Still from Human Flowers of Flesh (2022).
GALOUP COLLAPSES
By KAI LEWIS
i.
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The sea always remembered my movements. Even amongst our new legion of wretched dust and wretched men, there was never a time when they did not receive my reflection. I remember the boat. Le Don du vent. To my eyes it was a naked scaffolding of a boat, kept afloat by the relentless sighing of the waters. To him, the him that belonged to everyone, it was a cartoon. Something that your cousin has probably watched amidst the same tired summer. He did not see things as his own. He saw things as they are to the dirt. And from the dirt did his armies grow alright. My men on the mountains or ridges or deserts dare not to gawk at anything. They dare not let their limbs curve oh so gently or throw their eyes off the dead roads. He was a vague one, a lucky find, a boy that couldn’t know of men. I called him vague once and he gave that singular confused look he always dished out. It was the look of a disarmed cherub.
I longed for his death.
Djibouti always offered the greatest twilight for my boys. There was the cool tint of orange smashed into the blazing glory of the night’s navy. The light grazed the horizon and snuck its way into our weighted base. A peculiar thing would always happen during this time. At dinners or around the campfire, the shirtless soldiers, men and boys, boys and men, shifted into the light’s effervescence. With such fleshy reflections, I would forget whether I train these boys for war or for pleasure.
One night, after the men retired into their dreams of honey, shells, and sirens, he approached me. The campfire was not lit anymore. The vibrations of the barbets had ceased. His shaved head was a moonlit halo. He was barefoot and spotted with dust. When I met his gaze, all that was looking back was an intensely hungry boy, a violent mouth piercing a crustacean — slick drips and all. I was ready to command, we only talked through commands, but he was ready for a collapse. He reached out to my face, traced my cranial equator from forehead to nose, and walked away. At ease. At ease. I remember such a night like Mary would Gabriel, or would it be Zechariah?
That night,the chalk circle was tampered with. The chalk circle of empire, kingdom, and men. My legion. My boys. Our routine was an eternity and it was meant to be kept that way. We were in motion. In collective motion. In community, motion. We moved to make the bed, moved to iron, moved to stretch, moved to drink, moved to shoot, moved to touch ourselves, moved to honour, moved to sleep, moved to iron, moved to stretch, moved to drink, moved to shoot, moved to touch, moved to dream, and moved for honour. He stopped it all. Everyone’s movement went off kilter. So I had to make him stop. I had to. But now I don’t know how I can ever move again. Can the sea remember for me?
Still from Human Flowers of Flesh (2022).
ii.
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I can feel the sand chaining itself to my feet. It is the early afternoon so the tide has yet to make my acquaintance. There was a woman earlier collecting shells for her children. She was wearing an unfortunate gingham print and her technique was lousy, but god was she giving herself to the search. Her tender oscillations from crouching to standing could give Aphrodite a run for her money! A stained cockle, also waiting for its departure, grazes the corner of my left foot.
The sand is wet now. My feet are wet. I cannot recognize the limestone cliff faces anymore as the water decolours and recolours and decolours and recolours them. Beyond me is an alien expanse of blue and black. I would address the ocean but such beings can never be a friend, these waters only juggle synchronicity and chance with a hint of divinity. I am not a mystical man and as far as my knowledge concerns, Poseidon is dead along to join the carcass of France. Perhaps a statue of him still remains in the faux corners of Little Paris. He always talked of Little Paris.
By the pier is a single working dock light that gives flesh to the intruding waves. The bubbles of its sinuous dance explode and disseminate, waiting for that push to build itself back up again. In Djibouti this was the only song my boys accompanied their digging. How ungrateful we have all become of such a song. I am not a whore so I do not touch the sea in full flesh. I am not a philosopher so I do not gaze at the sea. I am not an explorer so I do not dive into the sea. I am a soldier. That means something. My boys meant something. I cannot see the future amongst these black watery pillars and I cannot swim into its depth. But these tides. My, my, my these tides! To and fro and to and fro! Attention! Back and forth! I have searched the river Styx for movement beyond my boys but nothing can hold memory like the ocean. For eternity, I will now swim with the crash and retreat of my ocean. I will never stop swimming on this beach.
I see the wave crash. I see the water retreat.
I run full force with the conceit of a mortal on the silk screens of wet sand and seawater and I try to curve my body into the reflex of the wave as it crashes into the shore again and I fall with the water and I stand again on the pathway of the silk screen and I retreat with a might long lost to me and in this exchange I can feel the rhythms of Djibouti in my muscles–Pectineus Trapezius Illiopsoas Gracillis Sartorius Adductor Longus Deltoid Sternocliedomastoid–and the boys wear their flesh too and they tense to my order and the Legion is big and monstrous and alive and France is moving and I crash onto the beach again bruises and kisses and I am moving and I am moving again and I crash and retreat crash and retreat crash retreat cra restrehat crash.
iii.
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It is the stench that reaches me first. A wintry seaweed. That’s it. That is why I am awake. That is why I open my eyes. A spectre of a family is looking down on me. They might as well have been family with their frigidity and communal propensity. I thought this was a premonition of the Ancients but the weighted cries of my crashes and retreats still rung all around me. How were these sounds outside of me?
I lay on my carpet of sand as they question my sanity and physicality. I can’t answer them with the water in my lungs but I know what they can imagine.
Look and see the forest in front of you. You cannot see the sun but you can see its rays. They gamble with the flora for a strip of their green. To your virgin eyes the light is bouncing jauntily. Pulsating strips of colours cradle such an image. Eden is more tropical than you had previously thought. There is a chorus of the wild mumbling behind with the cicadas. You are naked. You can dance.
But God, this time, does not curse your fruitful mutiny with the shame of flesh.
No, the god of this world knows of men.
A closer look at the veins of the landscape and you witness a tear in this sweaty equilibrium. The trees are moving. People are moving around the trees. You only have the leaf of a fig for your doomed armor. They have mimesis. They have camouflage and guns and all the WAR IS BEAUTIFUL BECAUSE IT INAUGURATES THE DREAMED-OF METALLIZATION OF THE HUMAN BODY. WAR IS BEAUTIFUL BECAUSE IT ENRICHES A FLOWERING MEADOW WITH THE FIERY ORCHIDS OF MACHINE GUNS.
I wake on the beach and sack one member of this concerned population of the pier. The firemen have come to save me.
Still from Human Flowers of Flesh (2022).
iv.
I am on a stretcher now. Metal consumes me. My friends have children with toy fire trucks. The men tending to me aren’t naturally brutal men. They meet my gaze when I retrieve the ability to have one. They caress my bruises, my history, and my neck without hunger. I almost forgot that the sea shunned my conscription. I couldn’t find the movement. None of the mechanics. None of the routine. I am an aged man dazing in and out of my metal cube of a vehicle. I do not recognize the sounds of these helps, kind as they may be. I do not understand anything because the sea is not mine anymore. I do not want to understand anything because I am old and bruised and heartbroken and miserable and deluded and hurt. Then the phone rings from one of the men’s pockets with a sound that could engulf all the souls of all the men I never held.
v.
This is the rhythm of the night
The night, oh yeah
The rhythm of the night
This is the rhythm of my life
My life, oh yeah
The rhythm of my life
You could put some joy upon my face
Oh, sunshine in an empty place
Take me to the top, and babe I'll make you stay
Oh, I can ease you of your pain
Feel you give me love again
Round and round we go, each time I hear you say