'Get Moving, Jonah, I'm Waiting'.

An essay from The Eighth Day by Christian Bobin, 'a Christian cousin of Kafka' ...

The two girls are walking ahead of you. They are ten years old. They are walking across the dead land beyond the villas. The wind is tangling their hair, undoing their talk. The wind has come from the ocean and has swept masterfully over hundreds of towns and roads, bending trees, uprooting fences, banging shutters, and loosing its full strength here, on the faces of two children, two friends in the kingdom of their ten years. The wind has had to deploy much cunning, and much love and patience to find them there; it has scoured the surroundings of the shivering villas and pursued them as far as this waste ground. They don’t usually come here, they aren’t used to walking on this ocean of red soil. A clay soil, gouged out by excavators, searched through by thunderstorms, a remnant of infinity. Hills the height of children, pits as deep as their games. In front of you the two girls, nearly choking with laughter because the wind is squeezing them so. Behind you, the knee-high walls edging the residences, the domestic desert. The villas are lookalikes. Same stone, same roofs, same green gardens – a caged green, the grass well behaved. The estate is the property of the bank. Confident executives have sold every plot. Smiling sales girls have trotted out the details: space, light, amenities. Young couples have studied the plans, giving as much attention to the attribution of the rooms as to the name of the baby on the way. My desk in this corner, the children upstairs and despondency throughout. The villas sprang up in the course of a summer. They grew as one sometimes wishes children might grow: unflawed, problem-free, lifeless. It was afterwards that the rain came. An invisible rain, a dust-cloud of cement and money, in the new rooms an air that stifled, a loan with twenty years to run. The roads between the villas bear the names of flowers or writers. A counterfeit coinage, old frocks dressed up. The children go from name to name, cross barriers, scatter at dinnertime, come back at nightfall, sit in the roadway, circulate everywhere, flocks of birds on dry land. Neither banks nor the tedium of living to repay the banks can ever stop childhood from spending its gold – without counting. The two girls carry on across the waste ground, from time to time the wind is too strong and they turn faces shining with cold and joy in your direction. This single face becomes an enigma as you look. It bears a name which isn’t just that of the children, it’s the name too of that waste land abandoned by the architects, the young couples, the bankers – abandoned by all except the wind. A name unlike the street names, a name the wind murmurs to you later, much later in the waste land of your reading, under the cloak of that book of god’s despair – the Bible, an ocean of red utterance. The first knowledge we acquire of god is bitter and sweet, gulped in with the earliest nutriments of childhood. A child licks god, drinks him, hits him, smiles at him, shouts at him and ends up sleeping in his arms, replete in the nook of the dark. This knowledge is immediate, offered to the new-born, denied to the clerical establishment, denied to those whose knowledge of god is thin – a knowing cut off from its known. Your way of reading the Bible is miles away from theirs: one sentence, maybe two, no more. It isn’t easy to read in a storm. You can’t read more than a line or two in these pages racked by the wind, tormented by the draught of an absence preferable to anything beside. Reading the Bible is at one extreme of your life as a reader, in this life beneath the ruins. At the other extreme is the newspaper. The newspaper as reading is black, thick, static. The Bible as reading is white, luminous, flowing. In the newspaper everything gets read since nothing is essential. You proceed methodically from the faces of ministers to the legs of athletes, from South America to the farthest end of China, from the rate of the dollar to the unemployment figures. Reading the paper is a serious matter, and like all serious matters has no bearing on life. You read a single sentence in the Bible and it’s like a drop of neat alcohol, an angel’s tear. You open the book, set your finger at random on the page, it lights on a fish, a palm tree, a lamb, you read, you move from your life to life, from the simple present to the present super-perfect. In the Bible there is god, and indeed there is none but he. He speaks without pause. In many words and none, in lightning bolts and the breeze of an airy April morning, in the rustle of standing wheat and the ox’s exhalation, in the white curl of a wave and a tongue of flame – he speaks in everything the world contains. In the Bible god speaks to god, without drawing breath, in a voice now furious, now smiling, now gentle with anger, now hoarse from so much shouting. In the Bible god is sick of talking to god and not being heard, and yet he goes on calling, calling … such loneliness, such love, it’s unthinkable, touch the book and your thought falls apart, only your eyes left to read and burn: how can one be so lonely and not die of it, how be so long a-dying and still be there, such strength wasted since the day of creation, so much love – how can it be? In the Bible the wind is talking to the wind, the wind tells stories to itself so it shan’t feel too alone, the wind of god on the lake of a voice, the wind that moves on the waters, the wind that enters the houses, god the wind, the breath that is god. One day he says to Jonah, Jonah, you’re to go to the people of this city, you must tell them I can’t stand them any longer, that my heart is very heavy, my blood very dark, you will announce their coming death, get moving, Jonah, I’m waiting. And Jonah doesn’t want to be the bearer of that kind of message, and Jonah doesn’t want to give heart-room to a thunderbolt, so he boards a ship, he wants to flee god, he knows it isn’t possible but he tries, at least he will have tried, and out at sea the wind gets up and the ship labours in the maddened seas, the sailors say, there’s someone here who’s got all the dogs of death on his heels, which means on ours, we’ve got to get rid of him, he’ll have to go overboard now, that chap. Jonah tells his story, says that he doesn’t want to keep his promise, the promise god is making to god that everything will get wiped out, and the sailors throw Jonah overboard and a whale that happened to be passing swallows Jonah all the way into its belly, the world’s black hole, where he stays three days and three nights. While he’s in the whale Jonah sings, there’s nothing to do except sing in the dark, the cavernous belly of the dark, in the end he says right, you win, I give in, I’ll go there, I’ll tell these people of your anger and their doom. And when he has delivered his message, when he has told the people of this town: you are lost, so lost that you don’t know any longer how lost you are, I’ve come to proclaim it to you, it is the wind speaking to you through my voice, the wind which is coming tomorrow to demolish your villas, your banks, your sad happinesses and your cinder gardens, when Jonah has spat out all these words he goes off quietly, pleased with himself, he has done his job. The people believe this news, they think it’s all up with us, god won’t revoke his decision, this time it’s the end, and with that they shut down their computers, leave their offices and go into the street to take their place in the day with no tomorrow, that is to say the grace of living, which is to say god. And here, now, comes the best bit, which lies, as throughout the Bible, in god’s inconsequence, in the weakness of a god who lets himself be melted by the surrender of these people, a god who rescinds his decree, a foolish god who contradicts the sensible, the wise god – just as one sees the wind suddenly hesitate, turn right back on its course, take in its hands the faces of two girls, only to give way before this fullness of light and childhood, and, suddenly putting off all its violence, retain only the gentleness of its strength, saying there is something stronger than I, stronger than the thunder god, holier than the lightning god, and bow down – bow down laughing madly before two ten-year-old children wandering on a piece of dead land, Jonah place, residence of the whales.

~

This is an excerpt from The Eighth Day: Selected Writing of Christian Bobin by Christian Bobin, translated by Pauline Matarasso. The Eighth Day is the first time Bobin has been published in the English language and the collection is available in hardback and eBook priced £12.99. You can see www,christianbobin.com for more information.