XXXIV.
I want to go back to before I was born. I want to
see the face I had before I was conceived
by modern science and so I choose not the Roxy where I have hung
suspended between
birth and my first experiments the tentative movements about my cage
my first mewlings
for food the days where distinctions between me and my world were
undrawn and irrelevant.
The retro clubs of New York form an underground
network for the escapees of last century
and its romance, the yearning for the times before the coming of the
dragon where many
believe Avalon and Arcadia existed in this vale of tears the earth of
prepostmodern times a
simple life uncomplicated by the adult concerns of becoming whole in
the face of the pain of
knowledge.
You can see them there every night in the club of
their choice, the era of their childhoods,
their turning away from the reality which bites at every corner of
the quest to become what
cannot be turned away. Who can blame them their nightly respite of
dancing to the beat of a
long gone Eden which never was but now becomes at every melody
revolving through the
grooves of their memories selected here as history less concerned
with fact than with fantasy.
I too become one with their faces one of the groovers the sayer of
words preformed in the
songs spell out for us the truth of this our lives. And the lives and
faces of those before we
were born. Our own faces.
As we walk along past my favourite club I remember taking Tetsu there months before.
Not tonight. I want to regress even further tonight. To The Face before I was born.
I sing in tune with the music bleeding up through the passage leading down to the Roxy.
"Old man - Through every step - I change.
You watch me walk away. Ta raa,
Ta raa, ta raa, ta raa....
Ta raa....Ta raa....
Don't
ask
why.."
"Where are we going this evening then?" Tetsuwon asks me as we keep going.
"To The Face, " I reply. "There to find out Who we are."
"By the way," he says, "my name is TetsuWAn you
know. I've never WOn anything in my life,
except the Hakozaki tea ceremony race last century."
"But you're talking about spelling," I say. "It sounds the same."
"My name has the sound of the dog's bark - Wan!
Wan! - I am not a wanton, you see," he
giggles at me. I remark to myself that he is so far self contained as
to not express any sexual
odor at all except when he wills it. This I find amusing. But at the
same time rather lucky for
me due to my general lack of sense barriers.
"What's the difference," I tease, "except that you
win, and then you've won. The past tense
I find is muchly expressive these days. Now and then. A useful
separator. It's all history now,
isn't it?"
"Oh well, it doesn't matter," he says, "but my name has a meaning you know."
"Yes, Robot," I say, "a thinking flying moralistic powerful computer."
"No, no, " he says back, looking serious, "Just an iron arm."
"Is it?" I ask in my best credulity, "Let me feel...."
"Alright, I admit, " he shrieks pulling his arm
away, "It is spelling, it is! It really means
the 'barking sound of philosophy'. Deep. Resonating. Irritating at
night!"
And we laugh for no reason and hold hands running
along the dark street towards our own
faces in the night.