POST-GESTALT FICTIONS (14)

 DOWNSTREAM

The argument went this far, and thus far only. On a positive note, an upstream or overstream entailed no backstream at all, no tired old characters, no wilting ghosts, no exhumed monsters, indeed, this was a turning of a page to something far more tangible than even Andy Warhol paintings as physical objects. Recast as miniatures in dress-brooches or tiny wall-frames. Tins of soup, canisters of brass polish and unsprinkable salt-cellars had now become silkscreen images that did not exist other than flat-out as lifted paint on porous surfaces. The actual framed results, though, could in turn be lifted as discrete things-in-themselves, wagged and wiggled about, then inspected with single eyepieces. But once upon a time such methods of materials-handling and heat-exchange took human hands to accomplish; later in history, with controllable claws of metal cranes or mobile vices on wheels. But, even more recently, it was easier with manoeuvres of an Ai’s robotic jaws or padded paws instead of gloves with hollow slots for fingers and thumbs. The manipulation of miniatures now derives not from manipulation, but from surface to surface tensions. Friction grazing friction, with sense data sandwiched between. Churlish Tontine couldn’t have made it up, even if he since developed the imaginative ability to retrospectively airbrush his unlikely name first.

He was, in fact, the last nameless person left standing. Then handled and lifted bodily to a prizewinner’s plinth made from concrete bricks no larger than Lego ones. It was a sort of domino rally, with a single domino left upright after the first one was tipped over and he was that very domino. Downstream or upstream, the rally’s ranks did teeter dangerously closer but he never looked back. Remaindered as a specimen of what a human being had been and put in a miniature museum along with other antique items of Pop Art to match in scale. Were humans and their artefacts always that tiny when compared to what or whom? Inevitably a rhetorical question disguised as an empty probe within an endlessly muffled pause.

***

MENDICANT

It was a tabletop land where TC lived with his now reversed but still forgotten names, literally a surface for Bridge and other simpler games like Old Maid and Beggar Your Neighbour. Tarot sessions, too. There was enough leg space beneath it, even for his long ones.  A liminal space, where he imagined his apprentice amanuenses to thrive, these words perhaps written by one of them. But somehow the actual scope of what was happening seemed beyond any words whatsoever. A waking lucidity disguised as a superdream that grappled overnaturally with bigger issues than just the surface situation of certain things falling away one by one leaving the essential thing-in-itself victorious as reaper of all the meanings — not only of its own singular meaning. A Lego model as a plea for being released into a prehensile existence. This was a taunting tontine for words, not for people. It was not even a tontine of Darwinian selection as the essential opting for a supernature. A knock-out contest  without strict parameters of heats, quarterfinals et al. A Swiftian parascaling of Man and Monster.  Each tarted-up playing card trumped by the next shuffle and cut.

A knock-on effect of massing hordes, bleating herds, bleeding chunks, whereupon TC assumed that beggars can’t be choosers, not even counted as medicines to be decanted or to merge into a flabby Earth-ball with which to exercise and play catch. The long and the short of it was preternaturally leg-over, as he became ill-tempered enough to climb down a strut of the foldable table to kill the particular bosscat among the many other aspirant hirelings for the opportunity to write this about him with such a nefarious lack of clarity. Indeed, there remained a hive of so many suspect amanuenses down there with various types of pens to choose from to morph his nibs.  And all these upcasts forthwith scrawled ‘Spartacus!’ with a composite quill on a singular card. A curse for any tontine worth its salt. 

***

MORIBUND

CT had his initials corrected by re-reversal, it seemed, and, under this new shortening of his nomenclature, he searched for the bosscat so as to curtail the source of the infestation. A spanner, though, he needed, to turn it full circle until the squealing sound was truncated into piercing pinpoints of silent light, alongside slower revolutions of the round tabletop. A tocsin reversed, just as his own still forgotten name was only recalled by its consonant plosives of initial engagement by needle and groove. The C was plainly a plosive by dint of being pronounced like a K when affixed to the rest of the word it ignited. The T was already thus triggered even when left alone without the rest of its body.  A tontine of letters striving for the winning zenith of semantic meaning without revealing what letters they were! 

He felt his way into corners of cards which had been masked by such corners’ use as scrapbook affixings, just like snapshots in photo albums, except these were stylised pics of royalty and jokers. One of the latter splayed moribund, as if asphyxiated by clamping so close to its own image. CT knew he was nearer to finding the bosscat, but he almost enjoyed being made to feel moribund himself, wilting like any ghosts used to be when he hunted them instead of seeking spanner fodder. He grasped his brute force instrument of turn and torque in case he met anyone who turned ugly enough to have their heads screwed off. Until he was disarmed by the charms of two women called Barbara and Hannah, who remained important enough to remember their forenames at least, still alive and kicking somewhere. At first CT suspected they were agents of the bosscat, for which both women were eager to keep such a secret clamped down on its steampunk urgings to escape by any valve it could find.  Any trunk or local calls on whatever technopunk equipment that happened to come to hand.

Hannah had the prettiest palindrome, and nothing could be feared to lurk there, under plain bolt or grooved. Barbara however had to bear the burden of an approximate Abracadabra, and this stress showed on her face. They managed to talk, however, as if they were nearly human. In shortened temper, CT scrutinised their demeanours while blocking their ear-shrill tintones; he sought the incognito shadows behind them for unlikely skirting-boards that had cartoon arches over-neatly cut into them large enough to hold rats or small cats. Even Dumbo hid somewhere, he guessed, perhaps within the word where he started writing above in predictive parallel with precisely simultaneous events. The scariest tontine of all is the one that nobody notices, until it is too late to worry.

***

GURNING

It was inevitable that Barbara would hold one of her knit and natter sessions as soon as settling into a new community after, on the face of it, a fracas with a cat at her previous property. She loved pets of all kind, so it was ironic her being driven from home by a single puss, but it had eyes like grooved spirals and paws padded beyond their means. Who had wrapped the latter was anyone’s guess, and nobody is even trying.

The ladies’ casting-on and -off of needles’ stitches still wrapping back on them, till the knitted fabrics grew under the gentle onslaught of fingers. And between times the so-called breathe-holes of looser areas, where the plain and purl had merged, began to create tiny gurning faces which would later be carried over into the intended garments even when someone wore them as normal jumpers or cardigans. Bending and bowing of bodies making the holes in the unshapely surfaces even more noticeable. Holes that needed the torque and bite of mending. Or so Barbara feared, as she listened to the chittering ladies while they clicked their needles as a coda before leaving under a cloud of social unease. Because, in a  corner, was one man with a folded umbrella who incredibly seemed to be adeptly creating a 3D pyramid of knitting. He had initially chauntered on about something he called a nematode from which he suffered badly and then about morling or shorling wool, the former as shorn from dead sheep, the latter from live. But he had since put his face where his self-evident skills were and not where his mouth was. A stunning totem of ancient Egypt made with its own deliberate air-holes that literally breathed in and out as if alive, unlike the accidental gaps knitted by the nattering ladies. He had whiskers he wagged and long since he had changed chauntering to mewing as a model for dignified silence, while gradually the other knitters held their breath or had it taken away by the sight of what he actually extruded from his neatened rows of tiny knots unknown to sane knitting, even while the ladies themselves were now tatting more successfully despite the sound of their mouths tutting explosively. An atonal music of renewed intent as derived from a cross-purpose series of crochets and ravelled lace.

Barbara took one last look at the inscrutable man whose own evolving face was now being darned on a wooden mushroom as stitched by a series of different expressions, all of them unreadable.

***

THE RAZUMOVSKY QUARTETS

Nothing to do with a Corrida Call, but the viola player Barbara shouted Olé at the end of playing the 3rd string quartet that evening in a packed hall near what was once called Madrid. She and the other three players then took a deserved bow after such a magnificent performance of what had became their trademark inspiration of the world’s ears. Each time seemed more powerful than the last. Talk about practice makes perfect. Not that they needed actually to practise at all, merely to travel from town to town throughout the expanse that was once called the EU and then, each time, give it their guts with gusto as well as with  more gentle aplomb inside the finite space of  whatever venue had been booked for them. She gazed at her three compatriots in music, Hannah a bolted-down palindrome of a person, and a young bearded man who remained nameless with the other three never really knowing much about him other than as someone else’s long-term replacement who kept himself to himself  and, to complete the foursome, an older man who was once well known as a cellist but he had the nickname, for whatever reason, of ‘Cat Stevens’, his real name having been shoved off into even more lost rhymes of reason and past time. Perhaps shyness, or qualms about his previous performances casting a shadow over his new ones. 

Cat the Captured one was often a headline in the English newspapers when the quartet performed in English speaking countries. In Spain, however, none of them spoke Spanish, except one of their roadies who only got an E in Spanish A level. His T shirt today bore the words ‘Corrida Call’, and nobody knew why, and nobody dared ask why, as roadies generally could be very strict with their secrets, and why the words were in English not Spanish was yet another mystery. Their whole set-up had made a speciality of Beethoven’s three ‘Razumovsky’ string quartets, such music having this as its own nickname the derivation of which by-passed scrutiny other than by the most assiduous of music historians.  They had never performed in Russia, and probably now, they never would. Even the countries had their own nicknames, and history was swallowing up the original ones as well as their flags, and hardly anybody studied history anymore for fear of what they might read.

Spain was still its own nickname. And bulls snorted olé at every turn of the next century along. The applause died down, as the four string players left the stage, each a picador when the demands  of  pizzicato called for pointy fingernails. Next time they hoped to play Ravel. Barbara returned to the stage as the lights in the whole place dimmed and she thought of what had just happened. She relished her own religious space. One of the apprentice roadies dismantling the music stands hummed Matthew & Son to himself. No residual earworm from the Beethoven performance for him. Who knows with what label the next Messiah will be nicknamed? Watch out for red flags and then, if need be, seek advice, they say, especially where there is no option but self-diagnosis at the initial stages of any disease. Once let snorting out of their pens, even words have their own nicknames to hide real identities and meanings. Barbara and Hannah often called their cultivated fingernails horns. And the quartet’s bearded stand-in often seemed to want to get too close for comfort. Barbara now left the empty dark stage to see where Hannah was hiding.  Nothing was plain sight these days as human customs now cowered within the latest ravelled loophole of frontiers, borders, grey areas and no-man’s-lands — or down within the echoey corridors even further down which the talented and famous had once walked safe from physical harassment if not perfectly immune to any subliminal interferences phoned through to them from above. Their names now forgotten. Even Beethoven’s.

***

CONVOLVULUS

An invasive plant but with enviably trumpeted bloom, this was designed upon one of the cards in a pack of others depicting images in a game called Pyramids leading to a certain goal of scaling the eventually smoothed-out sides of a towering cone looking down from its very peak. Out of bindweed erubescens, to reach a nirvana of zero at its spiritual heights of projected convolvulescence was the winining goal for each player, when a Corrida Cri-de-Coeur would ring forth with an explosive strength quite beyond any combined distillation of its even louder echoes. Not an Olé as such but more an unguent called Olay. Blended from the eponymous plant from which we started this fanfare of words. Not a farrago anymore but now an offshoot of the great big cheese in Heaven sitting under a huge red flag that managed to flap from airlessness..

The members of the String Quartet and its roadies played the game together during the interludes between concerts. Not the interlude dividing each half of a single concert, when the audience could cough its heart out with impunity. But the interludes of travel between specific concert venues. The cellist usually reached the top of the tontine first, but was churlish in victory. Even more churlish than he would have been with discovering a cheat or his own defeat. However, his skills, he considered, were with the deep scrape of ‘art’ and the more intimate niches within, not the mere fickle laughter of players overplaying their trump cards. Yet these skills gave him a secret pride, and a desire to progress to playing a double bass as the bosscat towering over the others, thus standing up on his huge hind legs while he bowed. 

The second violinist was uncomfortably silent. The first violinist, also, was too self-possessed as she stared at her own lap, as she felt past and future performances with a violin tucked under her chin, its base throbbing from the bow’s passage across the strings while it rested upon a crushed hankie that had already mopped up any residues of bodily fluid once escaping the drying qualities of the ointment she earlier used on such occasions, having itself left a visible trail in her wake. The cellist was never close enough to know the ins and out of essential oils — a mystery beyond any intricacies of the names given for otherwise easier gynaecological reference. Till the glory of an ever approaching morning intervened. Some of the card players would soon be off to a prearranged meeting of their cocktail murder club.

‘Olé!’ shouted one of the roadies with the onset of dizziness as a sign of victory, while the others’ minds were elsewhere with fundamentals as well as the inwardly practised notes of a future concert. This brought our pianissimo miniature to an equally abrupt conclusion as a ‘dying fall’ — itself a coda rather than an insistence upon having the last word.

***

CORRIDA CALL

The viola player now knew what being alone felt like. Upon a surprisingly sufficient plot of land to accommodate her resting position and squashed legs, surprising because it formed, she assumed, what would appear from the ground to be the pointed peak of a huge mountain. She was surrounded by a so far silent fog. It had started off as the rising sun’s reddish mist amid the dew of dawn. The means by which she had reached there she knew was uncertain. Above all, she felt alone, because there was no sign of her viola. During her lifetime she had never been without this antique instrument since being gifted to her by a rich uncle when she was a four years old. And she could remember next to nothing before then.

However, she seemed to have been left with a pen and a crossword puzzle to complete. Pens were called pens because they were fenced enclosures for words the narrow gate of which you opened now and them to eke out its denizens one by one to express what you needed to express, like lancing a boil and then pushing out slowly what was harboured within it. A boil, she thought, not any similar sounding word she had first thought of before dreaming up such a wayward analogy. Some words were red flags for the more dangerous elements within them, i.e. meanings that, if one released them, would mean more than they were ever meant to mean. 

She always carried a red hankie ready to tuck under her chin when she was called to play her viola at a moment’s notice of spontaneous need to do so. This redness of prop seemed to work well, and, as well as being a cushion for the rump of the viola as an overgrown fiddle, this hankie had also become her gimmick or trademark during an illustrious career as a member of a string quartet that toured every country under the sun, even here in the region of the Pyrenees. Performing spiky strains of Xenakis as well the more welcoming depths of Beethoven. And she guessed it was in the Pyrenees where she still travelled, having originally set out to walk around the area, and to take in the scenic views, before returning to the local area’s hotel so as to share breakfast with the other three players. They were all different people but made the four points of a feasible rhombus through the power of the music they made together. 

So, how had she reached, more than just literally, this point in her life? Alone with a crossword on a mountain. Unsighted and unseen. Pen poised to solve the ‘corrida call’ clue. And now another clue: ‘cardiac railcard’. And then yet another: ‘cloacal collar.’ The valves and spigots of semantics in squared-off compartments. And so the clues emerged, becoming more and more difficult, thrusting and bopping to silent and invisible crowds with chewed-up pencils. Her only hope being that the fog would clear and she would find her way back through more amenable veils and peaks. But the once foggy air now seemed like oily mist among the scrapes of land lower down rather than the earlier dew of dawn over-promising calm for her troubled contemplation. A temper tantrum taking its curtain call as red mist. A crossword made even crosser by a viola’s violation. And her body started to squat itself into a tighter geometry of straitened vales and sudden piques.

***

WALLING

Please treat this as if it is the midpoint or endpoint of a serial. But the question remained — why  did a touring string quartet need as many as twelve muscle-toned roadies. Point blank, nobody among them felt obliged to answer. It was evidently part of the group’s mystery, as mysterious as some of the music they played, like the double-stopping of notes as well as the pointillism of plucking called pizzicato. The four main protagonists out-stared each other when playing, often while masked during the the strains of 2020, but when each curtain was called amidst applause they broke out into the small talk of suspiciously false bonhomie, any airy smiles breaking out whenever the smiles could be seen without barriers and outside walls. 

When the group toured a number of communities in the Swiss Alps, the four players were blindfolded in transit  so that the scenery could not take their figurative breath away nor interfere with the inspiration required when later playing late Beethoven in a church hall. Hence, the roadies acted as a sort of composite tour guide, without the need of the four players to carry white sticks that were invisible anyway because of the snowy conditions. It all made sense at the time, squared off when their routines became more and more rooted — and were later patterned into neat walled-off compartments of intrinsic faith in what they were doing for the sake of their music. A few of the roadies, justifying their roles’ very name, were employed to corner off roads to facilitate private access between mountain passes. The rest of the more musically minded roadies, set up stands and settled scores upon these stands with the pages’ corners turned up for easier, quicker and more reliable turning between notes, without the player’s bows tilting unduly out of true into tangled blinkers preventing sufficient glances of cohesion for the sake of the music.

Once, in the Himalayas, there transpired what was called Chinese Wall Day in the coded parlance between different sections of the roadies. The chief roadie, for example, instinctively realised that the four participants were in ugly moods with each other and needed insulating from their own social intercourse despite the later impulse for a coherent coming together to produce the morning glories of music, as many concerts near Everest were performed for an audience of Sherpas having their breakfasts before shepherding a would-be breed of Tensing and Hillary towards the highest peak as totem of achievement, even as attempts were made to avoid the residual bodies otherwise littering the slopes, these being climbers that had failed to do so. Just a slice of life from beyond the blocking and muting so common today on social media. But often when you open a page by accident, unwelcome music screams forth which you can’t stop other than by rebooting the whole computer to stifle a bleeding chunk of sound that, even now, is panning out beyond the atonal barriers of serialism itself. Finally, in the Pyrenees, an abrupt attack of wailing: a Corrida Curtain Call: a coda to its own ‘dying fall’. 

***

HOPSCOTCH

The quartet eventually had ambitions to climb solo the scales of a musical career, but which of them reached the heights of Cone Zero impugns the other three with some sort of failure, something about which common human feelings should not be hurt, and, indeed, it is often the winner of all laurels who is speared by the sharpest point that is fame. Not necessarily the best in their field of endeavour, but the one who once cultivated those others whose shoulders were stood upon. A hopscotch frame — not the ‘crossword’ of numbers in illateral squares that we chalked out to play the game of that name as children — but a pyramid of wedge-shaped staging-posts with a mathematical sequence of numbers within each of them, a serial of series quite beyond the ken of modern brains. Coefficients, quadratics and irrational digits that only music could possibly express with the spiritual smoothness of harmonic strain punctuated by deliberately churlish atonalities.

This is a horror story fit for an old Pan Paperback of yore, now lying dog-eared in once forgotten memories.  The reading of childhood fairy stories with grim goings-on had in many cases of persona evolved into such genres as the gothic and the cruel, especially at Halloween. Not that we knew anything about Halloween when I was a child in one of the terraced backstreets of England. I looked up at the windows as I negotiated my way to a meeting of Wolf Cubs in a dark church hall. No street lighting, so I carried a torch. For one so young, it seemed very heavy, as I parted the curtains of even heavier shadows containing the creepy calls of night’s denizens. Down back-alleys and corridors of echoey jitters, I often looked up at top windows and saw cuneiform faces looking down imploringly, wondering why they had been implicated in some strange future writings about them called hopscotch, or so I imagined. No tiny ear plugs with string quartet music playing. Just the disconnected undertones of tangled tongues chanting random numbers. I desperately hopped to avoid further terrors. Any pavement cracks or jaundiced pumpkins verboten. 

***

ILIUM

When Ilium is spelt with a capital i and a small L it looks like a place in Wales rather than the Troy of Trojan Horse fame or even the name of a bone in the body. A body in a bed. A welcome in the hillside. A device for latching man-made things together in outer space. The top of a totem. The nirvana often reached when playing music. I have a dictionary for every mood. So did Jack Blanche and a man called Cat, not to speak of a few women’s names who became more important the more they were written about rather than left nondescript. The men in fact faded into the background, while the Ilium shone forth like a Bethlehem star or a morning glory of a newly arrived moon as satellite rather than a disguised comet or meteor. A convolvulus of meaning that might run on forever, while any characters got on with their business with nobody bothering to record their doings towards a personal ‘tontine’ that entailed sacrificing others in their cohort along the way. If they did it with cold aplomb or a grumpy mien, nobody else seemed to care even when being abandoned to each and every ebbing wave of closure. Nobody could see where it was all going, nobody cared, as they stood, sat or remained supine while gazing dumbstruck at the now blazing Ilium in the sky. Men went first, women last. Some in between lingered in either camp for optimal self-sacrifice whether it was to stay longer or leave early. It was the Tontine that ultimately counted, an accounting system for all that we had done and all we would never do. No point in being cross or crosswordy enough to be worthy. Amenable was now the watchword, uncurling the tightly curled, unchurning the churned up, stripping back the stroppiness of spirit, unfurling the back’s painfully hidden wings, unleashing bodies from beds as well as notes from staves. A shadowy woman in a tall black hat and a demobbed soldier with a daffodil in his lapel walked hand in hand towards the now grounded Ilium. They knew what it was, even if we didn’t. Perhaps we were inside it already?