D A N I L O P E S H I K A N
Skittering shadow of an invisible dog
In these stories, not all we seek is the sky above or the road ahead… Everyone has their wound. For some, it is their impoverished past. For others, humiliations they have experienced, for still others, simply illness or misfortune. There is always a skittering shadow of an invisible dog by our side, we can’t see it, but it gives signs… signals.
Excerpt from Shadows of Invisible Dogs and Other Stories
He had seen her on a photograph in faded, uncertain colors as if taken in the '70s; she posed at sunset in front of an ivory stone wall that leaned against the outstretched limbs of a lone fig tree. Her silhouette, in barely discernible pink, was caught up in the stonework's pattern of cracks as within a great calloused hand, whose grasp also held the blurry skittering shadow of a dog. This invisible dog annoyed him inexplicably and he turned the photo face down on the table.
The little one sat up on her knees again with her head drooping on her chest. The sconce vaguely illuminated her and the floor lamp—the vestal white sheets at her back. A gentle aura flitted across her little bronze shoulders, cast by the spectral arks from the television. In a few moments, the advertisement from the street would drown her entire tiny world in its unintelligible crimson trance. How does she bear it? He cringed, surprised at himself. This orgy of lights.
..."And… the invisible dog… can be visible?" She hopped on one leg and balanced with her arms over her head. "When it has veeery little enowgy left, just on the bottom."
"Perhaps," he spoke after an agonising pause. "Perhaps. But it has many, many more powers."
"Can it turn off stars?"
"It can… I believe it can."
"Is it so all-powerful?" She must have learned the word recently; she delicately turned it on her tongue. This disheartened him for it distracted him, dulled the sharp stingers of his ears, which were fixed on the silence in the other room.
"It’s all-powerful," he affirmed absently, mechanically emulating her. "Invisible things are all-powerful." A girl appeared next to the man on the screen, her arms plump above the elbows. They kissed. Again, and once again through the surgical mask. "Just like those that are nameless…" He sighed and added, "All-powerful."
Excerpt from Variations on the subject of freedom
Freedom, Sancho, etc.… For how many of us, who semantically suckled at her frequent yet feigned arousing disrobements, the future is no longer what it once was, nor will the past gets any better.
Here I am in the very midst of an Occidental library, in this case, the public library in Sydney, but it would be the same in Paris or London or even New York, where just a year ago I spent similar long hours in reflection and irritation. Here is the very altar erected by the Judeo-Christian civilisation in opposition to the whirlwinds of a disinterested universe. Here, books like T he 120 Days of Sodom, The Communist Manifesto, Fear of Flying, My Struggle, Doctor Zhivago, The Satanic Verses, Capital, American Psycho, Tropic of Cancer peacefully surround me. The librarian did not look up when blissfully burdened by the weight of freedom I shuffled over to my table, not even when I returned for ‘extra helpings’ of the same. The books I chose were ones I hold dear to my heart, which seemed to radiate in an ecstasy of its own. This time, the freedom began (obviously) with Joyce’s Ulysses and ended (gratefully) with Lolita by Nabokov. I wonder why I am reconstructing this scene from over two years ago. Ever since, it has been on my mind every night, trapped in the halo of remembrance beneath the night light or resting in forgotten slumber along the shelves by the bed.
How distant that hysteria seems now, which strained literacy to distinguish "potential" from "potency" but admitted ideas wearing domino masks with scowling faces like it was some masquerade ball strangely converted into a nursery. The time when the red or the star-striped verboten were a canopy covering the winged figurehead at the prow of the lonely human ship. What was really so upsetting in that "snot-green sea", in Leopold Bloom’s transsexual phenomenon amidst the reciprocally "manned-up" prostitutes from the circle around his endangered vulva? Or the childlike veneration of H. Miller, who spent his life contemplating the opening through which he was born with the hope of reaching, at last, a great cosmic truth? So what if a certain H. H., be he the most famous literary hero of the 20th century, fully equipped for relations with any Eve, preferred Lilith? Is there anything new in this? That in the world of Having and Lacking, the first only failed to buy ideology, while the second only failed to stop loving money? How can we find out, without reading about it, that the masses overall are female and so, must be fooled and forced now and then? How can we become repulsed by the (Ibid) idea of one race’s domination over other partially (and fully) exterminated human races if we don’t recognise it, or if we don’t at least for a moment, burning with an unforgettable shame, experience its full satanic attraction?
How do we truly understand liberty and when we are free?
