M&D: Christmas/Evensong in Gravity's Rainbow

[Smoke Teff]

Note P's attention to innocence, redemption (or lack). Also--threads of
material/textural continuity. Smoke. Recycled metal--memory and forgetting.
Some of these things are worth remembering in considering M&D's Advent
opening...

Nostalgia. The long for some kind of return, even to some innocence you
never actually knew to begin with.



Near her battery one night, driving Somewhere in Kent, Roger and Jessica
came upon a church, a hummock in the dark upland, lamp-lit, growing out of
the earth. It was Sunday evening, and shortly before vespers. Men in
greatcoats, in oilskins, in dark berets they slipped off at the entrance,
American fliers in leather lined with sheep's wool, a few women in clinking
boots and wide-shouldered swagger coats, but no children, not a child in
sight, just grownups, trudging in from their bomber fields,
balloon-bivouacs, pillboxes over the beach, through the Norman doorway
shaggy with wintering vines. Jessica said, "Oh, I remember ..." but didn't
go on. She was remembering other Advents, and hedges snowy as sheep from
her window, and the Star ready to be pasted up on the sky again. Roger
pulled over, and they watched the scuffed and dun military going in to
evensong. The wind smelled of fresh snow. "We ought to be home," she said,
after a bit, "it's late." "We could just pop in here for a moment." Well, *that
*surprised her, but def, after weeks of his snide comments? His
unbeliever's annoyance with the others in Psi Section he thought were out
to drive him dotty as they were, and his Scroogery growing as shopping days
till Xmas dwindled—"You're not supposed to be the sort," she told him. But
she did want to go in, nostalgia was heavy in tonight's snow-sky, her own
voice ready to betray her and run to join the waits whose carols we're so
apt to hear now in the distances, these days of Advent dropping one by one,
voices piping across frozen downs where the sown mines crowd thick as plums
in a pudding . . . often above sounds of melting snow, winds that must blow
not through Christmas air but through the substance of time would bring her
those child-voices, singing for sixpences, and if her heart wasn't ready to
take on quite all the stresses of her mortality and theirs, at least there
was the fear that she was beginning to lose them—that one winter she would
go running to look, out to the gate to find them, run as far as the trees
but in vain, their voices fading. . . . They walked through the tracks of
all the others in the snow, she gravely on his arm, wind blowing her hair
to snarls, heels slipping once on ice. "To hear the music," he explained.

Tonight's scratch choir was all male, epauletted shoulders visible under
the wide necks of the white robes, and many faces nearly as white with the
exhaustion of soaked and muddy fields, midwatches, cables strummed by the
nervous balloons sunfishing in the clouds, tents whose lights inside shone
nuclear at twilight, soullike, through the crosshatched walls, turning
canvas to fine gauze, while the wind drummed there. Yet there was one black
face, the counter-tenor, a Jamaican corporal, taken from his warm island to
this—from singing his childhood along the rum-smoky saloons of High Holborn
Street where the sailors throw mammoth red firecrackers, quarter of a stick
of dynamite man, over the swinging doors and run across the street
giggling, or come walking out with high-skirted girls, girls of the island,
Chinese and French girls . . . lemon peels crushed in the gutters of the
streets scented the early mornings where he used to sing, O have you seen
my darlin' Lola, with a shape like a bottle of Coca-Cola, sailors running
up and down in the brown shadows of alleys,

flapping at neckerchief and pants-leg, and the girls whispering together
and laughing . . . each morning he counted out half a pocket full of coins
of all nations. From palmy Kingston, the intricate needs of the
Anglo-American Empire (1939-1945) had brought him to this cold fieldmouse
church, nearly in earshot of a northern sea he'd hardly glimpsed in
crossing, to a compline service, a program tonight of plainsong in English,
forays now and then into polyphony: Thomas Tallis, Henry Purcell, even a
German macaronic from the fifteenth century, attributed to Heinrich Suso: *In
dulci ubilo *Nun singet und seid froh! Unsers Herzens Wonne Leit in *praesipio,
*Leuchtet vor die Sonne *Matris in gremio. Alpha es et O. *With the high
voice of the black man riding above the others, no head falsetto here but
complete, out of the honest breast, a baritone voice brought over years of
woodshedding up to this range ... he was bringing brown girls to sashay
among these nervous Protestants, down the ancient paths the music had set,
Big and Little Anita, Stiletto May, Plongette who loves it between her tits
and will do it that way for free—not to mention the Latin, the *German? *in
an English church? These are not heresies so much as imperial outcomes,
necessary as the black man's presence, from acts of minor surrealism—which,
taken in the mass, are an act of suicide, but which in its pathology, in
its dreamless version of the real, the Empire commits by the thousands
every day, completely unaware of what it's doing. ... So the pure
countertenor voice was soaring, finding its way in to buoy Jessica's heart
and even Roger's she guessed, risking glances at his face sideways and up
through brown ghosts of her hair, during recitatives or releases. He wasn't
looking nihilistic, not even cheaply so. He was . . .

No, Jessica's never seen his face exactly like this, in the light of a few
hanging oil lamps, the flames unguttering and very yellow, on the nearest
the verger's two long fingerprints in fine, pollen V-for-victory up around
the belly of the glass, Roger's skin more child-pink, his eyes more glowing
than the lamplight alone can account for—isn't it? or is that how she wants
it to be? The church is as cold as the night outside. There's the smell of
damp wool, of bitter on the breaths of these professionals, of candle smoke
and melting wax, of smothered farting, of hair tonic, of the burning oil
itself, folding the other odors in a maternal way, more closely belonging
to Earth, to deep strata, other times, and listen . . . listen: this is the
War's evensong, the War's canonical hour, and the night is real. Black
greatcoats crowd together, empty hoods full of dense, church-interior
shadows. Over on the coast the Wrens work late, down inside cold and gutted
shells, their blue torches are newborn stars in the tidal evening.
Hullplates swing in the sky, like great iron leaves, on cables that creak
in splinters of sound. At ease, on standby, the flames of the torches,
softened, fill the round glass faces of the gauges with apricot light. In
the pipefitters' sheds, icicled, rattling when the gales are in the
Straits, here's thousands of old used toothpaste tubes, heaped often to the
ceilings, thousands of somber man-mornings made tolerable, transformed to
mint fumes and bleak song that left white spots across the quicksilver
mirrors from Harrow to Gravesend, thousands of children who pestled foam up

out of soft mortars of mouths, who lost easily a thousand times as many
words among the chalky bubbles—bed-going complaints, timid announcements of
love, news of fat or translucent, fuzzy or gentle beings from the country
under the counterpane—uncounted soapy-liquorice moments spat and flushed
down to sewers and the slow-scumming gray estuary, the morning mouths
growing with the day tobacco and fish-furred, dry with fear, foul with
idleness, flooded at thoughts of impossible meals, settling instead for the
week's offal in gland pies, Household Milk, broken biscuits at half the
usual points, and isn't menthol a marvelous invention to take just enough
of it away each morning, down to become dusty oversize bubbles tessellating
tough and stagnant among the tar shorelines, the intricate draftsmanship of
outlets feeding, multiplying out to sea, as one by one these old tooth-
paste tubes are emptied and returned to the War, heaps of dimly fragrant
metal, phantoms of peppermint in the winter shacks, each tube wrinkled or
embossed by the unconscious hands of London, written over in
interference-patterns, hand against hand, waiting now—it is true return—to
be melted for solder, for plate, alloyed for castings, bearings, gasketry,
hidden smokeshriek linings the children of that other domestic incarnation
will never see. Yet the continuity, flesh to kindred metals, home to
hedgeless sea, has persisted. It is not death that separates these
incarnations, but paper: paper specialties, paper routines. The War, the
Empire, will expedite such barriers between our lives. The War needs to
divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress
unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a
folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein
Volk ein Führer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but
a complexity.... Yet who can presume to say *what *the War wants, so vast
and aloof is it... so *absentee. *Perhaps the War isn't even an
awareness—not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel,
accidental resemblance to life. At "The White Visitation" there's a
longtime schiz, you know, who believes that *he *is World War II. He gets
no newspapers, refuses to listen to the wireless, but still, the day of the
Normandy invasion somehow his temperature shot up to 104°. Now, as the
pincers east and west continue their slow reflex contraction, he speaks of
darkness invading his mind, of an attrition of self. . . . The Rundstedt
offensive perked him up though, gave him a new lease on life—"A beautiful
Christmas gift," he confessed to the resident on his ward, "it's the season
of birth, of fresh beginnings." Whenever the rockets fall—those which are
audible—he smiles, turns out to pace the ward, tears about to splash from
the corners of his merry eyes, caught up in a ruddy high tonicity that
can't help cheering his fellow patients. His days are numbered. He's to die
on V-E Day. If he's not in fact the War then he's its child-surrogate,
living high for a certain term but come the ceremonial day, look out. The
true king only dies a mock death. Remember. Any number of young men may be
selected to die in his place while the real king, foxy old bastard, goes
on. Will he show up under the Star, slyly genuflecting with the other kings
as this winter solstice draws on us? Bring to the serai gifts of tungsten,
cordite, high-octane? Will the child gaze up from his ground of golden
straw then, gaze into the eyes of the old king who bends long and unfurling
overhead, leans to proffer his gift, will the eyes meet, and what message,
what possible greeting or entente will flow between the king and the infant
prince? Is the baby smiling, or is it just gas? Which do you want it to be?

Advent blows from the sea, which at sunset tonight shone green and smooth
as iron-rich glass: blows daily upon us, all the sky above pregnant with
saints and slender heralds' trumpets. Another year of wedding dresses
abandoned in the heart of winter, never called for, hanging in quiet satin
ranks now, their white-crumpled veils begun to yellow, rippling slightly
only at your passing, spectator . . . visitor to the city at all the dead
ends. . . . Glimpsing in the gowns your own reflection once or twice,
halfway from shadow, only blurred flesh-colors across the peau de soie,
urging you in to where you can smell the mildew's first horrible touch,
which was really the idea—covering all trace of her own smell, middleclass
bride-to-be perspiring, genteel soap and powder. But virgin in her heart,
in her hopes. None of your bright-Swiss or crystalline sea son here, but
darkly billowed in the day with cloud and the snow falling like gowns in
the country, gowns of the winter, gentle at night, a nearly windless
breathing around you. In the stations of the city the prisoners are back
from Indo-China, wandering their poor visible bones, light as dreamers or
men on the moon, among chrome-sprung prams of black hide resonant as
drumheads, blonde wood high-chairs pink and blue with scraped and
mush-spattered floral decals, folding-cots and bears with red felt tongues,
baby-blankets making bright pastel clouds in the coal and steam smells, the
metal spaces, among the queued, the drifting, the warily asleep, come by
their hundreds in for the holidays, despite the warnings, the gravity of
Mr. Morrison, the tube under the river a German rocket may pierce now, even
now as the words are set down, the absences that may be waiting them, the
city addresses that surely can no longer exist. The eyes from Burma, from
Tonkin, watch these women at their hundred perseverances—stare out of blued
orbits, through headaches no Alasils can ease. Italian P/Ws curse
underneath the mail sacks that are puffing, echo-clanking in now each hour,
in seasonal swell, clogging the snowy trainloads like mushrooms, as if the
trains have been all night underground, passing through the country of the
dead. If these Eyeties sing now and then you can bet it's not "Giovinezza"
but something probably from *Rigoletto *or *La Bohême*— indeed the Post
Office is considering issuing a list of Nonacceptable Songs, with ukulele
chords as an aid to ready identification. Their cheer and songfulness, this
lot, is genuine up to a point—but as the days pile up, as this orgy of
Christmas greeting grows daily beyond healthy limits, with no containment
in sight before Boxing Day, they settle, themselves, for being more
professionally Italian, rolling the odd eye at the lady evacuees, finding
techniques of balancing the sack

with one hand whilst the other goes playing "dead"—*doe, *conditionally
alive—where the crowds thicken most feminine, directionless . . . well,
most promising. Life has to go on. Both kinds of prisoner recognize that,
but there's no *memo mono *for the Englishmen back from CBI, no leap from
dead to living at mere permission from a likely haunch or thigh—no *play, *for
God's sake, about life-and-death! They want no more adventures: only the
old dutch fussing over the old stove or warming the old bed, cricketers in
the wintertime, they want the semi-detached Sunday dead-leaf somnolence of
a dried garden. If the brave new world should also come about, a kind of
windfall, why there'll be time to adjust certainly to that.. . . But they
want the nearly postwar luxury this week of buying an electric train set
for the kid, trying that way each to light his own set of sleek little
faces here, calibrating his strangeness, well-known photographs all,
brought to life now, oohs and aahs but not yet, not here in the station,
any of the moves most necessary:

the War has shunted them, earthed them, those heedless destroying
signalings of love. The children have unfolded last year's toys and found
reincarnated Spam tins, they're hep this may be the other and, who knows,
unavoidable side to the Christmas game. In the months between—country
springs and summers—they played with real Spam tins—tanks, tank-destroyers,
pillboxes, dreadnoughts deploying meat-pink, yellow and blue about the
dusty floors of lumber-rooms or butteries, under the cots or couches of
their exile. Now it's time again. The plaster baby, the oxen frosted with
gold leaf and the human-eyed sheep are turning real again, paint quickens
to flesh. To believe is not a price they pay—it happens all by itself. He
is the New Baby. On the magic night before, the animals will talk, and the
sky will be milk. The grandparents, who've waited each week for the Radio
Doctor asking, What Are Piles? What Is Emphysema? What Is A Heart Attack?
will wait up beyond insomnia, watching again for the yearly impossible not
to occur, but with some mean residue—this *is *the hillside, the sky *can *show
us a light—like a thrill, a good time you wanted too much, not a complete
loss but still too far short of a miracle . . . keeping their sweatered and
shawled vigils, theatrically bitter, but with the residue inside going
through a new winter fermentation every year, each time a bit less, but
always good for a revival at this season. . .. All but naked now, the shiny
suits and gowns of their pubcrawling primes long torn to strips for lagging
the hot-water pipes and heaters of landlords, strangers, for holding the
houses' identities against the winter. The War needs coal. They have taken
the next-to-last steps, attended the Radio Doctor's certifications of what

they knew in their bodies, and at Christmas they are naked as geese under
this woolen, murky, cheap old-people's swaddling. Their electric clocks run
fast, even Big Ben will be fast now until the new spring's run in, all
fast, and no one else seems to understand or to care. The War needs
electricity. It's a lively game, Electric Monopoly, among the power
companies, the Central Electricity Board, and other War agencies, to keep
Grid Time synchronized with Greenwich Mean Time. In the night, the deepest
concrete wells of night, dynamos whose locations are classified spin
faster, and so, responding, the clock-hands next to all the old, sleepless
eyes—gathering in their minutes whining, pitching higher toward the vertigo
of a siren. It is the Night's Mad Carnival. There is merriment under the
shadows of the minute-hands. Hysteria in the pale faces between the
numerals. The power companies speak of loads, war-drains so vast the clocks
will slow again unless this nighttime march is stolen, but the loads
expected daily do not occur, and the Grid runs inching ever faster, and the
old faces turn to the clock faces, thinking *plot, *and the numbers go
whirling toward the Nativity, a violence, a nova of heart that will turn us
all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are. But over
the sea the fog tonight still is quietly scalloped pearl. Up in the city
the arc-lamps crackle, furious, in smothered blaze up the center-lines of
the streets, too ice-colored for candles, too chill-dropleted for
holocaust. . . the tall red busses sway, all the headlamps by regulation
newly unmasked now parry, cross, traverse and blind, torn great fist-fuls
of wetness blow by, desolate as the beaches beneath the nacre fog, whose
barbed wire that never knew the inward sting of current, that only lay
passive, oxidizing in the night, now weaves like underwater grass, looped,
bitter cold, sharp as the scorpion, all the printless sand miles past
cruisers abandoned in the last summers of peacetime that once holidayed the
old world away, wine and olive-grove and pipe-smoke evenings away the other
side of the War, stripped now to rust axles and brackets and smelling
inside of the same brine as this beach you cannot really walk, because of
the War. Up

across the downs, past the spotlights where the migrant birds in autumn
choked the beams night after night, fatally held till they dropped
exhausted out of the sky, a shower of dead birds, the compline worshipers
sit in the un-heated church, shivering, voiceless as the choir asks: where
are the joys? Where else but there where the Angels sing new songs and the
bells ring out in the court of the King. *Eia*—strange thousand-year sigh—*eia,
warn wir da! *were we but there. . . . The tired men and their black
bellwether reaching as far as they can, as far from their sheeps' clothing
as the year will let them stray. Come then. Leave your war awhile, paper or
iron war, petrol or flesh, come in with your love, your fear of losing,
your exhaustion with it. All day it's been at you, coercing, jiving,
claiming your belief in so much that isn't true. Is that who you are, that
vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government
camera as the guillotine shutter fell—or maybe just left behind with your
heart, at the Stage Door Canteen, where they're counting the night's take,
the NAAFI girls, the girls named Eileen, carefully sorting into
refrigerated compartments the rubbery maroon organs with their yellow
garnishes of fat—oh Linda come here feel this one, put your finger down in
the ventricle here, isn't it swoony, it's still *going. . . . *Everybody
you don't suspect is in on this, everybody but you: the chaplain, the
doctor, your mother hoping to hang that Gold Star, the vapid soprano last
night on the Home Service programme, let's not forget Mr. Noel Coward so
stylish and cute about death and the afterlife, packing them into the
Duchess for the fourth year running, the lads in Hollywood telling us how
grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney causing Dumbo the
elephant to clutch to that feather like how many carcasses under the snow
tonight among the white-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen around a
Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn bone, half-dollar with the grinning
sun peering up under Liberty's wispy gown, clutching, dumb, when the 88
fell—what do you think, it's a children's story? There aren't any. The
children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it's
Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the lamps burning
deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot.
And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black
North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in
helpless plunge to Earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too,
roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It's a long walk
home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at
least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes,
your exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been evensong here long
before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad
as this one—something to raise the possibility of another night that could
actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the
Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our
stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving

only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too
frail, there's too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir
heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another
Messiah, and sure somebody's around already taking bets on that one, while
here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful gossip to
Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the foreskinned
invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just like the
innkeepers who're naturally delighted with this registration thing, and up
in the capital they're wondering should they, maybe, give everybody a *number,
*yeah, something to help SPQR Record-keeping . . .

and Herod or Hitler, fellas (the chaplains out in the Bulge are manly,
haggard, hard drinkers), what kind of a world is it ("You forgot Roosevelt,
padre," come the voices from the back, the good father can never see them,
they harass him, these tempters, even into his dreams: "Wendell Willkie!"
"How about Churchill?" " 'Any Pollitt!") for a baby to come in tippin'
those Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin' he's gonna redeem it, why, he
oughta have his head examined. . . . But on the way home tonight, you wish
you'd picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your
heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it
were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you're
supposed to be registered as. For the moment anyway, no longer who the
Caesars say you are. *O Jesu parvule, *Nach dir ist mir so weh . . . So
this pickup group, these exiles and horny kids, sullen civilians called up
in their middle age, men fattening despite their hunger, flatulent because
of it, pre-ulcerous, hoarse, runny-nosed, red-eyed, sore-throated,
piss-swollen men suffering from acute lower backs and all-day hangovers,
wishing death on officers they truly hate, men you have seen on foot and
smileless in the cities but forgot, men who don't remember you either,
knowing they ought to be grabbing a little sleep, not out here performing
for strangers, give you this evensong, climaxing now with its rising
fragment of some ancient scale, voices overlapping three- and fourfold, up,
echoing, filling the entire hollow of the church—no counterfeit baby, no
announcement of the Kingdom, not even a try at warming or lighting this
terrible night, only, damn us, our scruffy obligatory little cry, our
maximum reach outward—*praise be to God!*—for you to take back to your
war-address, your war- identity, across the snow's footprints and tire
tracks finally to the path you must create by yourself, alone in the dark.
Whether you want it or not, whatever seas you have crossed, the way home. .
. .
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