Ma Kilman's Bar

I cannot see the island's geography as clearly as I can Ma Kilman's bar: NO PAIN CAFÉ ALL WELCOME, with its wrinkled paint, bead curtain and neon sign endorsing Coco-Cola. Blind Monsieur Seven Seas sitting on a crate outside speaking in old African babble to his sharp-eared dog; shifting as the day ages his box to the shade. Philoctete, a wounded fisherman with foam-white hair, in the rumshop window staring out to sea, periodically anointing his itching, tingling shin with ice or Vaseline.

Picture credit: West Indies Divers, 1899, Winslow Homer (source: WikiArt).

See Omeros by Derek Walcott. 

Written June 2022.

Jigsaw

The sleep of reason (war), the reptilian brain awakened. Peacetime, innocence restored; all is possible, life is trivial. Imbued with meaning or seeming meaningless; saturated with or depleted of experience. Any significance acquires in time, with second thoughts and afterthoughts, rehearsed, then executed. Tiny pieces of a jigsaw puzzle collected then assembled to perfection.

Picture credit: The Tower of Babel after Pieter Brueghel, (Gordian Puzzles), 2007, Vik Muniz (source: WikiArt).

From Journal, May 2022.

While Reading Pushkin

A single sentence, a short paragraph, an economy of words, disciplined prose, and imagination triumphs over my own reality. Fiction and history blended together, towered over by Pushkin's figure.
I see Russia, as does Ibrahim, the Tsar's negro, as 'one huge work-room where only machines were moving and every worker was occupied with his job in accordance with a fixed plan'; and wonder if under Putin it is the same?
I see a ball-room, ladies and gentlemen in two rows, curtseying or bowing low repeatedly to each other to the strains of melancholy music, and Korsakov, fresh from Paris, wide-eyed and biting his lip at this 'peculiar way of passing the time'; and then flouting the rules of Russian etiquette humiliated and forced to drain the Goblet – filled with malmsey wine – of the Great Eagle; and wonder if that scene was as entertaining to write as it was to read?
I see Kiril Petrovich Troyekurov's kennels with over five hundred hounds – though that number seems inconceivable somehow – and hear them 'singing their praises in their canine tongue'; and wonder, though it's wrong, if the Russian military do the same – whine and lick Putin's hand?
A pause...and then my imagination is struck again.
I see a cat saved from a blaze; officials trapped inside, the roof falling in, their screams stopped. Nothing but charred remains.
I see a daughter with the run of her father's extensive library, choosing which French writer of the eighteenth century to read; and wonder about her father's favourite the Perfect Cook – what sort of book was it?
I see dispossessed officer Dubrovsky's pact in the post-master's house with the French tutor; see his transformation from officer to brigand to teacher to brigand again; and wonder if it's true that we always miss what's right before our eyes?
I see the Volga with loaded barges floating on it, and 'little fishing-boats, so aptly called smacks', flashing here and there, and the hills and fields and small villages stretching beyond it; and wonder if those with such a landscape as a view know how fortunate they are?
I see many-coloured lights flare up, whirl about, and fall in 'showers of rain and stars'; and am, like Maria Kirilovna, 'carried away like a child.'
I see, from a distance, an airy shadow approach a trysting-place and meet a bolder shadow, and then, some time later, one disappear among the trees.
Time flies...lost in a dream.
I see a red-haired boy stealing a ring from a hollow oak, and caught see him dragged to and locked in a pigeon-loft with an old poultry woman as his watch, and then brought before the police-captain; and wonder how it feels to be a prisoner, for your fate to be decided?
I see a pistol drawn, one that wounds, one that threatens; and consider how a moment can change everything.
I see two winning cards, three, seven; and wonder nervously, unlike Hermann, if the third will be...? Three, seven....
These idle thoughts, sensations, escape me while reading Pushkin.

Picture credit: Pushkin at the Mikhailovsky, Pyotr Konchalovsky (source: WikiArt).

See The Queen of Spades and Other Stories by Alexander Pushkin (Penguin Classics, translation and footnotes by Rosemary Edmonds). 

Written 9-10^th May 2022.