A passage from Lowry’s heartbreaking and destitute and beautiful novel that drifts from sober fogs to drunken moments of incredible clarity:

……Night: and once again, the nightly grapple with death the room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful sleep, the voices outside the window, my name being continually repeated with scorn by imaginary parties arriving, the dark spinets.  As if there were not enough real noises in these nights the color of grey hair.  Not like the rending tumult of American cities, the noise of unbandaging of great giants in agony.  But the howling pariah dogs, the cocks that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico.  For myself I like to take my sorrow into the shadow of old monestaries, my guilt into cloisters, and under tapestries, and into the misericordes of unimaginable cantinas where sad-faced potters and legless beggars drink at dawn, whose cold jonquil beauty on rediscovers in death.  So that when you left Yvonne, I went to Oaxaca.  There is no sadder word.  Shall I tell you, Yvonne, of the terrible journey there through the desert over narrow gauge railway on the rack of the third class carriage bench, the child whose life its mother and I saved by rubbing its belly with tequila out of my bottle, or of how, when I went to my room in the hotel where we once were happy, the noise of slaughtering below in the kitchen drove me out into the glare of the street, and later, that night, there was a vulture sitting in the washbasin?  Horrors portioned to a giant nerve!  No, my secrets are of the grave and must be kept.  And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of the land is hell.

-from Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008