Luke White

Alexander and members of his forward guard, unarmoured and dusty in the winterdark streets that three months from now will be illuminated every corner by the glint of flame off bronze breastplate and greaves. Collapsed at an inn drinking the harsh fermentation of foreign grapes, listening to preposterous stories, elaborately woven Cretan lies. An itinerant amuses the group with fables far Indian of the Dragon who circles the ocean that circumscribes the world and who swallows his own tail, itself an Autocephalon that has consumed the first and he concedes to the commander that this cannot be known to be true as to know would require to be without from the serpent which has nothing but an inner.

Generals down drinks drowned in flasks cast by a glassblower who has bent the mouth of the glass around into a handle that snakes within to feed the base; there no within or without, but a solitary surface that contains and is contained by the liquid that will make its way through the torturous twists of stomachs steeled to war that have allowed rivers of wine to pass through with no change in their character. They will later remember the shape of the bottles in the fragments of shattered glass amongst the burned remnants of the glassblower’s hut that will be remanded to sand by hoofbeat and rainfall and time’s refusal of quarter.

Alexander and his generals arrayed against the eastern sun as it rises between temple columns from Asia unconquered. His commanders heavy-lidded and slow behind him up temple steps and he takes heed though no note of those whose hands are this morning calloused and raw from rope-burn and smelling of cornel-bark, who the night prior had been with hands soft as the faces of the women who stand now hidden in the shortening shadows of the low limestone lintels.

The priest climbs on to the axle and in loud decantation promises the word behind the contralateral sun to the knot’s undoer. Phrygian chants rise up with incense from grates below the plaza and a child falls to the ground in seizures speaking an original Tongue ancient before time that the priests cannot interpret. Tall tumuli of the old kings cast thick palls perpendicular to the white Persian columns and Alexander’s marble face is cast with the shadowed geometries of his predecessors.

Alexander regards the knot thick and intwisted and smooth from working and reworking, the scrabble of hands themselves smoothed to bone in the echoes of past struggles and failure. It coils a Medusan sphere of linear topography conjoining far distant points, and in the marriage of peripheries along the line Alexander sees the bridges of long noses, trails of horse and dromedary far to Greece and yet untrodden towards an unexplored Indus, pillars raised from foreign marble to xenophonic gods, blade-edges waxing and waning with the solstice and equinox of blood and surrender in close opposition.

Alexander accepts that to knot implies origin and terminus and the solution to the dilemma, the genius of the machine is not in the triviality of windings and unwindings but in the epiphanic unveiling of a beginning and an end by the man who will join the spring’s source to the sea. Knot and world both are a solitary surface, flat without an opposing side, joined end to end in a half-twist that marries west into east and mountain to shore and Olympus is warmed by Meruvian waves.

Alexander is a surface bounded by the singularity of his birth and a death yet undefined in a borderless land, a hyperbolic topography populated by the gridwork of crops and collected tribute and orders of fallen phalanges, the collected genealogies of kings fallen and yet to be and the manifold battles fought and to be fought and yet unthought that demarcate all edges which he curves inward within himself as his blade falls cleanly through the knot.

Seven months ago I decided to stop writing. I’d kept an online journal since the age of twenty-four that remains, locked behind filters and passwords, the lone remnant of the years. Eventually my writing and thought and my image of a particular girl from the desert became all the same thing, a knotted-up bundle that when I unknotted it was really just knots after all, and when she was gone the vacuum pulled far western cross-country drives and dreams about dragons and songs and ghosts of millions of steps through the canyons of Manhattan into the same formless singularity of loss, which isn’t a vacuum to be filled after all but a dark, small impossible gravity that erases all color and differentiation within its inescapable orbit.

Stopping was easier than I expected; the first few weeks without words put me through a withdrawal I could chalk up to the loss of the slight lovely yellow-haired proximal cause who I knew, unlike words, was not coming back. After that the methadone of medicine kept me calm, if numb, and I could replace the little lightning-arcs of thought that words had sparked with numbers and drips, sodium and epinephrine and the constant titration of coffee in the morning before sunrise that by the end of the day I had alchemized into comfort and cure.

But no one is really cured; it’s a delaying tactic we use to clear the cobwebs of disease just long enough to buy us a few more decades, or a month, or twelve hours to figure out what we need to say and then to say it and then flint-faced deny death the triumph of surrender on terms.

I’ve been thinking about Alexander in India, elephants which Pliny says are the natural enemy of dragons, Viking rhymes that mask as puzzles guessed from silences, the ten second stories that unknot themselves as I cut past them through the miles of Manhattan and leave them implied behind me. I’d like to write again, not so much because I’m thinking about these things but because writing makes me think about these things, and these things are good to think about.