagine the first airplanes and disputed borders.
Imagine infants being fed into gaping mouths of the gods.
Imagine the south wall of Jerusalem, where the followers of Moloch gathered, their drums drowning out the screams of the sacrificed children as the knives thrust in.
Imagine Moloch’s appetite – it must be appeased. We make gestures.
Imagine the inflamed minds of the revolutionaries trying to bring down the invincible empires, their blood running with new medicines.
Imagine the paint on the faces of the miners, deflecting the bullets at Marikana. Imagine their bullet wounds.
Imagine the General and his favoured Consort, a Queen in her own right, but born on the wrong side of the border.
Imagine the bold and black line, conceived of as an act of violence, (as the poet put it) marking off the rich from the poor, the righteous from the unknowing, the ethical from the immoral, the heathen from the true believer, the polygamist from the celibate virtuous.
Imagine the black line justifying the journey of the unmanned flying machines.
Imagine Daedalus in his laboratory, like some early Leonardo Da Vinci, designing the first flying machines.
Imagine Icarus, still a toddler, his running bum covered in vine leaves.
Imagine the poet’s father, shaping the inside of toilet rolls, with makeshift wings and large elastic bands.
Imagine that skinny man triumphantly flying these awkward and unfinished objects to the ceiling.
Imagine the craftsman, delicately gluing balsa wood and bits of the most fragile paper, to fashion the most beautifully shaped helicopter, a joy to perceive, but, actually ill conceived, unable to fly and bound to the earth.
Imagine the tearing line – ugly but functional or wondrous but earth-bound.
Imagine the labyrinth, with its twists and secret turns, with only a thread keeping us all from eternal darkness.
Imagine the Queen, her passions enflamed beyond reason, mating with a flying bull.
Imagine the moment of deadly ecstasy and pleasure as the queen is gored to her end by her son the Minotaur.
Imagine Tiresias, advisor to anyone who will listen, growing great provocative breasts every seven years, out of his ancient grey curled chest.
Imagine that same seer, his nose pushed into the magic crack in the Greek mountain, inhaling the sweet, dangerous, addictive, and wondrous smoke.
Imagine the monster and Icarus, enamoured, dancing at the same time.
Imagine Icarus, triumphant and high from the smoke, riding on the monster at midnight.
Imagine the monster howling with burdensome delight.
Imagine Icarus blackmailing his father to give him wings – he will kill the monster, fly and the gods be damned.
Imagine the bullfight. Imagine the minotaur dead.
Imagine Icarus, his wax wings spread wide, soaring into the sky.
Imagine Icarus, burnt by the sun, plunging into the ocean.
Imagine the devious gods saving him – he must take the killing machines and destroy anyone who crosses the border.
Imagine the first airmen of the USA air force, in their clumsy biplanes, destroying the hopes of the Mexican revolutionaries.
Imagine the brilliant design – the bullets passing through the propellers as if by magic.
Imagine the fronts of these awkward planes painted in war paint to terrorise the enemy.
Imagine the terrible pilotless fly machines, operated by an overheated Icarus.
Imagine the writhing bodies.
Imagine a triumphant Icarus flying into the heart of the burning rays.
Imagine Icarus, burnt by the sun, plunging into the ocean.
Imagine Icarus failing and the gods destroying him. Will he survive the fall?
Imagine Daedalus facing choice – Icarus must die.
Imagine the airman injecting himself with heroin.
Imagine the airman’s dream.
In his Metamorphoses, Ovid tells how Daedalus, master craftsman, artist, and architect, created the Labyrinth at Crete so cunningly that he was barely able to escape it himself after he had built it. Daedalus was then imprisoned in a tower to prevent his knowledge of the labyrinth from spreading. With escape routes via land and water obstructed by Minos, he constructed two immense sets of wings that he and his son, Icarus, might use to flee by air. He warned his son not to fly too close to the sea, lest the water soak the feathers, nor too close to the sun, lest the heat melt the wax holding them together. But Icarus forgot himself in his airborne elation, the burning orb melted his wings, and he drowned in the sea. A father laments the consequences of his creations, which do more harm than good.
IT STARTS:
To Neil:[1]
I could never, Neil
I could never be
(3000 strong the throng voicing some sort of struggle song
all the time it’s my body they carry along
lay it down low in the grave as they lift up high my name),
THAT could never be me,
I don’t have it in me.
I’m not the man that martyrs are made from.
The wrong song book so no Sousa, no Sontonga,
no glory no wonder at the way I may have lived on if I had lived on.
No,
nothing but the wonder and the why’s as they examine my eyes locked forever in perpetual distance (into the future and farther, modeled as a modernist Guevara), more then just a man’s eyes now, more than man size, now I become more then just a man, I become canonized, categorized as a comrade of the cause, I become the cause, I cause what is to come, what is to be,
that’s what your eyes say to me and I know
to be, Neil, that could never be me.
Neil, me, Neil, I?
No.
Too much I kneel already.
Prostrate position under the weight of whatever I still carry from when you first lent your weight to what would be mine … my whiteness carries a weight without the worthiness that yours did where your skin was an open page to write resistance on.
But,
mine is a closed cage there is no distance from.
Neil, under your weight I have to kneel, and dream of your fight to never kneel.
Neil, your weight continues to bend backs of those that carry a cause forward coz four words work where whole poems have failed, four words like:
“Hasta la Victoria siempre” simply they say: we carry the weight
heavy until light
streams into what
seems perpetual night, like
dreams do.
Neil, I’ve dreamed you.
Neil, you might’ve dreamed me.
But Neil, I could never be you.
Neil, before you never was I as bruised by what white is,
before you never was I as confused by what white is,
before you was a whiteness you challenged with patient wisdom,
kneel before you with the hopes of being blessed with similar vision.
Now your eyes are static signs of how short a lifetime can be.
Now I know that what they show is it’s not in me to kneel,
So, To Neil:
We miss you and your mysterious mind. All the wisdom it held we would reveal.
Until then,
a tribute
to Neil.
STAGE DIRECTION: SHIFT THE LIGHTS
[Reduce presence; sink into self; contained in a corner; stoic and static and:]
Voice (of Neil?):
“It was never going to be isolation that did me. This isolation they used, intending to abuse me into bruised sanity was never going to work. I was too used to isolation and its usefulness to me and my wanderings within. There was isolation in everything I had made mine, including my mind. Isolation was a friend. It’s in the way that my soul’s weighted: to be isolated is no danger to me. It’s where I’m found most free: in me and my world’s work. There was their danger: my world’s work. There was their world: my work’s danger was that their world wanted less of me. Irony really. There wasn’t much of me to begin with. Just enough to work its way into their fears, to get under their skin. They couldn’t understand a man working within their world but working against them, from within their world, from under (from within) their skin. When you’re white you can go either way. When you can go either way you usually go away from what’s white. At least I did. There was the fright: white man goes wrong way. Catch him. Contain him. Put him away. Let him be alone…without knowing that that’s exactly where he wanted to be…isolation would never end me…it had to be something else…some other sort of suffocation if I wouldn’t suffocate myself.”
[1] Neil Aggett (1953-1982) was a white South African medical doctor and trade union organizer who died while in detention after being arrested by the South African Security Police.