Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Read Free Page B

Land, but earlier on, at another time.
    At least I think so. I’m not sure, even though I sorted out the events and chronologies, that is, although I wrote and now retell and repeat the true and faithful story of my life as I write it or dictate it to this recorder, when we talk together. Naturally all of you will then capture it in your net and transcribe it however you want on those small screens of yours, in fact I thank you for this URL that you assigned me. I don’t really know what that acronym means, but I like the word
site.
“Three sailors go to Egypt / oh what a fine site / they go to see ...” Do you know that song? It was sung in our region once. If you want, I’ll sing it for you, so you can record it. Of course later you’ll write whatever you want, however you want; when I press the keys like you taught me and read or listen to it again, I always discover new things. No, it doesn’t bother me, don’t worry. In fact, as far as I’m concerned ...
    It doesn’t matter so much if I’m unable to see it, my life, just as I can’t see myself while I drank and ranted in the tavern, at the Waterloo Inn. When I write, and even now when I think back on it, I hear a kind of buzzing, blathered words that I can barely understand, gnats droning around a table lamp, that I have to continually swat away with my hand, so as not to lose the thread.
    It’s nothing new, right? That too is written on the chart. Hears voices that repeat what he’s thinking. It’s true, I hear them. And you don’t, Doctor. Stereotypical hallucinations. Delusion disorders. It doesn’t upset me, I’m used to insults. Displays—I display—a lively intelligence, but with an evident ideo-affective dissociation that disturbs his spatio-temporal orientation, mental images that he fails to place in the context of his own existential experience but tends to elaborate in a delirious fiction. He is not at all reluctant to recount it, either orally, on the recorder, or in writing; sometimes even on the computer, which he manages to use a little, with some help, along with the others during the computer psychotherapy sessions. He seems convinced that he is still in Australia, and above all that he is the clone of a certain Jorgen Jorgensen, a deported adventurer who died in Tasmania in the mid-nineteenth century, whose autobiography he sometimes says he read and sometimes claims he wrote—as though you couldn’t write and then read the same book, what an idea!
    And even if I had read it before writing it, it wouldn’t change anything. It’s so difficult to determine what comes first and what comes later, Goli Otok, Dachau or Port Arthur; suffering is always in the present, here and now. He has—I’m said to have—the feeling that he’s not been told the truth about his origins. I’d like to see how you’d feel, Doctor, if they told you when and why you started being a traitor, if they claimed to tell you what you did and what youplanned to do, your past and future offences, like the UDBA agents claimed to explain to me—even you think you know who I am and who I’m not better than I do. Your, that is my, Nosological History, Doc. No. 485, is indeed a fine fiction ...
    Not that I don’t have my problems. When in Newgate, amidst that thieving, murderous scum—though I made them respect me from the outset, I had after all witnessed and doled out death on the deck of the
Admiral Juhl
or the
Surprize
, under the Danish flag and the British flag—when I wrote about the truth of our religion revealed in the Scriptures and in nature, in that cell in Newgate where I had been unjustly thrown by the judges of His Majesty George IV, I realized that prophets hear the word of God, that it comes to them as tremendous, a thunderclap in their ears, and that to tell it to others they turn around, addressing those left at the foot of the mountain, looking down like Reverend Blunt from the pulpit when he preaches in the prison chapel, and they repeat