Pipi Longstocking, the Pin-up Girl,
Christ and Other Small Prayers
There he is walking across the desert with his hands-up or falling from the copper heavens, an angel with clipped wings. Mumbling gratuities to the corner grocer, burning at delinquent public ceremonies, fumbling with the genitalia of truth, whispering direction that sounds like broken pride. That is his business, making peace with the enemy, arbitrating between seasons, between the garage mechanic and Rachmaninoff, between the cabals of meaning, giving counsel to Hollywood Moguls and the cigarette girl. He is dapper in his invisible rags, laughing like an old hag, quoting Copernicus, and the philosophers of Rome, leering like a victorious general before dawn. Smiling like a tourist, dancing on the roof of an inner city subway, hanging from overhead bridges where the cities famous dybbuks pass by. There he is in Chinese laundries and the gulag, raising his flag of hope. He says, "I am one of you. I am the weather, I am the country doctor. I am Gina Lollabrigida, the next door neighbour, the Sunday painter with evergreen stockings and a heavenly smile", but we know he is an imposter. We know he is dead, and carries no arms, this poor fiddler and saint from the back country, and so we kill him again and again. He is black, he is yellow, he is a woman. He is Adolph Eichmann and Marie Antoinette and he is there in the adobe classrooms, and with the 5th Brigade sipping martinis, and slipping pennies into the torn cardboard boxes, making eyes at dictators and their fairytale brides. Sticking his tongue out at 12-year old bullies, slapping hands in the cookie jar. He is between the gossip and the real heart, between money and blood. He is in the desert feeding water to the cacti and beasts, numbering the philanthropies of wisdom on his famous scarred hands, drawing plaintive circles and stickmen of Blake's Jerusalem. He is drowning in rivers, following hungry children, throwing candy at the blissful moon, dancing with brooms, comparing notes with Meister Eckhart and Hildegarde of Bingen, peeking out from underneath anthills, witnessing it all, witnessing it all, the knell of desire, the knell of discontent, the knell of every possible explanation, screaming for his favourite Magdalene, screaming the apocalyptic epithets of love. He is passing out flyers at hospital wards, famines and plagues, plying his trade, digging the graves, silencing the clock's tongues. He is with fallen evangelists, between the sagging breasts of Pandora, howling at the foot of the mountain in the dugouts of meaning. He is in the streets hugging old Nazis, straightening the ties of businessmen and priests, who have no idea who he is. Serving yesterday's cold soup and day-old bread to the crowds who have arrived a day too late, one by one looking for the miracle. Sartre with his Nausea and Neitzche searching for a mountain cure.
Hieronymous Bosch with a few of the early less famous Impressionists and the youngster Keats. But he is busy with ticket-stub holders and alcoholics to whom he has promised eternal life. Handing out pamphlets in the restrooms on Hollywood and Vine, in the funeral parlour with the ghost of my mother's stiff hands, with the Viet Cong planting gardens by a river, walking by Dachau and Indochina saying his usual prayer. Standing between Dante and Pipi Longstalking, arguing over the graveyard of puppy love, the slot machines of desire eternally on fire whirling their ever-wheeling eyes, of bananas and moon and suns colliding with human envy. He is there on the plains where caribou once roamed, and by the dungeon where a lover's prayer and a praying mantis wait, by the black veils of widows, among the holy cattails, Hail Marys, swollen vulvas and lullabies. He is praying for the ordinary housewives who accept bribes from the Post Office, for the rich impotent king and slavish aristocratic poor, their cuckold of tongues, in the shadows writing it all down in Proustian detail, He is arguing with the Cosa Nostra and the shoeshine boy. He is in the middle of the fracas, in the ditches where the rivers of blood run dry. He is there with the stonegrinders and ferrymen when the darkness falls and he is there like a rainmaker with candles coaxing mercy from the sky, chanting the same dull chant, dancing the dance that makes the rest of us sick with envy and hate, rhyming the paltry strategies of the otherly. All ears upon us, all eyes waiting for beauty's nihilistic face, 100 million clocks singing their mad tunes, while he waits to be crucified, while the ecstasy of glass-eyed lovers goes on, the 100 million children with swollen bellies, the slaughterhouse frenzy, the churches and the governments and the centuries that were born to be toppled, the feel-good rhythm of the pin-up girl's brushstroked breasts, her lonely poetic stature, as her Mama dances a jig from up on high, and the stars and the planets fall.