Quinx by Lawrence Durrell

Author:Lawrence Durrell [Durrell, Lawrence]
Language: spa
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788401412950
Google: cRoyPAAACAAJ
Publisher: Plaza & Janés
Published: 1996-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIVE

The Falling Leaves, Inklings

THE GIPSIES KNEW OF THE TEMPLAR TREASURE, EVEN to its location! The knowledge came from Egypt – landscapes of cork oaks ravaged by yellow ants. Honeysuckle grown clear into trees as if it had had a mad desire to perfume the sky. Desert cobras conferring kinghood, smiles like a breath over embers. Tawny dunes, rock doves, hoopoes. The Bedouin shared their love of gold ornaments, the spoil of rifled tombs, sold to the Templars! Lapis lazuli, amethyst, alabaster, tiger’s eye, turquoise from the workings in Sinai, mummia!

Notes scattered to the winds of old Provence. Reality is what is completely contemporaneous to itself: we are not completely in it while we still breathe but we yearn to be – hence poetry!

Sutcliffe loquitur. A little tipsy? Yes.

Good writing should pullulate with ambiguities.

Whose dead body buzzing with flies?

The dimensions are four but the aggregates five;

Open-ended reality coming alive!

Questions concerning the individual’s rights in the matter of buried treasure occupied the waking thoughts of Lord Galen for many weeks, months, now! He found the ideal man to cope with this ticklish matter – a dark, hooknosed man – nostrils flared: a lawyer who smells the perfume of litigation. He was a Jew from tragic Avignon who had somehow escaped the searches. A Jew is only a Brahmin with a foreskin. Snip. Snip. Snip.

In age of clones and quarks

Bless our radioactive larks

Quinx in her religious quest

Will one day tower up o’er the rest

A star-y-pointed pyramid

To point to where the Grail lies hid

Within the poet’s begging bowl

Last metaphor for the human soul!

Once poems were nuggets of inner time but we have become experts in not listening – experts in not growing up.

Sitting on his balcony in the Camargue Blanford thought: “The past has just finished becoming the present and here I am. I am still here un-dead. But the desert has covered the breathing and the night has covered the best. Everything (look around you) is as natural as it can be. All nature consents to the code of five. (Five wives of Gampopa, five ascetics in the Deer Park, five skandas.)”

Proust, so attentive to history as Time, as chronology, as reminiscence, never seems to ask at what point the limpid noise of the water-clock or the gravity of the sun-dial’s long nose was replaced by clock-time marked by a machine; surely this must have registered the birth of a new type of consciousness? His immortal tick has become our tock.

Blanford sealed up in a poem like a virgin’s womb.

“Subsiding from zenith like an old sand-castle,

The sea-lick washing me away balcony by balcony,

By keep and drawbridge, tower, bastion, ravelin and ramp,

By mote and sannery, and so back to dune soon

And then forever dune prime, and then sand, sand, sand,

The endless and uncountable sand.”

“Eh, Sutcliffe?

“Can’t you understand?

“I am blind sometimes, like old Tiresias,

My eyes are housed in my breasts

This interloping insight is all I have, outwardly

But inwardly whole new kingdoms are there,

Whole new kings and queens unborn,

But alas my eyeballs were scorched out by sea and sand.

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