The Ghosts of Jay MillAr by Jay Millar Page A

that no one could survive it. He spent much of his time alone, speakeasy style, slipping from shadow to shadow along the night. His mind ready for anything, distracted by nothing, he was wearing the skirts of the past. The night so black it couldn’t possibly exist. On the other side of the alley there is an invisible               wearing a brown down fill’d jacket and tie scrawling childlike words across a wall: ‘Mr P. Cob_ / BEWARE ’. The word BEWARE written in such a delicate calligraphy that it looks indecipherable, but our hero is ready to imagine it says any-thing, anything at all. How sad it is, he thinks, that throughout this dark hull of a city people are covering up each other’s tracks. Painting over every artifact they can find in a quick attempt to claim it, to make it new and suitable to their own states of being. It all layers itself naturally, without any effort, and origin has no voice here. It is 1934 (it has been here for so long) and everyone is deep in the heart of a depression. Why does the rest of the world insist on becoming invisible at moments like these? Shaking his head at the invisible        who is still writing, he cannot believe the mind could shut down on itself, cannot believe there is anything worth saying about meeting exactly where our darkness covers up the tracks. In an instant he is ten feet back, and the invisible has sketched a square which is, he decides, the same size as the building on which it has been drawn. It is all very shocking. In an instant he is thirty feet back and the building is the same size as the sketch it is drawn on. And inside the square, he has noticed, is says nothing at all. In an instant he is seventy feet back and the man, still writing, is gone. And nothing happened.
    Perfectly Ordinary Dream #1860 1 (July 9,1969)
    We might as well be dead, and happy, and alive. It was the greatest reading he would ever give and as a blessing she was present. O the beauty of a single red head! This, too, would come to be an historic occasion, for it was the only time she would see William Blake read to an audience. At least she thought it was him up there on the stage. It was hard to tell, the way he hunched over himself, not even bothering to face the audience (of which she was the only member), his long wispy hair falling like curtains over his face, as though they might rise at any moment and the play would begin again. A
single table, centre stage, at which a man sits. A waitress appears (as though from nowhere) and takes the man’s order. When she turns, the man watches her hum swaying away to the bar, and smiles to himself (for there is no one else in the bar). He pulls a revolver from his coat pocket. At the exact moment she begins to pull his beer, he shoots himself in the head.
The curtain falls. And William Blake remains hunch’d over his beer on the stage, reading his poems in the most clear, booming voice imaginable. It echoes around the empty room. There is not even a microphone. It is almost as though he does not wish his body to be present, only his voice. And she slowly begins to realize a most amazing sadness, she feels it bubbling up around the front of her skull: What sadness to have something to say, and no one who will listen. How sad and how beautiful the persistence, the sheer will to believe absolutely in what your mind can do. Another frothy beer appears on the table before her. No matter what brand she orders this same milky broth appears. Soap. Soap Milk. How strange, she thinks. Drunk out of her mind in the middle of the afternoon.
    Perfectly Ordinary Dream # 1867 (January 21,1932)
    Rimbaud was not only surprised that the man standing before him wanted to publish his writing so adamantly, but that he didn’t even recognize him as the author. ‘This is the finest writing I have
EVER
laid my eyes upon’, the man was saying (although he was