Tokio Whip by Arturo Silva Page B

hardly a mythology, only silly in the end. (Perhaps destructive. “Believe Christ and His Apostles …”) That’s maybe one biography; look for the other one, the faces, voices I’ve so neglected and that were there with me all the while, there in the shadows, in the corners and backgrounds, on the verandahs and stairs, too unassuming to come forward. (My Noir set as redone by Minnelli. ((Or Phil and Tina: “It’s those little things that mean so much, so very much.”)) )
    Or Zen, Blaise, we ought to try some sitting. Take Roberta’s advice, visit the temple, live like that.
    Love. Purely. Do not think.
    No, no, think, man. You are leaving her – you’ve been asked.
    (“Leaving? Who’s leaving? Who said anything about leaving?”)
    No, Lang.
    The times are very different. Indeed.
    Lang … Lang …
    Sorry, Blaise, but nothing happens to you when you’re standing still. Not to me at least. I don’t have that kind of Zen. You’ve got to move.
    I need to re-enter the world.
    This is it, for our exhausted hero, as he summarizes the end of a near-year-long meditation, a meditation that had begun with the Chinese silencing.
    A sudden screech, a wing glimpsed, a woman’s opened speechless mouth – The city is a skull where all the voices resound in words and notes repeated forever in each friend and lover’s specific articulations, and all their images flash in instants fixed forever in single takes; it is here I encounter myself my destiny alone – and where I meet it hand in hand with Roberta both of us with eyes wide open, all pain forgotten, disappointed love forgiven, where my friends are forever present, conversing, we walk through backstreets or across boulevards, meet simply to wander, or linger in cafés and bars, we recommend books and records, participate in the quotidian, glory in it all, and at night when the bars have closed, the lovers returned to one another’s arms, the children’s terrible dreams undone with a parent’s unseen kiss, we each in our own ways return home to dream, reminisce, make a late night phonecall – or write a few notes.
    My room, skull, city is bare – perhaps a print or postcard on a wall: Bernini’s Teresa, Fischer von Erlach’s Karlskirche, something by Sesshu or Lee U-Fan, something perfect, hard and yet all emotion; no more than one shelf of books, a few pens and paper; the gray tabletop stripped but for the keyboard and monitor … the drama of lovers – Roberta and I – and others too, friends, the family drama – all played out – an inner struggle of gestures, journeys that end either in death or go nowhere at all, pleas that no one listens to, murderous loves that are endured … for what? … sisters and brothers all of us understood finally in our tragic fullness that turns too late to grace and splendor – they become one, friends, couples, more – finally, union, the misremembered dream of life.
    The body is restored and the soul rediscovered – sea and sky! – the mind is as fast as the hand as immediate as the writing – here: desk, skull, city – Tokio, Roberta and I, where all these wanderings end.
    What more can I say, Roberta? – Lang now out of his delirious access, letting go the weight of doubt the burden of questions, the spirit and flesh raised, standing once more prepared to speak with the sun behind and the moon above – sunrise and sunset reconciled! – Roberta? With Aretha then, “I love you. And I love you! And I love you too!” A world of you inside me – and I failed us both. (And you love me too!) Union, yes – but not now, not just yet. No second chances for fools like me. Go your way in this city that belongs to you. If there is a Tokio to be mine too I’ll find it. In time, I pray, for us to rediscover one another. You leave me, stay where you are. And I’ll