—MICHEL FOUCAULT, Madness and Society

1

AS IF HE had been cast away among the lotus-eaters, he seemed to have forgotten his fatherland. He knew he was a stranger. The thin ocean wind told him so, tossed it into his face—the wind that blew, day in, day out, sweeping across bleak marshland and weed-choked rubble fields and straying into the gaps and ruins of meandering streets.

The heavy sky told him so, day in, day out, the dove-breast clouds, scraped by the broken rafters of gabled roofs; their shadows scoured the houses red and sore, water dripped from their feathers, till they dissolved in white; sometimes they perished from the arrows of a stinting and distant sun, brittle arrows that pierced them only to break against the struts of the loading cranes in the bombed-out harbor, where their splinters scattered over the wet stone jetties, palely brass-bright, cradled in the cold water, until new flocks of doves flew over, breast to breast, and quickly pecked them up.

The nights hushed it toward him, step-queens, no moon drifted through his blood, no dream-drunken bird measured the stillness of a black-and-silvery landscape with its warbling. Masses of cottony darkness pressed heaven and earth together, smothered the sparsely beaded streetlights and the pitiful contents of scrip-shabby department stores into pale fog-aureolas and let their oily shimmer ooze into the black canals.

The dropsical air carried it to him, in gull shrieks expelled wildly into nothingness, weaving the emptiness of eternity on gull wings—a nightmare carnival: Pierrots shooting clownishly to and fro and up and down, crossing, chasing one another, reeling, plunging, now surrounded by powdery whirls of snowflakes, now streaked obliquely with strands of rain. He could hear it in the city’s din, which surged restlessly like the straying wind, now and again punctuated by the walrus bellow of a ship’s siren, haunted by the ghost of the past. He heard it in the constricted voices, the faded intonations, the crumbling speech of the people he passed during his constant, futile walks: pale blond men and women who looked at him with eyes of faded blue in which blank uncomprehending amazement froze into the enigmatic gaze of nixies. Estrangement stood between him and them, and this strange place to which they were together condemned did not unite them.

•

Yes sir. That’s how it ought to start. Orphically. The evocatively murmuring past tense. Rubble Age in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe, Germany, 1945–48. Enigmatic gaze of nixies (read: Hanseatic contrariness). Cast away among the lotus-eaters (read: displaced person). Sheer poetry, that’s how I set it down. With a throbbing heart full of sacred hope: As if he had been cast away among the lotus-eaters, he seemed to have forgotten his fatherland—period. With a dying fall . . .

The first sentence has to ring like out bell metal:

Solidly immur’d in earth

Stands the mold of hard-bak’d clay . . .

Schiller, Mr. Brodny, in case your memory’s failed you. You probably call him Skyler now. Well, we still call him Shillah. We are proud of him. Singing and ringing cherub’s voice. Singing and ringing for a child’s heart. Daddy, tell me a story. Sissignore, subito! The communication of fatefulness arouses our memory (or is it our morality?). Arouses our sensuality. Okay then, tell me a story, if possible in three short sentences. Of course this would require form. (Schwab would have said, “Ni plus, ni moins.”)