Two Men
The first sits on a bar stool outside a city centre supermarket exit. A modest, silent figure, a Muslim, he is straight-backed and holds in front of him a small, soft basket, from which erupts a dazzling plumage of peacock feathers, a spray shocking the monotone mood of the churning street.
To Muslims, the peacock is a cosmic symbol and when it spreads its tail it represents either the whole universe, or the full Moon, or the Sun at its zenith. In the Middle East peacocks are shown on either side of the Tree of Life, symbols of the incorruptibility of the soul and the two-fold nature of the human psyche. A Sufi legend, probably of Persian origin, tells that God created the Spirit in the form of a peacock and showed it in the mirror of the Divine Essence its own image. The peacock was seized with reverential awe and let fall drops of sweat and from these all other beings were created. The peacock’s outspread tail imitates the cosmic deployment of the Spirit.
The second stands, totem, in a derelict structure on one edge of an inner city graveyard. Like the first he wears a beard. His clothes are almost indistinguishable as separate garments. It is as if he is dressed in robes of clay, of fashioned mud. He stands, but his posture suggests the postural equivalent of a low, unending moan. Indeed, he seems to be generating a kind of bass roar, like the sound of a large wave permanently building and never breaking. This sound could come from the impact that a certain kind of enforced being has when it acts like the wave. But his gaze is as precise as diamond.
A young woman passes, as relaxed in her day, her walking moment as she is in the bright dress she wears. He looks at her as if to say, with his eyes, my skin misses your skin. My hands no longer know how to function in relation to another human. They shake and then are too still. My eyes seek out your mouth like something once seen and forever lost.
The age of each, for reasons both shared and different, is unclear. They occupy that indecipherable phase well after youth but before old age when, life riding them hard and for a long time, their span seems to have compacted onto itself, each difficult year weighing more than its mere duration, pressing and moulding them so that their features, bearing evidence of too much endurance, slip out of the calendar’s accumulation into an adjacent frame, where time is deeply etched experience, and the clock ticks incessantly in the constrained circumstances of one’s own hardship more than on a wall, around a wrist or in the corner of a computer screen like this one.
The men who fall away from this life, who are knocked into the verges and ditches by its career and frenzy, begin to resemble the path they have left; rough, cracked, all too vulnerable to sudden weathers, to extremes of ice and scorch. Those who walk on the track and stay upright, the further they make it along, seek to mask the inevitable traces, degrees of the same marking, that such a progress must leave on all who journey. They use things, accounts, modifications to torso and face, as shelter and camouflage from the wind that blows, the blows that wind, until they too finally succumb, and join either the earth, like wood that dissolves in the long, slow currents of soil, or the air, as the messages on tattered prayer flags, in the high, clear mountain passes to the East.
Hypnomart animate! commission © Joe Magee & Alistair Gentry 2001