Bole: Chant 2

Leaving my apartment the next afternoon, I trapped the wings of my tattered coat in the door as I closed it, and received the jolt of a shock as it clung to my shoulders as I tried to step forward. Scurrying through my pockets for my key I bent down to unlock the door and free myself, just as Masur was walking up the stairs.

—You ought to think about getting a shorter coat, he says.

—I like this one. I’d die if I lost it, then I’d still look for it.

—Where you off to?

—I’m thinking of leaving.

—Where to?

—Ah, . . .I don’t know yet.

—Well, before you go, you wanna come up have a drink?

—A drink of water?

—Right . . yeah, he says remembering.

Masur lives on the top floor of our apartment building, three floors above mine and across the hall. His apartment was roughly the same size as mine, and he had filled it with posters of our national sports teams, and his book shelves consisted of adventure novels from the war and biographies of those who fought in them. He handed me a drink and we sat on opposite ends of the room, bridged by a coffee table. Our conversation was pleasant until we began to speak of the future, and I mentioned that I had been thinking about leaving for somewhere else. At first he understood this as leaving to another area of Anglii, but I assured him I meant further on. Our differences of opinion began to grow apart like red salt water, until we were separated by more than the coffee table. A dispute which was raised by the statement I made about our country; raised against his one-eyed patriotism. The same kind of one-eyed patriotism that a fool has for the ground beneath his feet, or a prisoner does to their bed. The sentimental attachment for that which they feel, I must here choose the word he so exhaustedly used, grateful.

—Our nation has the National Health Service, you must at least recognize elsewhere you wouldn’t have that? he says

—Ha! I let out an involuntary laugh. William Beveridge would be turning in his grave, I remark. Probably still saying I’ve got a thousand things to do.

—What grounds have you for saying that?

—You call me ungrateful, but look around, Masur. Drugs, drink, squalor, we’ve got people around here eating themselves to obesity, cancer of the smoke. And yet you talk to me about people who don’t have clean water, proper food, or shelter good enough to call a home. Whose the one whose ungrateful?

Masur pauses for a moment, processing my remark, accepting and rejecting it.

—Are you saying we aren’t entitled to enjoy ourselves?

—I’m saying thank God we have the National Health Service. Because we certainly aren’t helping ourselves.

That was perhaps the discussion. His absurd and unasked for outrage, at what was in his perspective: my ungratefulness towards my country. I had never questioned it once. I had never even let it be of concern, you don’t questions your patriotism, you either have it or you don’t. We spoke from different worlds, a world which he has much to learn, and his words were all his father’s. I could feel them, the repetition of his worlds, the out of context statements he used, the irrational arguments he proposed. I was talking to his father’s generation, and talking to him was like talking to a puppet, and I know of no other young man more their father’s son.

—But we must also have low brow culture, decadence and even the sleaze, he says. Otherwise it would make people sick, for not being able to express how they feel.

—Sick?

—Yes, sick with a lack of expression, he replies. High culture is not strictly higher living. You need all of it.

—Okay, I agree with that, I said, having understood his argument. But we have too much of one and too little of another. And too much of the wrong kind.

—Heh! Elitist.

—For what? For saying good things are better than bad things? No, there must always be an authority that directs to right and good things, without authority there is no respect.

What irritated me most of all, was that it was not an argument nor a discussion at all. I simply made a statement which was of no one’s concern other than my own, which he attempted to topple, foolishly attempting, without reason. So I felt no reason to explain nor defend my statement. What’s said was said. They were the words that I could only could have repeated. And the only effort on my part was to try to hold back any further statements that would spur this continued and pointless chatter.

—I didn’t realize you were a fascist, he says.

—Well that proves it then! I said. Orwell was right.

—What?

—Well, who isn’t a fascist? If fascism is the discouragement of a nihilistic form of decadence, and the encouragement of good and high things over low, I say with a slap to my left arm, sow me a badge.

—What happened to you, Zylitol?

Without acknowledging his question I continue my remark.

—It’s quite simple, I say. If you give people low brow culture, they’ll become low brow people.

But his words said so much about who he is, and I knew that they spoke so greatly of his relations and those around him, that they are all contained under this one belief system, and simply because there were many who believed it, and because those beliefs were embedded in to our very way of living, they believed it was right.

—I think you should go, he says.

—Ah, but we were just starting to have fun.

—Now, please.

—You know, I say standing to leave, a problem with you, Masur, is what you know is just vocabulary.

Or rather, my reader, these were the things I had wanted to say, but felt I could not, as I am not this person known to Masur. And so instead, feeling as one sometimes does when they have shared others company and felt there were things they had wished to say, I chosen to replay the episode to my own imagining.

After replaying the short evening at Masur’s over in my head, and recalling some of his remarks, I began to laugh with myself, having now the liberty to do so. And feeling myself more at ease in my own apartment, I began to laugh wildly. And laughing so wildly and talking aloud with such wild temper that the neighbours must surely have left their rooms and come to the door to hear. My reader, every time I read a scathing remark about our nation, our soft-spirited nation, I laugh in an outburst of mad joy. That it was not only me who felt such intense things. And that there were others who said it best in numerous ways, to speak of something foul and to cause a reaction of something wonderful. Our land, not of gentle men, but of gentle spirits. These remarks I leave to the wind, my unknown reader, but the pleasure I keep with me. I hold on to it, as it soothes my muscles. Vasta says ___________ and Vihta says __________, these lines which have kept me laughing for days on end. A private joke amongst dead branches. And my neighbours, they must surely cease their chatter, on hearing this wild laughter, and raise their ears to walls and over hedges. Yes, it is correct, their ears speak, it is mad laughter, coming from that child—For in their minds I perhaps am a child—And they wonder what on earth has provoked such an obscene sense of pleasure. But this is also my reason for laughter; it paints my picture beautifully. I am laughing for having seen and felt what I had known to have been there to see and to feel. Yet, they only see me, laughing, and only question with ears what have I heard. Not piercing through our soil and leaves to have seen what I have seen, what my Vihta and my Vasta have known to be. Nor have stretched out their branches to have felt what I have felt—but Vasta said it in his famous, all too famous lines: what is great is for the few.

And having enjoyed laughing like this, I felt a melancholy that I was unable to say these things in pubic, and only released them in solitude.

Where are you, conscience, when I am in public spheres? Why do you not roar and cackle as I would have you do? Is it because, lonely sun, you would not have another to share your brightness, but only rocks and vapours?

But my thoughts were again distracted by the sounds of voices at the base of my window, I stood up from my writing desk and walked over to the window to see what the noise was. There I saw beneath, at the grounds of the apartment, a small collection of people who seemed amused at the arrival of a young man who was approaching from the west. The young man’s name was Chrysolepsis. He is older than myself and I expect everybody knows him, or of him, one way or another. His name was never spoken without praise, or flattery, and on every young woman’s lips his graces were spoken with an adoring tone, and on every young man’s his achievements were spoken with such admiration it was easy to believe he was each their closest friend. The crowd, on seeing him, turned to each other excitedly in the expectation of his presence and made an effort to make themselves appear either more casual or more attractive; the boys turning from cheerful smiles to wincing as if in the duration a moment the world had become an enduring weight; the girls looking away from him as though trying to picture something or place themselves in a scene that left them calm, where those emotions could be revived, wearing a look that suggested nothing troubled them and simple to speak with them was to experience a rare delight. All this while Chrysolepsis continued to stroll along the pavement towards them. And on arriving, without making a gesture, they were all unable to conceal their smiles and each greeting him in their own way, some enthusiastically, some too shy to say much at all. Yet after Chrysolepsis wandered on, having I suppose not ever intending to stay, they all went back to talking amongst themselves, slightly distracted from what they said, as though dizzy from a quick passing with this renowned young man, whilst Chryoslepsis walked on in his direction, noticeably raising his head a little higher than when he arrived.

And shaking my head, not without smiling, I thought how funny it is to live in this apartment of a thousand eyes where Pheme may still blow her trumpet, and I turned away from the window and went back to my desk.