Gods and Salamanders

White light, white light. He has a terrible headache just thinking about it, the poet says. White light! Light in light, light lost in light. As bright as phosphorous. So bright you can see nothing by it except brightness, a perfect inversion of the deepest night.

How abstracted it seems. How blank. A great blind eye. The blind eye of a blind god, watching, seeing nothing. Watching, the god gone blind, gone mad, the god having torn our his eyes, his tongue. The god who ripped himself up like a telephone directory. The god in flakes of light, raining down. The god like the million eyes that open on sunlit water, dazzling, dazzlingly blind.

How can he, the poet, the non-poet, bear it?, he says. He can't bear it any longer. It's driven him mad. He has a headache, a terrible headache. The pressure. – 'Do you have any idea of the pressure, Dane?' He thinks he's head's going to shatter. It's going to break apart in a hundred pieces, and then what will happen to my interview? Before whom else will he wave his dictaphone around? His friends? But he doesn't have any friends. He's driven them away. The light's driven them away. The light in his head. His dreadful migraines.

Who can bear to be around him? He drove them away, in order to save them, the poet says. For their own good! For their salvation. Lest he take them down with him. Lest he take them down and suffocate them. Lest the plastic bag of his company was tied around their neck. Lest their last breaths could be seen, hollows in plastic. A plastic-coated face. A plastic-coated cry, oh God, he had to spare them. He drove them away.

His headaches, his dreadful headaches. He foreswore red wine and cheese, tomatoes and chocolate, but it still wasn't enough. He foreswore white white and coffee, dairy products and wheat products, but there was no escaping it. The light bore down upon him. The light drilled down, it drilled into his forehead.

That's where it's turning, the poet says, in his forehead. As though his forehead was the tip of a great cone that spread up and out and as wide as the sky. As though it were the whole sky concentrating himself into his forehead, pouring down.

It's too much. There's too much light, he says. It's killing him. He's going mad, quite mad. He doesn't feel anything anymore, can I understand that? He doesn't feel anything … he lacks himself, he lives minus himself. All feeling, all mood. Catatonia – is that it? Apathy, anyway. Shut-down. He's shut down and shut out, all on his own. Who are you going to interview when I finally go mad?, he wonders. Who, when I'm tired recording everything he says? Oh monotony. Apathy! Apathy, apathein, no moods, no moods.

Stories, instead. He wants to tell me stories. Anything. Anything to – distract me. To distract him, too. As though stories were a kind of shelter against light. A little darkness. – 'A tent of darkness to pull around us, you and me, Dane. Because we need some shelter. We need light, God knows. God knows we're alone enough in this world. Separated enough'.

He's terribly alone, says the poet, but how could it be otherwise? He drove them away, for their own good, all the others. But in truth, they were disinclined to stay. They hardly had to be driven. Didn't they just wander off by themselves? Weren't they going away anyway? He laughs.

Off they went, off he went. He followed his own direction. He led himself, blindly. Perhaps they all did. They all set off, each in their own direction. He laughs. To each, his own direction. To everyone except the Dane, who follows everyone else's direction. Follows everyone else and with his stupid dictaphone.

Stories, stories, says the poet. As though they were a way of silencing it, the roaring. Do I hear it, the roaring?, the poet says. It's as bad as the light. He can't hear himself think. He can't hear anything he says. That's why he has to bellow and shout, do I see? The noise, oh God.

It's worse than the students upstairs, he says. Worse than their stomping up and down the stairs, their eternal rumpus. Worse than the student flats either side of him (he thinks they're student flats). The noise, the real noise comes from the sky, he thinks, the poet says. From the sky, the whole sky, like light, like the white light.

Only sometimes he supposes it comes from a specific point in the sky. A kind of quasar. A point-source from which it is beamed out to him. At him. At him, the poet, the non-poet. It drills into his forehead from a million light-years away. Drills into it, sent a million years ago and from a million light-years away.

It hurts, the poet says. Do you understand that? He wants a little silence. Wants a least a lessening of the noise, if there can be no silence. He likes to listen to the conversations of others on the bus. To bus-chatter, to the to-and-fro. Anything so as not to be alone. Not to be alone with the noise, the noise.

Still, it's not as bad when he's inside. When he's in his flat, for example. In his bedroom, in his armchair. The noise lessens. It can't quite reach him here. He can read, or try to read. He used to write – or what he called writing. To write a few lines, here and there … A little silence. A little less noise, that's all he wanted.

He has dreamt of creatures – gods or salamanders – who live like noise within noise, like light within light. That's what he sees in his headaches, he says. That's what he hears. Roaring within the roaring. Gods' voices. Salamanders'. They're shouting something to him. He has to hear, but he can't quite hear. He can't make it out, the message intended for him. Because the noise is splitting his head apart. The noise driving down like a white axe, through his skull, the centre of his skull. The blade of noise slicing down, right through him, dividing him into two.

He's being cauterised by noise, he says. Burned along his edges. Sometimes he thinks he's falling, falling in light and noise. He sees a body, once dark and closed upon itself, pinned open, drawn. A spread out body like a page, with no secrets, nothing hidden.

He's nothing inside him, the poet says. No interiority. No space for secrets. The gods – the salamanders – know everything about him, every thought. They can see it – that's how he imagines it. They can see and hear everything he thinks, he feels it.

My God, how they torment him, his gods, his salamanders. Writhing around him. Turning around him like great porpoises. Beasts made of starlight. Of sheets of noise. Turning around him, quicker and quicker. Sometimes approaching. Sometimes touching him with a fiery limb which passes right through him. Screams. Screams that pass right through him. That's their way of talking, the poet says. That's how they would address him: by screams.

He's a white page, the poet says. A white point, like a planet in the middle of a supernova, its atmosphere blasted away, its creatures dead. A blasted planet, rock, just rock, the shell that survived the nova's blast. A shell, a husk, and with nothing at its core. For his centre has been blasted away, too. His centre, his secrets, his ordinary life. The man he was.

Was he really that – a man? Him – a man? He thought he was some crippled thing, grown in a lab. A stunted thing. A thing torn apart. Thought he was some experimental subject. Thought he was the trial case for new kinds of torture. Thought they were trying to invent a different kind of pain. White pain. Noise pain. The roaring, roaring, like television fuzz. Roaring, to say: programme over. No signal here. Nothing can get through. Roaring. Fuzz.

He used to turn the volume of the television right up. And his radio – his radios, because there's one in his bedroom, too, and a little portable one in the kitchen. He'd turn them up, right up. Now everything was roaring! The needles went into the red. The volume went up to 11.

Too much noise! Too much distortion! They told him to turn it down, the students, - he, the poet, the non-poet, a regular citizen, told to be quiet by students. They banged on his door. They had to bang a great deal, over and over, until he heard. Until it sounded where his heart used to be, thump-thump.

When he answered the door, they were dazzled by the light. He left all the lights on in his flat, he says. He screwed in the brightest bulbs and left them on, in his light and roaring phase, he said. He dazzled them, they who were used to light, who had the light and airy upstairs flat, while he had the dark downstairs flat. And he wondered whether his body had begun to emit light, too. Whether he was turning into a salamander. He roared at them, the students, like a salamander.

Anyway, the police came, and told him to turn the noise down, so he did. You can't argue with police, the poet says. The police are in league with the salamanders, he says. They're their minions, their servants. They might appear to be the opposite of light and noise, but in fact, they're needed; they, too, have their role.

He was quiet, after that. He hid in the darkness, under the bedsheets. It took him a long time to come out. They weren't going to draw him out. He needed to rest.

Madness is very tiring, the poet says. Very, very tiring. It keeps you up all night and through all the nights and then drops you, exhausted. You fall to earth. Fall back to yourself. You're exhausted! Madness dropped you down the mineshaft. Madness dropped you down its liftshaft, and there you are at the bottom, in the pit, the poet says.

Ah, how can he explain it?, he says, growing quieter. Danes are sane, he knows that. Terribly sane! The police are sane, too, he says. Perhaps I, too, am a servant of the light and noise, in some way. Perhaps I, too, am in league with the salamanders.

Ah, he's calming down, the poet says. My presence has excited him too much, he says. He's not really used to company. Not anymore, since his friends deserted him. His so-called friends. Or he deserted them, whichever it was, he says. 'And I awoke and found me here on cold hill's side', the poet says. That's poetry, you know. – 'And I awoke – all alone – on the cold hill', he says. Because that's where he is, he says. On the cold hill, all alone.

'It's cold, terribly cold, the poet says. And we're so alone, so alone. Even you, Dane: alone. We're wretches, perfect wretches …' What are the gods trying to tell us? What are they shouting? And the salamanders, who are part gods – or are the gods part salamander?: what do their screams mean? And the light, the terrible blinding light: what does it mean, Dane? Can I help him? What on earth does it mean?

'What do you mean, Dane? What is your meaning? Who sent you here? What are you recording?'