AUGUST 2002
INNARDS
Peter Livingstone, having failed
at most things, and being unable to cope with the
‘blessed shiver’ of memory, threw his hand to
writing and pounded the keyboard like he pounded the wet
streets of an imagined city, with anger (more false than
real, I mean what was there to be angry about? Too
much food in his belly, too much time to linger, that
kind of thing, but he was, nonetheless, a low-security
prisoner of it all. He could have escaped but too
many anal flutterings enclosed him.). He wrote to
escape the frustrations of his limits and he wrote in the
hope of clawing from his mind the patina of memories that
either distracted him from the hints of happiness that
darted by or corroded what little there was left. He
wrote, fitfully at first, but later with growing panic
like a man alive to an approaching fall. Or so he
said. He wrote from his darkness and from it
stretched a hand. He sought darkness, he read, and
the darker the better. Strange, he read. He
stretched out his hand to feel the texture of nightfall.
The fascination of darkness, the power it had over him,
the way it made him tense and rigid and cling to the
emptiness of a cross or the words of the past.
When the book was finished it was
rejected by all who read it. A number of copies
were printed and he distributed them, desperately,
ashamedly, reluctantly, to friends, to acquaintances, to
people on the periphery of a nodding acquaintance but
whose opinion might sustain him. They were thrown
away, they collected dust, they were recycled, a few
pages were read, what thoughts his friends had he never
knew for they did not say. His mind, shadowed by
the uncertain shapes that whisper to us all, whispered
that they found it pedantic, pretentiousness, poorly
written, poorly masked. He threw away the disk.
A single paper copy remains and it has been used to
absorb the rising damp that issues from a plastered wall.
The rising damp that is warping his books, expanding the
pages, eating the ink, morphing the thing, slowly, into
something else. The dedicatory epigram to his book
was as follows:
‘For Alex Gordiani: who went East and never returned’
it all started not too far from the Marsh
“I
remember”, wrote Livingstone, thinking of Alex,
“when I first sat down to write and furrowed my
forehead so that I might more deeply and clearly think my
way to the east and its paternosters of places. At
that time Dascus Street was dark and grim and that was
about it or at least that is all I can remember not being
able to picture in my mind a single building or a single
moment from being there. But I was there and at
some point in the dimness of my own past passed along its
arteries: Church Street and Hagsted’s Lane. Two
streets that might have served as urinals, (I would not
have done that), or at least, where I’d expect to
find, much to my distaste, a down-and-out clasping a
bottle of cheap Sherry, or a twistcap bottle of Pedrotti,
or pissing with his head down and one hand on the wall as
his body swayed from side to side. Generous spills
of urine sweeping across the wall. To and fro.
An old discarded coat of heavy tweed thread-bare at the
elbows. A grey v-neck jumper, covered with film of
filth and grease. Delicate white veins on the back
of the hand. Startling. Eyes that were now
glazed copies of eyes, not snuffed but suspended in the
glint of fading fears and hunger, eyes embalmed by the
habits of time and the sins of blindness.
Livingstone
had no recollection of being born but wrote himself back
to it so as to free the umbilical knot without doing
himself harm. Pea-green, he wrote, in summer, and
smelling wicked is the river that flows through the City,
separating it in two, before separating into a liquid
tracery of riverlets now tunnelled and channelled beneath
the streets of the city, rising up with the moon-floods,
and by stealth through the earth and wood and stone.
The Venice of the North some drunken sod of a traveller
wrote and Livingstone looked for it everywhere and wrote
down what he remembered or what was told to him. There
is a Famine workhouse behind the height of a limestone
wall, transformed into a hospital, complete with a
maternity wing, a geriatric wing and a clinic for
sexually transmitted diseases. A primordial trinity
in flight named after the holy man, or the name of the
man that held the Marsh for his clan or for his order or
because he believed, at some point, back then when belief
in the Trinity was still a brightness in the eye that
coveted new ways of coveting.
His
aunt, my aunt, disapproved of the place in the same way
that she disapproved of High Street Stores - nothing
wrong with them as such but not for the aspiring. She
was a terrible snob like the best of us, the rest of us,
all of us and it gave her definition. She died
there in the geriatric unit after spending six years at
least in its beds, losing flesh and memory, smelling of
disinfectant and, vaguely, delicately, of urine. She hung
on in. It hung on in her, pulsing through her,
throbbing in her. On and on, ebbs and flows. She
had long forgotten both her name and her past. And she
confused all her nieces. Her name, let’s say,
was Margaret Legge. I never heard her name said
like that but I heard others talk of her, of her temper
and how she slapped a Black and Tan in the face, talk of
her as being a soft touch behind the bar. I
remember her skin was softly wrinkled, flaccid to my lips
when I kissed her cheek at Christmas. She gave each
one of us a box of chocolates. Double Centres. She
gave her sister’s bike away when she, Nell, went to
England to work in the canteen of a comprehensive school.
Nell, it was I knew best. Their sister Mam to
others and Nana to others again. Tears in the wind.
My spellings in Winter. The table set in the morning.
She was kneeling and saying her prayers when I pretended
to be asleep. The three of them have returned to
the earth. To the massive soil through new wounds.
Wash
me in the blood of your wounds went the hymn. And
today, to-night, the song asks when will there be a
harvest for the world? Yes, feeling the strain
and the b*****.
On
that day, the day that intruded upon Livingstone as he
wrote, he woke up because of the fire-crackers, lit in
honour of the Risen Christ, no less. In Italy no
less. A home-coming. The smoke was
everywhere, tiny particles from far off planets,
particles of light, he wrote, but such matters mattered
little to him and hope and light were reduced now to
metaphors that tied his mind to the aridities of
explication rather than the expansion of what he used to
imagine was his soul. The word had been abused and
sullied by its advocates and purveyors. But there
it was, the word, flickering and spluttering and
coughing, collapsing for want of air.
The claw of the past
Meanwhile, here before him, lie the remains. Throwing the bones before him and reading the pattern like tea leaves the story of his father’s life was as you can well imagine. It could all be told over a cup and as you listen you touch the cold metal of the table’s frame and your hand sweats and leaves its faint moisture on the mottled Formica. It will soon evaporate. It might be told over a pint. Somewhere where the T.V echos loud and flickers alone above the noise of the talk of saturated drinkers. It had rained. His life was a story with a forgotten beginning and an end told by others and marked by cards, kindness, fresh sandwiches, incense, turned soil and an imagined turned page.
It’s hazy now. There might well have been a mist that morning. It was April or May, there might have been, would have been birds singing. And there might have been a shower of rain to wash the fields. Livingstone’s father was put aside. They thought him dead, but he twitched and was grabbed and flung over a stout shoulder and slapped on the back and his mouth opened and air rushed in and out with a cry and he was washed of his mother’s body and brought to her. Born in the house amongst women and with the smell of fields, showers, wet dung, the steam from that kettle, blood and the waters and secretions of the body. Born in the country and brought up, as his brother said after his death, brought up hard in religion. In a land that worked him hard, he worked hard and dossed off when he could. Hardness, in the mist. From the soil, then, but not rooted to it; he went to the States, selling newspapers on the street corner not far from Times Square, cooking fry-ups in Florida, walking the second floor in Woolworths of San Francisco, a fighter pilot in the Korean War. That’s where you got the scar on your neck – a stray bullet, burst tonsils treated with iodine when you were a lad. In the sixties he worked near Tremont Street in Boston with its buildings on one side and the Common on the other and on the hill the golden leafed dome of the Statehouse by Beacon Hill where the blacks were in the 60’s where the Afro-American museum is now surrounded by the red-bricked houses and ersatz gas lamp fixtures with their electric light casting light on the tourist brochures filled with clichés and read by the lost. Did he eye the curve of a breast, did he put words to the canker of his anger?
Peter Livingstone spent Sunday mornings weeding the graves of others now passed away to a better world. The old Cistercian monk in the mountains drew weeds from the graves of his brothers in preparation. He was ready to go. He had burnt his arm lifting a pot of boiling water, he lifted it up and it tipped over, full it was; a lick of scalding water burnt its trace along his arm. It was a chalice of sorts. What was his name?
Where is the passion? I am
wondering where is the body, the remains that I hid and
what is it called? Is it there beneath the tree where we
ran naked and your flesh was so chubbysofthard and I
wanted to run away with you to Galway and then the others
told Mum that we took our clothes off for fun and so on
and so on in La Mancha.
Let’s go. You needed the anchor in the safe place for ships. A mother of harbours. Legend has it that it 1294 the house of the Virgin Mary (Santa Casa) miraculously uprooted itself from the Holy Land and was brought by angels to a laurel grove (loreto) south of Ancona. Each year three million pilgrims visit the Santa Casa, in Loreto and its Basilica. Begun in 1468, the basilica was designed and built in part by Renaissance architects Bramante, Sansovino and Giuliano da Sangallo.
It
was the nurturing place. Let’s go. One day I was
young and Joey Browne said ‘how do you 
know that chair exists?’
and I couldn’t answer him and still can’t.
He said that when he was eight. A clever little
fart… And one day I said ‘I adore
choc-ices’ and he said ‘You should only adore
God. That’s a commandment’ The little
shite he laid that on me then and stopped going to mass
when he was a cool 13 year old. He may well fry in
hell.
That
smell of smoke. That smell of smoke. The
sound of a pigeon in the morning.
And
this morning it is time to look at the skull under a pale
light. She sat there waiting. She sat there
waiting for me to go or to move closer? Should I
have left or stayed and rutted? I left – and
the tension of lust’s unclosed ring, that space
between finger-tips, remains. I turn around and
look when everything says not to. Not now, not with
the … But that’s all crap I suppose. Beckoning
crap towards that site of reckoning, that great shithole.
It flows on carrying me beyond the final line.
‘When
I left our flat in Boston on a wet morning, Oct 5th
1961 we cried. And then I pushed her to the very
edge of my mind because it was there, pressed against the
contours of forgotten memories that I thought I could
squeeze her into a shape of my making.’ He
said this one night to help me understand. ‘I
left her and her ghost remained appearing everywhere.
Making me angry’. ‘I turned to politics
as the economy raised the boats in the late
sixties’. A new generation. Freed, we
thought, from the nets of history. Instead, they
went fishing for whatever the sea and land could offer.
Eventually we lost ourselves in music, in the end of a
glass, in a haze of smoke whether incense or gange.
‘Give
it fong’. These words go over in my mind all
the time. They are part of the knot. They
came from the west. Came east from the west. A
fong, a leather crop spurring. He ended up in the
Blackwater. Another shot himself with a shotgun.
Why? Why these knots we slash? Letting it
flow. Backwater awhile maybe. The first is
***** and I will never forget the way he slapped me on
the back, his collection of biographies, his Opel, his
Dylan tapes, his voice, his past, his passion for
language and kids, the last time I saw him and muttered
about all the work to be done. And the second is
**** ***** and I will never forget the torn Christmas
card, the hip-flask, the sports jacket, the cigar, the
home-brew, the army-cut, the chocolate cake, his hardness
and softness, his take on the world.
I
had a teacher in primary school who was young. We
were all mad about him. He was great fun. He
played the guitar, played and sang the Little White
Bull (or was it Black?) He had a terrible temper,
like my mother, like my father. He used to call us
up to the top of the class if we got too giddy with talk
and hit us with a stick on the tips of our fingers.
I remember in my first year of school a Christian Brother
who used to hit out with a leather tong. He was
replaced by a beautiful blond French woman (but that
seems too improbable). She was replaced by a kindly
Brother who used to swing a little wooden stool over his
head. All that in the first year. And writing
this makes me queasy. All that anger, all vented,
the body’s contortions, the body’s pockets of
tension and frustration making shapes and hitting out.
All these knots moving down the generations, shaping our
response to the world through sticks and stilettos,
anything that came to hand the same hands that cradled
the new-born with a sigh of lost hope and masturbated
with sighs of guilt, relief and a note of redemption.
It
was a great night. Alex Gordiani appeared on the
Late Late Show on the first show of the new season in
1989 and revealed his real name in response to a fawning
question put to him by our host Gay Byrne. Later he
told Livingstone that it was that night that he felt
complete, that everything made sense as he recounted his
life to Gay. He began to believe it all himself.
Alex Gordiani’s story made sense. He stepped
back and admired Alex, as did the audience, as did Gay.
He had set the timer and was taping the show to view
himself and see himself and boy did he love Alex
Gordiani. Revealing his real name, however, was a
mistake. Understanding Gordiani was one thing but
who the fuck was Paddy Looney and his story of having
dreamt of an orgy involving Charlie Haughey, Margaret
Thatcher and assorted Lord Mayors from Cork doing strange
things with hurleys and fresh pasta warm and wet from the
pot?
Paddy Looney had never, it seems,
recovered from his trip to India where lust had arisen
and taken a shape and was named from memory’s bag of
tricks.