Victory | Dan Muenzer

He didn’t know where land gave way to sea due to declivity and fog; night and day along the horizon disputed, moment by moment, which would exist in the next. While the sun surfaced in the tide, meeting the other that sank, lights thrown up from the periphery heralded dawn.
So it must have appeared to one picking through the slag, he thought, to whom he himself would seem incredible, with black land stretching all around and his own certainty more certain than that imagined confusion that whatever cinder remained, whatever its antecedents had promised of cessation, had reached now its terminus. The landscape itself could declare it, if personal happenstance mixed with topography: that becoming behind the headland, long since having ended having begun to become it, was now having its being in the fullness of its shadow: and that not even visible, occluded by that solid blankness against which his spirit now leaned.
Leaning, he could view it more clearly: that which, as he’d surmised, once appeared to one for whom the oncoming dark, however ultimate it felt at the time – true rest requiring a lying terminus – was after all provisional.
But it wasn’t. Not now.
He kicked the stone skittering it across the pile and unpacked his bindle and bit into his sandwich. A bird, wheeling down, roosted on a pillar, ruffled its feathers – and remained, leaning into the wind.
If nothing else in common, they had this and it was fundamental: a dark veil behind which looking could stop. Nothing behind would ever surprise him again, or so he thought, that being the precondition of being caught by surprise.
But then to one for whom his own novelty to himself would convince him it all had been newly created, it was bright, a resplendence behind which one never thought to look, it being the medium of seeing. It occurred to him that the two might be in fact the same curtain drawn along a pole. Though one hadn’t seen it, the not having witnessed seconded that old impression of novelty.
Wind through a tree.
Nothing to do but gather berries and roots and bear witness to something that, not even desiring one’s looking, nor looking back in return, left one with the fresh, uncomplicated impression of the self seeing another: as he, now, looking out over the desolation like some dark past in its open persistence beyond utility. But, together with the rocks and starving birds, lacking what had sealed it: the goodness of everything.
One in the past had built an altar, in the twilight, to some force – no need to call it a deity – in which, though he didn’t believe, still to credit disbelief would be too coarse a credit. Nor, as he gathered the materials, was it in the manner of one prosecuting by rote some cultural form (what remains of a culture when a culture has gone being the performance for others); but, in the dark, far from any to acknowledge it save himself, he did so secure in the knowledge, not of its inefficacy, but that no one would even know it enough to judge of its futility: not even himself, if he were being honest (a hard quality to manage when alone). For all he would have expected, after all, he thought, as he bit into his sandwich, was motions liberated from where the chroniclers would fix it, or the markets, or the calendars: a bit of gratuitous wake kicked up in the after spume once the ship had long since disappeared. One who saw both of them (or all: the common thread binding them, they might as well be one) would, granted, uncap his paints, fumble about the canvas: by the time morning came display to the dew and mountain birds (to the bright tailed one sitting on that rock) that abstract summation of what was already to the one that built it merely an altar: it being the interpreter’s part, from his greater vantage, and to whom all that occurred was a model, only to leave one more supererogatory shell of what had already molted into itself.
That’s how it must have seemed to one who passed through the wilderness, through bowers in which nothing yet had closed its eyes in sleep, over rocks not yet washed by rain, through the wildflowers that, innocent of step, hadn’t borne a mouse’s paw, let alone lights that in twilight would tear open oncoming sleep and claim additional watchfulness: as though one whose brush had moved picked the trees in pigments up out of the soul, and, pricking the highlights on the waves, had bound the elements together with all-pervading light, had stepped away from the canvas of things: and as though that satisfaction of the maker, laying aside endeavor, should work backward and perfuse through the whole (as though it all sprang in a moment, and no blank canvas ever was). One then who massaged his limbs in the sun, or stretched against a trunk, would move as in a living memorial, himself feeling no strain to become any more than what he already was: but later, when birth’s gossamer had snapped and he’d felt himself pass into the newness’s tedium, he might not remember, except in spells by the night fire, how when the sweat first had sprung out he’d dashed toward the sea: he’d thought he was melting.
Night falling round and the dark underfoot.
Behind him spread that occlusion which, like a rounded stage, prevented anything not already visible from the wings from interrupting performance. He walked to where the soil peeled off into a rolling ditch, to the other side where the declivity continued to roll, effacing itself, first gently, then with greater precipitation, toward the fog that, exhaled from the waters they obscured, rolled with the waves only visible in the motion they imparted to that impalpable mist. One should feel so on an abandoned stage, part having been discharged and only the exits faintly glowing along unoccupied aisles: only what once was looking now dissipated even past its remainder (though those eyes in suspension, whose watching, together with one’s inner pressure exerted, helped to keep all consciousness down).
Stuffed into the pith of the role summoned to the scene.
He must leave behind, like that sun, now bobbed beneath an occlusion, the afterimage of sight: a smear through which one saw, not what was no longer there, but what one no longer was, no longer suffering the impression that made such a thing to be: thus (he gathered a few twigs from the pile) one borrowed from the consciousness another had raised the gentle pleasure of being what one was to oneself: a sense that, without some sort of distance, would merge into what it was and not know itself at all. He stepped back and surveyed the rectangle he’d made: a window onto the dirt made from a few sticks, framing earth that knew itself no worse for having been parceled out into something that, as far is it knew or cared, could have been a bean plot, an arboretum, an altar, a gallows, a grave: something owned or, beneath temporary scaffolding, merely surveyed. Similarly, one who, beyond all this, distant brother to the clay, would pretend indifference to what his own hand summoned onto the canvas: stroke after stroke here was the sea and there the rock. Not even the thought of when those fossils were trees and spring freshness that fog intruding between the eye, what it saw, and, further along, the marks that, catching him, if not themselves, by surprise, pretended, in the cover of that deception, to be the genuine emanation of things.
He tiptoed up to that feeling of completion, near enough to feel what it must be like to be fatality itself, but not so near as to dissolve in it and thereby not see himself for the necessity of things. He caught it somewhere in the environment, yet again importing beneath its indifferent rind the fruit of his own action: his own thought appearing to itself, so that it might, failing recognition, not feel itself alone, in the guise of a stone the lightning had riven, or a wash of obsidian dirt where a stream had once, winding through rocks, made its way to a sea that bore rather than aimless suds ships that tautened their rigging to tell themselves where to go. One beyond the lights that once were there, he imagined, might do the same, but in that half-accomplished, provisional way, knowing, as he must have (for even he, for all the shadow, must be aware of a light that once was, even though it never would rekindle) that all it would take to rob the dark of its element was turn up his heel: a simple reorientation of soul that, wheeling the dark upon itself like the aforementioned curtain, would reveal, on the back of its damask, the gaily pricked colors of the town where he was born: there the floodlights over the warehouses, here, where a field of flowers once stood, a level plain of asphalt: and though to one willing to brave the night there still surrounded the concrete mass the hum of bees, drone of sea, and whisk of renovating wind through the hedge, one wasn’t a child, and knew that not seeing was not tantamount to not being seen. The bird ruffled its feathers, and with a shift of its eye, took in the final rays flushing upward, neither moving its body nor ceasing to lean into the breeze.
Its completion, whatever it was, might not be with it every moment of its life, while it rode the updraft with spread wings or, swooping from its perch, dove for the worm only it could see. Its completion might be for the one who saw it before it had a name. He was himself nameless now as the sensational vitality that spread from his middle, that common anonymity that would bind him to it more intimately than any shibboleth to things: any name he’d think to call it presupposing his own identity as one impressed to the service of others, in making them useful to himself, and no longer free to simply drape his limbs over something he felt but didn’t thank and used without acknowledging the benefit. Everything after would be an act of worship, merely, and taking possession something imposed rather than an extension of what, lacking boundaries, wasn’t even on offer. Again he wondered whether that might not be preferable: even beyond what one would imagine of it from a pictorial perspective, to inhabit what, after all, couldn’t adequately be represented but through the experience of itself: to move without knowing one’s own shape, like that breeze one must have felt, in the time of the lights, that lifted listlessly around things that still were, and would be, without knowing, any more than aboriginal man, where it came from or to where it listed. Such an earlier one, of course, whose commonality with himself was, after all, only provisional, could only have guessed, in the contrast between the light and the dark – the piquant liberation from his close-pressed city to this field that, even then, gave way on nothing in particular – what it was for one’s body to extend into unknowable indifference, one’s core, like a breeze, even at its densest being nothing more than a congeries of force that, far from recognizing itself in a bent blade, imagined it merely the nature of things to give way to its passage.

Not that they contained everything, but rather everything them. No further motion would bring any addition, nor did they need to fear subtraction: everything that would be having been, there was nothing to take away. It all could be contained. Let’s go to the garden and, where the light hasn’t yet scraped from the newness of creation, try ourselves against clouds that only now are taking first shape as a camel or a clown. Let’s turn aside into the courtyard, and from where the marble statutes gaze out at the botas that haul fish in from the harbor, enjoy the luxury of not knowing what it is to be anything other than what one might imagine another to think him to be. From there, it’s only a brief passage to the place where, even if lights still were still burning behind one (he realized, now, he didn’t own any precedence), they memorialized the lost walkings of ones who had already come and passed. And so he came even nearer, on the sly, to what, even more than the dark, could not bear too much illumination. Near enough now to trust its solidity. The smaller he became, the more he opened to the circumambient indifference that, borrowing the afterimage of what he’d long sought to be, turned ample enough audience to what he actually was: which was, as he’d never admit – such admission leading directly to tautology – what he’d already neglected to be. It might be that the brightness tricked itself likewise: that, beneath the ignorance of novelty, lay a craft that, turning aside from what potentially could have been, forgot its creation, and rested, without future, in the inevitable is. To brush through the garden then would be closed to all surprise, including that of the still-fresh dazzle of the existent: unless, that is, beneath the dissipated glamor of a panoply of self-subsistent forms, still lurked the guilt of having created at all. Before was not nothing, such a one might think, if he allowed himself to think, but the possibility not only of this but another: and that this should be rather than that postulated contrary suggested, rather than the ineluctable, some element of selection, a swerve toward predilection, a hankering for something, in short, a choice: which, absent the subject one tried to forget, would no longer itself be remembered. Thus, constellate oneself as one might into uncounted numerologies, still one ran the risk of rounding a corner, and, in a dusky coign, encountering himself.
Seeing as one would be seen by one whose brush picked out the image, the signs that had come to pass flashing their premonitions of doom no longer would be relevant to the interpretation of what was no longer in the offing: was on, one might say, and that for perpetuity, if the absence of something could be given a positive presence, and that to endure longer even than these waves would lap the shoreline after his absence. As the shape of things themselves, revealing themselves in that initial dawn, wouldn’t need any codicil beyond their own dew to speak to their freshness, so, too, might ancient things speak out in their age, and through what they presented contain and by containing annul the forebodings that have proceeded and, in part, created them: a man with a crooked stick paces out for himself the last steps of his byway, but one needn’t inquire any further than his cataracts to surmise, in complete satisfaction to one’s otherwise indifference, a journey whose foreground had died into itself. A command falls, a city is built to the specification of an invisible power, and what remains of mythic foundations is buried beneath the industry with which something comes to maintain its appearance. It didn’t matter whether the initial stakes had been laid in jest, or whether, where something now was, something else was intended: only that the earth, marked out, had seen itself parted from itself.
Not that one could forego shape altogether and loll along in nullity. Such a non-recognition, he knew, would fail to fulfill the history he’d known in his bones even as he forgot the particulars. No, it was essential, if anything was, that what had been should continue to be recognized as having been, though, like one afraid to look over a cliff, he preferred rather to feel the heights of those depths, recognize the real possibility of plummet, than hang fastidious over, one hand knotted in some scruff of present sensation, the other testing the air. As too much thought between strokes cancels the subsequent in dwelling too curiously upon the prior, so, too, would the monumental form of his own contentment cease to be chiseled moment by moment into this rock should he ever pause to consider the origin of the chisel or inquire too closely into a face that, if it were to deliver him from consequence, could not be another’s as well as his own: enough, then, to one who viewed it from afar even in closest pursuit, that one had been apart from something the distance itself proclaimed was desire: that through a fumbling through inevitable fortuity, later cast in the form of a struggle, that he should near it; that, in proximity, a reversal should upend his motion, things not be what they seem, expectation tumble over itself and re-right its route: in short that everything that was should conspire to this thing of ultimate importance, which, given its privileged position, could afford to be nothing more monumental than the smallest possible portion. One would sidle along the sidelines, then, with his brush and fix the moment that, frozen into resins, better actualized the contentment of achievement than achievement itself.
One of the sticks having been whittled down between bramble in a hollow and its end whisked into a finger of flame, it drew, as he drew it in long, slow patterns in the air, languorous figurations that sparked against the purple-dark and hovered in smoke. Laid within the pyre, the parceled earth he’d now stuffed with sticks, it began curing in light through the striated nest, glowing in shadows, bars, curls, and slants. Self-indulgence having permitted something come to be, even at that very beginning, to worship its own origin, would find its payback at the end when, even with the work complete, it would take its cue from that earlier finality that had proved to be false. One long dead, rather than the rest fitting the completion of a thought, would find himself, unaccountably, still lingering at the back of another man’s tongue: would, as the waves rolled in, now, with a ceaseless throb, to curl upon the cracked beach, still ebb only into the possibility of once more flowing again, and find tight hostelry only in the place where, that uncounted time ago, they’d thought to lay him with such touching finality.
Only in art, the bird proclaimed, was anything ever actually finished, and spoke to the point by flying away.
Here, however, as was possible then, and even, in a hypothesized later, would have to be acknowledged, nature, having divested him already of so much that was necessary, had provided a trick: something not to be found in strength of arm or loftiness of intellect. Nothing, even, in the exhaustive catalogs and canticles one would raise to the procession of so many deities, one would find it singled out for praise: through fear, perhaps, that the unspoken thing, once spoken, would raise the primordial jealousy, and whatever had drowned his early infancy in sleep return to do the same to all the days still to come. Even before that passing breeze, loaded with holiness, had reached him from beyond the cherry trees, before, even, his breath had learned it could continue by itself, subliminal to thought, he would have known better than to be fully present even in the midst of totality: to always hold something in reserve, folded, unbloomed, within his own bud, not even nestled together with what, in the years, would exfoliate into inwardness, but dropped into the spaces between the spaces of thought: the impossible, irrepressible, inexhaustible thing that led him, even in the most thoroughgoing transports of self-knowledge, good and evil, death and decay, to hold to that primary impression that, fallen from any creator, inheres in his object rather than himself: that of something attained.
Nothing now suggested anything other than the completion he’d won. Any jealousy from the past (what it had wanted to be) or misgiving of the future (the desire it would postulate, and in an empty tract of space, draw again the figuration that would tug it down the line) would have been another here, and thereupon there would reassert itself again. What was would be pressed into the service of an is that, not yet even knowing how to desire to be, would learn that hard yearning from formlessness’s form. One might need to survey then what it meant to leave such a place: to leave its trees behind you, its birds, its golden sun falling on fish and butterflies; to harbor its image ever fading, as it always had done, even at its first threshold of light; to know that all that could appear, subsequently, even given the freedom to recollect, would only be a canvas that he’d reckon from what had been what might yet be, and in the space that passed between that original impression and clotted exigency, learn to import, even into his rest a kind of unresting wakefulness, the omnipresence he’d gathered that would watch him as he slept, without laying a prescription for the things he’d neglected to acknowledge, or calling neither to the flame nor marble that would never accept what wasn’t offered in vain.
As it all collapsed into a ring he wielded the brand, and for the time it took the air to warm into smoke, almost remembered what it was he had done, and how it had seemed, while something beyond the night insinuated itself into what he called his peace, his abasement, his worship if that’s what it was, and it was.

Dan Muenzer is an educator from Honolulu, Hawaii. His pseudo-Victoriana was recently published in the Bombay Literary Magazine. He also has pieces forthcoming in The Muleskinner Journal, Frazzled Lit, and Theakers Quarterly. His true passion, however, is for reading and re-reading Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy.