Lancelot

to.
    Why did you leave twenty years ago? Wasn’t Louisiana good enough for you? Do you think the U.S.A. needs you less than Biafra? I sometimes think that if you’d been around to talk to…
    You are silent. Christ, you don’t know yourself.
    I have to tell you what happened in my own way—so I can know what happened. I won’t know for sure until I say it. And there is only one way I can endure the horrible banality of it: and that is that I sense there is a clue I’ve missed and that you might pick it up.
    It is as if I knew that the clue was buried somewhere in the rubble of Belle Isle and that I have to spend days kicking through the ashes to find it. I couldn’t do that alone. But we could do it.
    A clue to what? To the “mystery” of Belle Isle? No. To hell with that. Belle Isle is gone and I couldn’t care less. If it were intact it would be the last place on earth I’d choose to live. I’d rather live in Brooklyn. As gone with the wind as Tara and as good riddance.
    No, that’s not the mystery. The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time.
    Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes?
    Because there is a clue in the past.
    Start with the present moment. Look out there. A fall afternoon in New Orleans with the peculiar gold light that fills the sky when the first wedge of Canadian cold air slides like a crystal prism under the Gulf steambath. Look at the gold light. It radiates in the crystal and filters down into the same shabby streets with the same neighborhood sounds of housewives switching on their Hoovers, TV, voices through kitchen doorways, the same smell of the Tchoupitoulas docks.
    Consider the past. Imagine a man sitting in Feliciana Parish for twenty years practicing law (yes! “practicing”), playing at being a “moderate” or “liberal” whatever that is, all under the illusion that he was living his life and was not even aware that he was not.
    But something happens. There is a difference. The difference between then and now is that now I’ve been alerted. I am aware of being the tape head. I am aware of this room being a tape head. That is why it is so simple and empty: so I can be aware. As you can see, it consists of nothing but a small empty space with time running through it and a single tiny opening on the world. I’m staying here until I can decide what the tape head is doing and whether I have anything to say about it. It is simply a devourer of time and does it necessarily turn the pure empty future into the shabby past?
    A year ago (was it a year?) I made my two great discoveries: one, Margot’s infidelity; two, my freedom. I can’t tell you why, but the second followed directly upon the first. The moment I knew for a fact that Margot had been fucked by another man, it was as if I had been waked from a twenty-year dream. I was Rip van Winkle rubbing his eyes. In an instant I became sober, alert, watchful. I could act.
    Yet something went wrong. I am glad you are simply listening, looking at me and saying nothing. Because I was afraid you might suggest either that I had done nothing wrong—like the psychologist here: no matter what I tell him, even if I break wind, he gives me the same quick congratulatory look—either that I had done nothing wrong or that I had “sinned”—and I don’t know which is worse. Because it isn’t that. I don’t know what that means. Yet obviously something went wrong, because here I am, in a nuthouse—or is it a prison?—recovering from shock, psychosis, disorientation.
    From a state of freedom and the ability to act (that night I told you about, the world was open! I was free! I could do anything, devise any plan), I now find myself closeted in a single small cell and glad to be here.
    A fox doesn’t crawl into a hole for a year unless he is wounded. But after a while he begins to feel good, pokes his nose out, takes a look around.
    I still have the resolve to make a new life, an absolutely new beginning.