ESP

'Ill, unemployed. Unemployed and ill. The Ees. Walking in the Meadows, the grass flowering … Walking up past Jackson's Boat towards Didsbury. Was this really the Mersey, which flowed into the great estuary on which Liverpool (pretty much) was built?'

What does he remember? What stands out? That time, more than the others, is indistinct for him. As though there was something about it that memory could not cross, not all the way. That, like the birds who set out to fly across the Dead Sea and drop from the sky with exhaustion, there was something not to be reached, that remained there, fuzzy and indistinct, a background that could not become a foreground, and which could only be seen from the corner of your eye.

And even then, it seemed to not to want to be seen. To hide from sight, if only (in my imagination) to turn its eyes on you; to see you before you could see it. – 'It was as though it had already seen me, already known me, that what I sought to remember was the effect of its greater power of memory. As if my whole life, everything I had lived, were but an episode it was recounting to itself. A way it would know itself, discover itself, and perhaps come back to itself, for it was always coming back thus, sending out arcs of lives like the flares that rise and arc across the body of the sun.

'Who was I? Who had I ever been? My life had been an echo of something else. Mine, what was mine, was only a way for something else to possess itself. I felt as though I were being turned inside out like a glove. My memories were not mine; my life was not mine. Everything that belonged to me did so only as a kind of haze produced on the surface of a greater body. I was mist. I was a cloud of midges above the water. No: we were like a mist, Ann and I; we were like a cloud of midges above the water.

*

'Read the quotation on the post-it note there', the poet says. 'No, not that one – above it. Read it out'.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

'Virginia Woolf', he says. 'And it's true not only of memory. Does his life make sense to him only now?', he wonders. 'The opposite, the very opposite', he says. 'It shouldn't make sense. It should be released from sense, or what we think of as sense', the poet says. 'From linearity. From order. There's nothing worse than the story! Nothing more imprisoning!

'Storytellers are like drunks', the poet says. 'The worst kind of drunks, rambling and belligerent, convinced they have something important to say. But there is another kind of drunk who knows nothing is important. The sovereign drunk who will say anything and nothing, who will speak just to let words bob like a beachball on a seal's snout. To make of speech a toy, and of speech pure play. To say words simply because they are words.

'So what story will he tell?', the poet says. 'The same story, over and again', he says. 'The same, which is to say, the non-story, the impossibility of stories. Look at you, with your dictaphone, waiting for stories! Waiting for wisdom. Well he has no stories, no real stories, and no wisdom, not what a Dane would regard as wisdom.

'The Mersey, that was the river. The young Mersey, because it was no more than ten feet wide. It was modest, almost anonymous. You wouldn't have thought to ask its name. It didn't want to be remembered. But the Mersey it was, and there we were, on its banks.

'How many walks did we take, Ann and I? A handful? Just one? Or perhaps they didn't walk at all, perhaps this is a fake memory, cryptomnesia, as they call it'. But it's real enough, this memory, he assures me of that. What were they talking about? Ann was telling an anecdote, the poet says.

'It was the end of a summer's day, Ann said. She and her friend were sitting beneath a tree. A game, even though they were weary. One of them had flash cards, and the other – was it Ann? - was to guess the shapes on those flashcards without seeing them. Wearily receptive, as the light failed, and Ann, the guesser (if it was Ann), guessed right almost every time.

'"That's what you couldn't repeat under test conditions", Ann said. "It's why they can't prove the existence of ESP". Ann was a great believer in ESP, the poet says. – "Really, we know all each other's thoughts", she said. "We know, but we don't want to know". What am I thinking, then?, I asked her, falling happily into the trap. – "About how pretty I am", said Ann, smiling'. How pretty she was! And there it was. She wanted something from him. Something was to begin, but who was he to begin it?

His tendency, he's well aware, is to narrate his life as though he was always acted upon, never acting. – 'As though I never showed any initiative, and what happened did so almost despite me'. So what did happen then, on the banks of the Mersey, just up from Jackson's Boat? What did he do?

'Nothing', he says. 'Or nothing that she might have wanted'. He didn't take her in his arms, as you are supposed to. He didn't turn and kiss her full on the mouth. He didn't let his hand drift out and touch hers, and then clasp hers. They walked along. He was awkward. He'd got in his own way. He was getting in his own way.

Oh to stand aside, completely aside! To let another come forward in his place, living his life, taking it over! He wanted to delegate his life to another. Someone else should be living for him. But there he was, living, or doing something like living. No kisses, then. No taking her in his arms. He was the one being acted upon, not her. He was the one yielding, but to what? Oh God, oh God.

What excuse did he have for his inaction? What alibi? Did he really want to be left alone, unromanced, unromancing? Was he really to sit on the sidelines of life? I'll sit this one out: wasn't that what he'd said, so far, of his life? And he was sitting it out, this one life, this only life he had. But what of it?, he thought to himself defiantly. I stumble over myself; I get in my own way. And so what?, he thought. I am my own obstacle. And why shouldn't he be?, he thought, suddenly fierce.

'Nothing happened, Dane', the poet says. 'Do you see? Do you like my story?' As a Dane, I would have kissed her, he knows that. A big, strapping Dane, all blonde and blue eyed. All poetic! – 'I would have taken her to my arms and held her', he says. 'You Danes are all decision, he says. All decision and straightforwardness!

'It's as though you were a young nation, though he knows Denmark is quite ancient, with its Vikings and so on. As though you were Australian, or something, very young, full of life and confidence and white teeth!' But he was no Australian, he says, and no Dane, do I see? Can I understand?

He was passive, dreadfully passive. Mars was not in his birthchart, he says. He was a Pisces, dreadfully Piscean. Too old to act! Too tired, as though he'd lived a thousand times. Hasn't he felt, sometimes, as though thousands of lives had trailed before him. That his life was one of the last times his soul would be born on earth?

It was so attenuated, his soul. So blanched. It wasn't enlightenment that he had to achieve to escape the wheel of rebirth, but a kind of perfect attenuation. A perfect stretching out of the soul …

Sometimes he wished he was old, really old. That he could have had done with it, all the business of life. In India – old India - you can become an ascetic only after you've lived as a householder. You must have married and had children before you can leave the world behind. But there were exceptional cases in which asceticism was permitted.

Didn't Sankara, for example, forgo marriage, and leave his parents' care as a wandering sanyasin? He would have wandered thus in his imagination, the poet says. He was ready to give the world up before he had grown to know it. And he's ready still, he says. Do I suppose he's ever lived, really lived?, he asks me. Do I think he know what it means to live?