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What? You Could Not Sleep? Neither Can I. The Noise
You could not sleep? Neither can I. The noise has
resumed, earlier each day as the summer solstice
approaches. Some astronomical principle must be
operative, the way the sun consumes matter to make
light and warmth, but no astronomers are left to explain:
they, too, were eliminated in the Final Purge, the
Ultimate Solution---but what did we purge this planet of?,
with a solution that has caused more problems than it solved.
In the former houses of the Poets, manuscripts of verse---
sinnets, ballad, love poems, and an epic or two---continue to
write themselves to completion; an unread completion.
In the former houses of the composers, sonatas and symphonies
fill blank staff paper; fugues, waltzes, even symphonies.
In the former studios of the sculptors, left over blocks of
massive stone appear to be forming youthful, masculine
figures; youthful masculine figures that are---I might add---
provocatively naked; on blank canvases, naked male figures
cavort in the most lascivious and perverse positions:
remember the wall paintings that were uncovered in Pompeii?
In the so- called Houses of the so-called God we no longer
worship, bodiless voices chant elaborate liturgies in the
almost ethereal beauty of four-part harmonies. In the
halls of theaters that have long closed, full of the
dust of that era and shadows we do not want to remember,
voices recite theatrical dialogues---drawing room
comedies being preferably dominant, especially in matinees.
In the apartments and hotels of the homosexuals (first to be
deemed subversive, who raised the pleasures of intimate
love to the levels of fine art, desires are still being
satisfied: you know it if, like me, you stand close
enough to the craters and rubble that surround their
abodes and coverts, although they were the first ridden off.
What world are they depicting---these artists whose eyeballs
we plucked out, whose tongues we severed, whose hands we
crushed, and whose legs we hamstrung? Perhaps none of it
was actually real; perhaps historians---if such scholars
still existed and thrived---might have explained it;
but, in the wake of the great Purge, the interpretation of
our state, our realities, and the obligations the Party
expects of us is left to us to experience and explicate.
I know what you think (your thought being no more valid or
accurate than mine): that all these artists are constructing
around us a vast Inferno, even more extreme than that
written by the great Florentine Poet, who died in miserable
exile, in Ravenna, in thirteen twenty-one.
Starward
