THE MACARONI PEOPLE
The Macaroni People did exist in fashionable eighteenth century history, but enough of them! You can look them up. This single mention is more than enough. I want to talk about the Macaroni People today or, as some call them, the Macaroni Madness, even the Macaroni Miracle, depending on one’s point of view. ‘Elbow Pasta’ — look this up, too! — is a form of Macaroni. Yet, when, in these days, politicians tend to be straight up and down, or soft in the middle, either divisive or all-embracing, it’s important to get terminology right. Covered in cheese. Or with sugar and raisins, as a more wiggly form of the rice pud one was given in the old school canteen. Macmillan was prime minister then. And he said we never had it so good. Well, I begged to differ. Now I begin to agree.
Only last night I was visited by figures on wobbly stilts and they sported what I can only call macaroons as heads. In the days of the Lyon’s Corner House, such cakes were part of the choice on silver tiered cakestands that stood among the teapot and teacups, when listening to the Max Jaffa ensemble in the corner of the room, a corner with a small c. A house made of corners, and cream cornets as companions for the macaroons. The architecture outside had a frontage of leering mascarons (look the latter up on Wikipedia!)
Indeed, Lyons without lions, just rows of gurning masks. And the Macaroni Medley played on mandolins for the teatime customers to swoon at. The clink of cup and saucer just one ingredient to accompany the arrival on stage of living mannequins upon taller, sturdier stilts, more like uncooked spaghetti than al dente manicotti. The scrape of chalk on some hidden blackboard made me think of the school canteen again, and the miniature dumplings that were often as hard as bullets. Treacle tart was only just around the corner. Daydreaming with a small d is never the same as being back in the Good Old Days for real. Towards the end of my life, I often soar with my eyes into the sky to see the true epiphany of Macaroni Madness as the shapes of people wavering like shadows with loose olecranons, miraculously as high as the clouds are. Look up at them!
***
THE LITHOGRAPH
It was difficult for Don to judge whether it configured a single face or two human figures standing up in a boat ready to dive into the sea. Whatever the case, by evidence of its feel to Don’s fingers, he sensed it was a lithograph not a print. More suitable for a vibrant ghost story than an exercise in surface pareidolia. The meaning of the ‘p’ word just used by Don — opaque to many — was a portal to an inner depth below the surface, indeed a visualisation towards shapes of new meaning.
He shook his head. Whom was he talking to or writing for when expressing the above words? He placed in his mind’s eye a face of a stranger, a plain but strangely attractive female face, and the rest of his thoughts were addressed to that person whoever she was. Already, he somehow knew her and he believed that she knew him. Was she connected to the face he had first visualised in the near-abstract lithograph or maybe the two figures in the boat were connected to this woman in some story plot he had yet to be told by another person or by himself. The next question for Don was to wonder why he was referring to himself in the third person singular.
“Don, what’s the matter?”
The voice had not objectively come out of the blue. Equally, Don had completely forgotten that he was unalone in the cellar room, where candlelight struggled with the draughts from what he remembered as the coal bunker’s door to the outside. Thus he was duly startled by the sudden non-arrival of a ‘visitor from Porlock’. Non-arrival because the visitor had been present all along.
Don felt the surface of the lithograph again, as if giving himself time to dwell on what his answer should be. This action served to give his hand something to do instead of staring blankly into the other’s eyes. A reason for delay, to explain his stony silence, while seeking his answer amidst the aged undulations of the lithograph’s design and its ink’s mineral contents. Some of the random scratches of wear and tear seemed part of the design that he had tried to fathom by a combination of an independent pareidolia and the whimsy of a ghost story he had simultaneously told himself. Scored lines on dark draughty walls, he somehow thought. Light that was managed by means other than candles.
“Nothing is the matter, my dear.”
Although it was his answer, he realised it wasn’t his own voice. Nor were the voice’s words ones he even understood. The voice and the words were more ancient than that, even neolithic. And the watery wavery light fell into a strangely strange darkness.
***
ANYTHING GOES, ANYTHING BUT
It was called Deep River, but it was anything but.
With a nightwatchman’s house little more than a hut,
A township where simply anything went,
And that meant its days of Truth and Consent.
And today much goes, simply everything goes,
And jolly townsfolk strode in espadrilles and finest hose.
But a rogue element set alight the night hutch house
And turned this jolly verse into unscanned and unrhymed prose.
You see, inland Deep River had a dry dock as its central point, to which no deep river led. Indeed, no river at all. This made no sense without a strong element of truth and consent. The fact that a huge ocean liner sat between the huge plinths of the dock’s work area, swarming with working hands, and proving that mind over matter actually served its purpose while the economies of scale in Deep River gave much to do for the mischief makers to be scorched free of their mischief and who might have otherwise torched the night hutch first. Busy hands keep contented minds, many claimed, keeping such hands themselves from being nasty hands. Yet, at least one rogue always existed in every community and this particular rogue thought that the nightwatchman had scored with his wife in the eponymous house that now lay in ashes near the dry dock. Not many ashes as it was still ever the remains of a hut or night hutch, not a night house at all. Just a few wispy flakes of ash beneath the towering dock. Never to be noticed unless someone remembered what such ashes once were. Since then, everything went. Even consensus became a mistaken rabbit hole into which truth vanished forever. Sill waters never run deep, never run even shallow. Metaphors mere empty hoses to hose down hulls or wheelhouses. At best, footwear as casually buckled flats not deep-shod shoes at all.
Deep River was anything but what it wasn’t most.
The Night House the mere shimmer of a watery ghost.
And vast shapes come and go nightly from the dockside struts,
No-one woken to see them coming and going like tiny buts.
***
HOLD YOUR HORSES
Not that Boss Jenner knew anything about horses. He had never been near a horse, let alone groomed or ridden one. Yet, his favourite expression when facing someone who appeared to be acting impulsively was ‘hold your horses’ and then go on to explain why such metaphorical horses should thus be held.
Imagine a situation, therefore, where Boss Jenner encountered a horse in real life completely beyond the context of what had transpired before such an encounter. Out of the blue, quite unpremeditated, he lurched forward with his head, or his nose did if not the rest of his head. More a leaning motion than the presumed lurching, in hindsight. He could not believe his eyes as he caught sidewise his own reflection in what he later found out to be a Horse Mirror that was once common in certain areas of time when grooming. The nose was slowly stretching like a piece of abstract art worthy of preserving, had that been possible in those days. There was then no easy way of making permanent records of what one was constantly seeing moment by moment, as there was today. A series of static or stable images for posterity, either to incriminate felons or to award heroes. Even to make fine art from finding captures of the momentary and potentially momentous, a valued few of which clinchings or clickings could possibly be called monumental. Boss Jenner was ever to be part of such a framed cluster of splintered realities. One clinching in particular was being head to head with a horse, to the nature of which horse he had yet not been able to acclimatise himself. In racecourse parlance about close finishes, indeed, against the odds, a long head short of a nose.
The stabilised pen is still poised enough to write more, had this not fallen short of a never-ending horror story, instead of a fleeting ghost story as it now teeters upon becoming. Even a novel given, in hindsight, the now arbitrary but apparently careful choice of the protagonist’s name of Boss Jenner, a name that might have been intended for a novel stretched over time from start to finish. Fiction horseplay, it could be called. At optimum, a form of horse-trading between the art genres of literature and modern painting, but hopefully better than both, should time be allowed to quell any wanton impulses by whoever wrote this.
***
WATCH FROM THE START
The invitation seemed more tempting than ‘Watch Live’. Best to get at least a glimpse of the whole context in order to enjoy the middle and end. Hannah remembered the old days when cinemas regularly had continuous performances and one could enter and leave at whatever stage of the various screenplay storylines had been reached. It did not seem to matter, and, if Hannah agreed with my own views on this matter, one’s enjoyment and comprehension was not affected, in fact the middle-to-middle of some films was preferable to a beginning-to-end. Perhaps they once made films differently, fully expecting alternative timeloops in the audiences watching them.
In later years, with the arrival of VHS, I witnessed Hannah experimenting with the altering of the tapes so that she could watch old cinema films backwards. Whether that soon became easier with DVDs was a moot point because, by then, she had ceased finding backwards viewing a novelty to cherish, but the act of reflecting the circling sun upon a coloured surface of unintended colours was an audacious eccentricity to wave in the face of prescribed tradition, and Hannah indulged such a sense of new things happening every day to the extent of deliberately choosing to avoid internet streaming ab initio so she could end her life with something even newer. She created me. Complete with my own real memories of the past.
***
VIRGINIA CREEPER
Always wash your hands when preparing stuff for the kitchen oven; you don’t know what might have crept upon them. I sensed the Virginia Creeper was parthenogenetic and I had no duty to explain what I meant. I just knew it seemed to come from nowhere because it was not officially native to where I lived. And that it commonly climbed old buildings and some tall trees with its customary glow of redness in its leaves. I put out of my mind that it was poisonously inimical if one was careless with handling it and didn’t wash one’s hands thoroughly. No holds barred, my meanings are well hidden. No condescending to those who may read this tract purely in order to read the dubious existence of ghosts into every space between its printed lines. Even the sound of its words carried messages beyond their semantics. If it is too hot in the kitchen, nobody is preventing you from leaving. The oven needs to be hot so as to do its job. And indeed the creeper is climbing in profusion across the mansion walls towards the roof like a veritable conflagration. The finale of a horror film or an arson committed for insurance purposes? No it was all part and parcel of Mimi’s attempts to explain the nature of the ghosts that creep along with the creeper. Subtle ways of imparting them into tenuousness from nowhere, like virgin births or accidental prompts for artificial intelligence, without, at the same time, having to be explicit. To be plain about them would make the ghosts vanish, and she wished to encourage them, even to the extent of using these attenuations as a means towards the ends of helping her with existential angsts about other impending terrors that were far worse than ghosts. Ghosts at least had some ‘promise’ embedded in their existence, a proof of an after-life if you need me to be plain and simple. Mimi on the other hand felt no such qualms, dressed in her red hat and purple clothes that she used for socialising with like-minded people. Redness always climbs to the top, she thought, except if it’s one’s birthday; she smiled at the thought. She hired me to translate into plainness her endeavours in subtlety so that she could get her point across, and, so, I masqueraded, hidden in even plainer sight, as it were, dressed like a Morris dancer, my head decked in red leaves with wooden batons to beat upon other dancers’ wooden batons as we made arcane patterns upon the lawns and struck rhythmic noises in even closer vicinity with Mimi’s mansion’s vision of a burnt-out shell. I hope you get out of the kitchen in time. Forget the hands.
No comments:
Post a Comment