WHITTEMORE QUOTATIONS

It has struck me many times when reading the novels of Edward Whittemore, that the prose is immensely quotable. In my last re-reading of the novels, I noted a number of excerpts from the novels as ideal for quotes. Below are those I have noted for each book. Please contact me if you have your own favourite quote from one of the novels, and I will include it here.
Quin's Shanghai Circus /Sinai Tapestry / Jerusalem Poker / Nile Shadows / Jericho Mosaic

Quin's Shanghai Circus

 

 

The manuscripts were illustrated with ink drawings
exquisitely detailed to show every hair. Even the
cat hairs could be counted, where cats appeared.

Right this way for the illusive dream often sought and seldom found, or to be exact, often found but seldom recognized.

The fat man muttered and swore, laughed, lied when there seemed no reason to lie, then corrected himself before wandering off on some byway of his four decades of travel through Asia.

There seemed only one thing to do, so I did it. I became a ghost.

Of course we do what we have to do. That's what she taught us, after all, by performing the tea ceremony, turning the bowls at sunset. We do what we have to do.

An immobile naked giant who heard everything and saw
everything, from whom there was nothing to fear.

A kind and lonely man. As kind and lonely as a clown.

Here echoes could have no end, for the great empty area
was no less than a cavern of the mind.

He swept his arms through history gathering up
emperors and peasants, barbarians, poets.

When there is Tao in the empire, the galloping steeds are turned back to fertilise the ground by their droppings.

War, disaster, turmoil. Despite it all Mama had followed the Tao.

To know its sawdust
Its smells and rings and highbars
Is to remember.
~
The supreme present
Nothing compares to the present
Unless it's the past.
~
Alone and delirious in the desert of his Mongol ancestors, in the solitude of wind and snow, he raised his hand to wave farewell.
~
But lives cross, the sun and the moon contradict each other,
we are enmeshed in a network of doing and feeling. Others
become part of us and the pasts of others are beyond us.
~
In the darkness of a minute or an hour or all the years of his life, Quin listened to the echoes of Geraty's booming laughter.
~
Facts and figures. Are they enough, or is it possible that Shanghai was more than this? Not just a city but an actual part of mind?
A vision we all carry somewhere within us?

~
Life is brief and we must listen to every sound
~
No they will not believe you but you must tell them the truth all the same. You must say that once a man dreamed a wind would come, he dreamed it and willed it, and because he did the wind came.
~
Now we see him stepping into the ring, the master of ceremonies dressed in boots and frock coat, carrying whip and
megaphone, a shaman and arbiter of miracles.
~
Timeless, masterless
Come the acts of memory
A Shanghai circus


Sinai Tapestry

 

The manor was an immense mausoleum containing no less than five hundred thousand separate objects acquired by his family in the course of six hundred and fifty years of doing nothing

What the family malady amounted to, in short, was an unshakable conviction that the entire universe was ordered with the sole purpose of endangering Skanderbeg Wallensteins.

Lunatic prophecy and moronic fancy collaborating to produce original Holy Scripture fully seven hundred years before the first appearance of the Old Testament.

The divine source of inspired religion, these whimsies
concocted by two rambling anonymous tramps in 930BC?

A flight of birds just passed us, going from where to where
in the desert? I don't know, but when they alight I'll have arrived at my holy place.

What have you done today for God?
Today in His Name I have rewritten the universe.

The swirls of the Koran shape and unshape themselves
as do the waves in the desert and yes the oasis may be small.
But yes, we will find it.

Once more a dream and a place to dream.

Pillars and fountains and waterways, a place where
myrrh grew three thousand years ago and forever.

I named him Bernini. The dreams were crumbling, but not
quite gone. I suppose I hoped someday he would also carve his own beautiful fountains and stairway to somewhere.

No dreams now, only the empty day, but at least he had
survived the harsh coming of the light.

A gesture then, a photograph now, a cloak threadbare
and resplendent from century to century.

Hopes and failures given to time, demons pressed into disquietude, spirits released to memory in the chaotic book of life, a repetitious and contradictory Bible suggesting infinity,
a Sinai Tapestry of many colors.

Original and unreal? Imitation and unreal?
What gibberish is this? What madness?

Alexander the Great and Christ, a blind man and an imbecile, the czar and Wallenstein all steadfastly sharing their profane and sacred concerns over the centuries.

Have you heard of a mysterious book in which all things are
written? A book that is circular and unchronicled and
calmly contradictory, suggesting infinity?

And wasn't it possible that all prophecies were really
histories misplaced by time? Memories in disguise?

In the end nothing could be said of his work except that it was preposterous and true and totally unacceptable.

Undoubtedly God passed His time in some other way, but how?

Men tend to become fables and fables tend to become men.


Jerusalem Poker

 

Here I am only twenty-one years old and I'm already
a veteran of a war that was fought nearly seventy years ago.

Mummy dust. Trading in futures. Religious symbols.
With that kind of backing the three men seemed unbeatable.


A fateful stone from antiquity discovered in a temple
beside the Nile. Fate breathing variety into life.


Altogether a roomy seven-story apartment, inverted and
impressively solid, in the top of Cheops pyramid.


Our subject isn't Strongbow's study, but Strongbow himself, Strongbow in Constantinople thirty-three years ago. What sinister game was he playing out there then? Just who does he think he is going around and snatching up the Ottoman Empire?


No reason to hold back just because there are only three
hours between noon and midnight on a rainy day in February.
That happens all the time in bad weather. But spring
will be coming soon and then we can make up for it.


We're holy men now, you and I, and our concerns are
spiritual ones. But even a single night with the princess
is worth a century of incoherency.


And even when hard factual evidence was available, it seemed to drift away almost at once and lose itself in the twisting alleys of Jerusalem with the ease of a Haj Harun, that unreal
phantom figure who somehow embodied the spirit of the mountaintop, everybody's mythical Holy City.


The god of dawn? The god of light?
Strange presences, it seemed, on the shores of the Sinai where he and Maud had once known love.

Christ in gloom and smoke with a pistol in his belt. Christ in the fires of Smyrna.

And somewhere in Jerusalem, or in an encampment near it,
a child would grow up not knowing he or she had been born to Christ and Mary Magdalene.

A night seemingly like so many others. Father Zeno tending his
wheel and Theresa her sainthood, and above them on the rooftops, Joe, a silent witness with his sleeping pigeons,
minding the dreams of new stars over Jerusalem.

And if God turns out to be a gunrunner crossing the desert in a balloon in 1914?

My God but I was young then and didn't know much, nothing
in fact, plain zero. Since then I've learned a little. You do playing poker in Jerusalem for twelve years.

By God, isn't it true we can get lucky now and then and
time doesn't pass at all? Or rather it passes all right,
it just doesn't take all the good things with it.

Peace is the treasure, peace to seek, Melchizedeks's gentle dream on the mountain.

Tonight they dream there is a Jerusalem. And because
they do, it will be here when we wake up tomorrow,
dreamed into existence for another year.

The end had come. Jerusalem lay on the table. At last
it was a case of winner take all in the eternal city.

Change the view that's the article. If you're down on the coast, bugger it up to the mountains. If you're in the mountains, bugger it down to the coast. Do you follow me?

For the Junker baron and baroness and for Martyr as well,
the nineteenth century had abruptly come to an end in that early summer dawn in 1914, although elsewhere in the world
a few more weeks were to pass before the radical new
state of affairs was generally recognized.

The least we can do on these beautiful Aegean shores is honor our pagan gods, and there's never been any question,
they're on the side of love. Heavens, how they did carry on.
Swans and bulls were no obstacle whatsoever.
In comparison our very best efforts are meager indeed.


Nile Shadows

 

In addition, so contradictory were the disguises of his background, it could not even be determined whether he was a Moslem or a Christian or a Jew.

It's only when we try to come up with answers that we lose our way and wander, like the stars overhead. For the stars do that don't they? Forgetting what we've been told, I mean, isn't that surely the way the heavens look? Astray and incomprehensible?

Or should I remind myself that almost everyone who has ever
been important in history was nobody to begin with, and
that maybe the most important ones of all stay that way?
…Invisible don't you know. Like a voice speaking the truth.

Life is an awesome blessing and the more we know of it
the richer we are. The more we know its dust, no less
than the golden toll of its bell.

Your journey now involves time, my child, not space. Not rivers and mountains and deserts to be crossed, but memories to be explored.

Please forgive me that outburst of realism, he muttered. I try to keep them down to a minimum, given the way things are.

Suddenly the world you knew is no longer there and you find yourself off in some little corner where nothing is quite right,
not quite what it used to be, and a sad loneliness steals over your heart …Sad, because you always thought your little world would go on forever.

In the end all grand schemes of order are private, and all the systems which we pretend are universal have but the dimensions of my closet.

…this network of Stern's spanned more than a century, its
members not all among the living, yet their presences still so powerful they echoed endlessly through other lives in a shadowy web of doing and feeling, that most profound of all secret human codes.

When the day had come to look back and ponder the weavings of Stern's wanderings, the network that would finally
reveal what Stern had sought, the unique figure traced by every man on the infinite landscape of time.

Those little moments of infinite beauty and infinite sadness
falsely ordered in retrospect to give life continuity,
a recitation of finite moments that in fact never existed.

…heaven save us from people who dream, especially failed artists, the worst of the lot. All tyrants seem to be failed artists of one kind or another…But then, so are most of us in our souls.

Open tomb every Sunday, a charming social event
with all the amenities observed.

What a droll thing life is. This mysterious and merciless
arrangement of logic for a futile purpose.

Hope … hope. We can squander all the gift of life and
even more than that can be taken from us. But not hope.
We must have hope or the heavens will spin silently
and it will be as if we have never lived…a nothingness of nothing.

Stern's haunting canticle in the wilderness for the lost
sunken moon…his only companions the unknowable
Sphinx and the fleeing stars.

Anonymous in his rags in the dust at twilight, a beggar surveying his limitless kingdom.

Rags to riches to rags it goes, and whoever said we all begin the same and end the same knew what he was talking about.

In fact you might even say codes are a metaphor for what we are beneath the surface of things. And some of them seem so universal we think they can be written in stone, while others are so obscure no one but ourselves may ever know they exist.

We all do what we can in life. We try to no purpose and
we do what we can and what we can't do, we don't…

I suppose we all have to delve into the Egyptologist's craft now and then, and there even seen to be some hieroglyphs involved. A code, so to speak. Things I can't decipher because
there's no Rosetta Stone for this one.

But all lives are secret tapestries that swirl and sweep through the years with souls and strivings as the colours, the threads.

History doesn't hide you, just the opposite. Gives away your
hiding place, if anything. But what other hope is there?

Liffy once more the haunted prophet of old, a frail man stricken with the terrible knowledge of the names of things…

You've been tending your soul, haven't you? You used to talk about doing that and that's what you've done. You went away and did it.

Good and evil just aren't as simple as we'd like them to be.
We try hard to pretend otherwise, but it's never really true.

And when the time comes let a whirlwind descend on the
desert at night and let the blessed stillness of dawn
be on the sands where he's walked.

It has to do with the tiny glimpses we're given of people,
and the fact that everyone seems to be a secret agent in life
in a way with their own private betrayals and their own private loyalties that we don't know anything about, and their own secret code copied down from a private onetime pad,
whichwe both know is all but unbreakable.

People have a way of slipping into our hearts and staying there, and we treasure them and don't want to let them go,
and more than that, we never can let them go.

Long thoughts standing around like pilgrims outside an oasis, leaning on their staves and restlessly waiting to be spoken to life. Talk, the poor man's gold. The thirsty man's water.

THE PANORAMA HAS MOVED.

…..unfortunately barbarians do seem to serve a purpose in history, for when we have them as enemies at our gates we no longer have to judge ourselves. For a brief moment, anyway, our innate savagery is safely out there beyond the city walls and we can rejoice in our self-righteousness, and be smug in our petty civic virtues.

Why is it that the Mongols of this world always tell us
they're defending us against the Mongols?

Life is always a gift of faces and a gift of tongues, and
I don't mean just those of others. I mean our own… All the faces we're given in the course of a lifetime…and all the many tongues we learn to speak.

Men always justify wars by claiming they're fighting the barbarians. What they don't bother to add is that the reason wars are continuous in history is because the barbarians are inside us.

Jericho Mosaic

 

A struggle called history, the human soul, God.

Secretly, all human beings dream. Even thieves and connivers have that hidden place in their hearts.

Having lived for three hundred years in our Jericho time, I know man's political endeavours are devious and futile and completely without merit when compared to even one flowering fruit tree, which is truly a boundless philosophical subject...

What is true is that a holyman sometimes has special
obligations, to others even more than himself.

To her it was a vibrant silent dream of a city, its narrow alleys
a maze of man's strivings through the ages where even the
smallest corner guarded a hoard of secret history, a treasure of secret tales only fitfully at rest in the dust of millennia.

Finding our true way is perhaps no more than being what we
have always been…but with eyes that see.

People learn to hide and survive or hate and survive or dream
or survive, but the one thing they do is survive and not with acceptance in their hearts for those who humiliate them.

Perhaps in the excitement of going to war against the Jews,
he thought, the Arabs were once more indulging that profound Levantine trait of preferring the mirage in the distance to the dreary stretch of desert at hand, the rich prospects of fantasy rather than the gritty facts of everyday life.

In my three hundred years I have seen several proud conquerors come to Jericho in search of oranges in the lowest and oldest town on earth, but I suppose that's the nature of living in desirable place.

Thus the mountains and the valley, the deserts and the sea, lust and wisdom and murder and empire, these various profane
and sacred causes of man all find their crossroads in Jericho, which is why we grow oranges here. To refresh those who are forever passing through.

And yet nothing that happens today changes our yesterdays,
mused Moses. The Mount of Temptation still rises above us
to the west, the river where John the Baptist renewed souls
still flows beside us to the east. We are well situated today as ever for shesh-besh and holy matters.

Like all conquerors, he wears the too-old face of a boy
who has had to endure the unspeakable.

The Holy Land, in other words. And also a fair enough assessment of the lowest and oldest town on earth, it seemed to him. Workable and adequate for the time being, at least until God did show His Hand.

A pair of open hands facing Assaf, facing Yousef. A palmist's indelible map of the lines of the heart, of the lines of the mind and destiny for the soothsayer in each of them to read by the firelight, one day to ponder.

We add new vows to the old and forsake nothing and the soul becomes like the Holy City, the myth which is Jerusalem, a dream of ourselves which forever unachievable, to be seen only by others, its wonders recounted to us in imaginary tales of distant places.

How far, he wondered, could a man really go in creating himself? How far, in other words, could the Runner run?

…musing on the mirage of the present which was forever
being born of the mythology of the past.

The tapestry shifts from moment to moment, just as
the unchanging desert never stops changing.

But all the same those rare and beautiful moments from the past live on within us, no farther away than the smell of an olive wood fire or the sound of rain beating softly on a garden, time's unquiet ghosts, haunting our memories with secret whispers of…what if?

Understanding as little as we do, we always seem to be connected to others in ways we never suspect, in a sweep of time we can't fathom, in moments we're only able to recognize years later. As if for each of us the important things in life become but one single story in the end, one beautiful secret dream we grasp too late.

For the big and powerful, it was always easy enough to find new Killing grounds where others would do the dying for them.

Why be caught publishing yesterday's truths about today's national heroes and saviours, when we all know they're going to turn out to be tomorrow's unscrupulous villains and national traitors.

The steps of survival were always so small, it seemed to
the Runner. Yet how vast was the sad finality of these changes he was witnessing.

The tragedy is that our greatest human treasure - memory - so often glitters locked away out of reach, the one gift we can never quite give away to another, even to those we love most.

And wasn't it strange how all of this had ineluctably come to
pass for the Runner? Even with the most careful planning
and all the will in the world, there never seemed a way to know which little moment from the past would mysteriously blossom into a man's inevitable entire future.

Serenity, prayer, peace of mind, sleep - they all partake of the same gentle breeze.

The leisurely sessions over the shesh besh board, Bell noticed,
had a peculiar way of exploring the universe without appearing to do so.

Don't wish too hard for what cannot be, he said. It's good and right for a holy man to believe more than the rest of us.

In a world of secrecy and fury and chaos, it was astonishing how short distances were and how quickly things changed.
Indeed, how near an unexpected friend could be.

…great men understand dust and oranges far better than the rest of us. Because they know man is dust and oranges. Because they know all of the rest is simply the clatter and dice of a shesh besh game, a run of chance and skill which we all play and refer to as life…clatter and dice, dice and clatter.

The emotions in the mosaic seemed to crowd together and yet remain separate - a commanding Tree of Life sheltering cruelty and beauty.

Contact: dreaming@jerusalemdreaming.info

©Anne Sydenham 2001-2016