Free Class Warfare by D. M. Fraser

listening? Tradition shone in the air, alien light glinting through an archway (as I understood it), striking still water. Yes, there were goldfish in the pool, and other species. The noise of traffic was indistinguishable from wind, the conversation of large indigenous trees, the scraping of unaccustomed sandals on gravel paths, as we strolled together. And I was happy, I was then entirely happy, without thought.”
    In his mind, he is saying to her, “There are worse things to remember than happiness, if such it was. We walked in a Japanese garden, beside the languid water, and I was young and strong and full of passion. I was not yet detached from the material life, the manifest world. Nor am I now, though I pretend otherwise. Your body in the twilight appeared to me as drapery, the costliest of fabrics, voluptuous as amber in a green bowl. Gossamer hung on your hips, your magnificent thighs; I could not forbear to praise you. Oh, oh, the sweetness of life, that has such visions in it. Your lips moved as if in speech, but you said nothing.”
    Do you know the song now? Do you recall the words? Never mind, chances are no one is listening. Yet. Now it is only a stridency of guitars, triumphant, somewhere down a hallway. Along this perspective a door may open, or it may not. And if it does, what will come raging through? There are things he is powerless to anticipate: irruptions, incursions, blind processes of history,
things.
He is going somewhere, to do something, but there are turnings he cannot foresee, from this vantage. Suppose—
    â€”
Suppose that one night we go out driving together in the rain, out of the city, out through the lowlands, marshlands, industrial flatlands, out past the chemical factories and refineries, military reserves, television towers, wrecking yards, across rivers of effluent, down boggy vastnesses streaked with powerlines, pipelines, all that complicated pasta of roadways, freeways, pavement blue as steel under mercury light, the trusty Chevy spinning along, patient buzz of moving parts, Pachelbel on the radio, and the two of us trying to carry the tune, out of key: until, at some unremembered intersection, some exit no map prepared us for, entered upon so swiftly, helplessly, that there’s no time to scream OH NO or JESUS, or to bargain, plead, change heart, change gears, then
—
    Well, just suppose. Meanwhile in his safe house he will stand at a window, with his true love, hearing percussion: congas, spoons, tambourines, clear girlish voices singing Alleluia, far away. This cacophony signifies something, yes indeed, and it is coming closer.
Hold on, hold on
. He, for his part, will hold on. The Empress of India extends a pale hand, traces his spine; the flesh is pliant. “Come the Revolution,” she says, “all this will be swallowed up, it will all be consumed. We have been exempt too long. You and I will fall, our beauty torn and discarded like Kleenex after a virus: and who will rescue us? It is late, late for an act of Grace, were one ever thinkable, and I am more tired than you suspect. I have considered soberly, in my way, the efficacy of love, but have come to no opinion. In the circumstances, that may be all for the best. Those who come after us will never taste, they will never tell stories, of the sweetness of life.”

CLASS WARFARE
    â€¦
Et surtout mon corps aussi bien que mon âme, gardez-vous de vous crosier les bras en l’attitude sterile du spectateur, car la vie n’est pas un spectacle, car une mer de doleurs n’est pas un proscenium, car un homme qui crie, n’est pas un ours qui danse
.
    â€”Aimé Césaire,
Cahier d’un retour an pays natal
    TIME SEEMS TO BE running out, for all of us. Many of the stories lately have an apocalyptic ring; the air is full of rumours, intimations of collapse. It is being said, more and more often with more and more conviction, that things are getting “out of control,”