POST-GESTALT FICTIONS (15)

 THE STICKINESS

Joy, oh, joy, no mix of different names to conjure with. Just someone before whom we bow our heads and address as ‘Your Stickiness’. The Real Mucky, if not McCoy. Possibly both at once. A great belief in the slow half-by-half motion of Zeno’s Paradox that shall become an antidote to the Tontine syndrome from which we have all suffered heretofore. The latter condition being a straight upward decline, killing all in our wake for the amassed treasure inherited upon each of such killings, leaving us eventually at the top of the mountainous pyramid that soon fades out into Cone Zero.

Why say ‘us’ when I really mean ‘me’? Just a figure of speech, a collusive shedding of guilt upon all whose shoulders I have stood and then crushed. If they’re dead, why matters it that they should adopt the guilt that should have been mine? Still, with some shock, I realise that the pronoun ‘us’ still applies, and I have not yet killed YOU! There is no room for two of us at the tipping point of reaching the top. All pronouns are so slippery these days, so interchangeable as a caprice or a confident purpose, so equivocal as a shake of a used duster or an honourable right. But little did I know that the toggle-switch of ‘us’ and ‘me’ has been singled out as the most momentous polarity of all. For all of us, not just a few. But the few have now become two, in the most hideous rhyme of all. Half of a half, but on whose latest behalf?  Glaciers calving. Dying Earth reviving. Who knows the repercussions of altering fate?

Miniatures clot together like skin and blood, while tinier feet than mine slow down. I feel I am alone, watching bodiless things still climbing in my wake, some just with empty clogs as a means for being feet and nothing else to see as being ‘them’ at all. I seem to hear the sound of drums, violins and flutes, but nothing that appears to be able to actually make such music. The more normal strains of a string quartet are merely yesterday’s feat of achievement. I gurn at nothing but myself, with no mirror to check either way. Then a mere sticky whisper in my ear that is you. Read on, dear friend. More miniatures may apply, but Real McCoys need not. This is just a disposable prelude to a greater goo to come. Cloy, oh, cloy.

***

WALLOP GAP

This is just a staging post, which must say something about its as yet unreached and unwritten ending. Indeed, the party of Paradoxers struggled through the salt marshes, ever slowly seeking, as was their wont, rare conundrums and other false plurals. Oxymorons were in short supply, and next to no Sherpas at all, so they had to manage their own soft luggage breathlessly in short relays of way-stations. The harder edged suitcases had been forwarded days before for a shilling apiece, so at least that kept one hand free for each  of them to negotiate the unbalanced horizons that thrived thereabouts. The progress was so draining they had to imagine they were trotting or cantering, not wading. Never at a standstill at all.  Dizzy was not a word they allowed, and giddy was eked out as abstemiously as their slow-witted facetiousness to each other. They thought they were heading towards Watford, but at least one of them argued it was a place called Wallop, while, in fact, they were all wrong: the hub of their search was a town called St Osyth in Essex. Glimpses of the sea and the tall mast of a pirate radio ship gave some sort of game away as to where they really were. But none had yet taken the clue, and weighed it against the tuning bar of the wireless that the only woman among them trundled in a trolley behind her, its barely serviceable wheels often getting semi-stuck in the mulchy salt of the earth.  More like a toy than a real trolley. The wireless being the party’s only means of communication, one-way inward, never out. And the signal often wavered, like their purpose itself. The fact that it was Radio Wallop broadcasting on a local channel seemed to prove earlier assumptions had been misplaced. They scorned each other’s  dependence on each other, in this tiresome trudge towards a goal that would last long enough for any ageing memory to barely reach. They gazed through a gap in the high marram grasses and discerned, despite the gluey gloom, the radio mast, now a bit nearer and swaying from side to side. No rhyme or reason to it. None of them knew it was a ship. So they they thought it was the appalling land itself tilting, soft but hardened enough to lurch like a wind-tossed deck, as they waited for whatever history would write about as the wallop to end all such wallops of tectonic uncertainty. They had to re-invent words to describe a sense of their nauseous vertigo. To create rhymes and anagrammatic concatenations. Gawp at a pall of gallop: the major catchphrase or call sign that they misheard from between the static gaps of static — together with an ill-tuned word for tireless. 

***

PIANO RAG

The Ilium was shining on the opposite side of the blue to the sun, and, like many of us, I wondered if it had living entities on board. Perhaps we would never know whether it would run its fingers along our keys briefly and then soar off into the wide black yonder whence it came. A test run, a tinkling with stars, and our lives would continue as before, perhaps with any memory of it erased, hence the haste with which I record this about the Ilium for posterity. Yet, who knows, it may be able to wipe clean even the print of indelible ink upon insoluble paper — while it otherwise needed the future-proofing of the fact that it came, it saw, it conquered and had not, in truth, gone without a single trace. Itself valuing its own indelibility.

We all still nursed our own chronic debility after Big Change, some symptoms of which were distilled by our blinkered denial into the single expression of Long Rhapsody. A malady to which we set a melody, Hankies at the ready to mop our brows from the unforgiving sweat of everything  against which we tried to block our minds, we felt we felt as good as new, little knowing certain churlish powers centring on the indefinable Ilium had their own giant duster to show how house proud they were about potential landing places to colonise. A good clean up before they dared set ‘foot’. We heard the riffled chords upon even dustier pianos that we had forgotten to store safely. An improvisation of cunning durability. And, also, the clatter of broken keys that were beyond repair. But, evidently, once they were cleaned, they would serve a different purpose as yet unknown. Even fittings such as  rests for music scores had cans of Brasso applied to them by those of us requisitioned to carry out such a job for who- or whatever made it a priority. A slow job, a long drawn-out series of dabs and rubs, more sticky than otherwise. It was like wading through invisible glue. But we persevered. Still do.

Imagine our apocryphal frustration when the Ilium vanished without closure for our endeavours as well of for any sign of its own retrospective trace. I was not the only one of us who lost our tempers before we lost our memories. Lost our rags, too.

***

ROCOCO

More playful than Baroque, it depends on what side of creation’s hard-edged design you’re on. Allow me to wish in your shell-like that you pay heed — namely, the entirety they called the Rhombus, whom a few of us called the messiah, and others called a wayward creature, was no geometrician at all, and even algebra was quite out of range for such a brain reared solely upon an arithmetic without any alphabetical letters to represent numbers. Having been steeped in the three Rs (Reading, Rioting and Rococo), our Rhombus figure knew where its own angles were placed but not the nails on its fingers and toes. Its own ‘it’ being what it’s like to be a real creature turned critter whereby it nurtures paws instead of any furcated fingers or toes at all, so it is then hard to count to ten let alone twenty. One needs hard, not soft, joints or appendages to be able to succeed in even a single math. An invisible forked tongue needed by it, though, with which to discuss the differences between trapezium, parallelogram, oblong, various -agons and the basic shape as its own namesake. Yes, this Rhombus took verging on an eternity to move its shoulders and sides into another configuration, and an average human lifetime would not have noticed the difference in the shape of its empty territory between the narrowest of barely moveable margins, while figurative halves relentlessly split each other into further halves as followed serially by the near infinitesimal bite-sizes of a rogue median of humanity’s lifespan rather than its average leverage between an initial foot in the door of creation and its forced exodus elsewhere. Rococo was the keyword with its meaning’s whorls and curlicues replacing any sane geometry upon which Euclid prospered. And the battle still proceeds slowly as sin, the Rhombus flags ever mustering on the brow of the hill against the rioting marauders with algebraic letters as insignia, an imprimatur of design that constitutes — by employment of such letters as words — this very soft-headed portrayal  of the aforementioned battle’s onset of affray. You can see what side I’m on! Ago, ago, agone.

***

FORTIFIED

The Rhombus was a far call from a perfectly round Forty-Five Single of the old gramophone days. The disc I had in mind was old enough to have its middle punched out to fit a juke-box turntable once  it had  been laid there with a silent clatter by a moving elbow that had been triggered into action after a customer dropped a shilling into a slot for the chosen song that the disc’s grooves diligently carried for conversion into sound. The shape that was our hero in geometric form  looked askance at its own akimbo sides and angles, aching to emulate the circle its first experience the seeing of which circle was embodied in the chosen disc that plopped rather than clattered to the spinning mat. A silent plopping by dint of the juke-box’s fortified encasement within a semi-globe of glass. A whole shuttling wheel of other discs’ edges also revolved in breathless unison as it prepared for the next choice determined by another customer with shilling, or bob as it was then called, grasped in a grubby hand belonging to a young lad who had been abandoned by his guardians in a corner of the establishment with an orangeade and packet of Smiths Crisps complete with a blue crinkly tourniquet of salt. He thought the salt was the best part of the evening’s experience, and as he untwisted its tiny crumpled mitten, he saw this salt sparkling with its own geometric shapes that he imagined, via the magnifying microscope of his mind, to be minuscule ghosts — each beating a rhythm  to the Twist of Chubby Checker that was now being played, followed by Juke Juke of Earl, and finally Blue Moon by the Marcels. A circle always was the eventual winner, as we watched the real and only ghost vanish back into the sides and angles of its own deeply cross-hatched shades whereby corners bred more corners, or lines of draught pieces in squares. And later this ghost abruptly ballooned shut till it was ready to haunt the lad again. The newly fortified silence was broken only by the crunching of crisps being a gentler form of beef joints cracking their bones late at night in otherwise empty butcher shops. Pork bits crackling, too. He waited with the Patience of Zeno for his guardians to reclaim him. The question remained, meantime, regarding the nature of the shadowy third that seemed to have chosen a disc, too, but which of the three discs was it? Flat on its B-side waiting for a  pick-up at best to play it or at next best to rescue it to the still shuttling wheel. Each spiral of grooves instinctively aching for invention of a stylus that could quietly jump the onset of surface cracks. Little did they know.

***

POLYGLOT

The Rhombus ghost, an entity of straight lines and angles, used several tongues even if they were all figurative tongues in its hazy communication with those of us on Earth that it opted to haunt. The bright bone-shaped Ilium, meanwhile, often returned to hang in our mostly blue sky for long sporadic periods, as if any entities within it knew that we still had no knowledge of who they were. Though, it was hinted from various sources controlled by the Rhombus that they were like us but in an overnatural form. Whether we would notice the differences from us should the Ilium land remained to be seen. We were sure, though, that it was more than just a simple Trojan horse. 

We claimed to be the salt of the earth and our own survey said that the Ilium also carried minuscule minerals inexplicably known as optics. Only a polyglot could interpret the nuances of such changes of meaning in otherwise common words as pilfered from between the camouflaged mountweazles in our otherwise traditional dictionaries. A digital apology, a godly agility, too, with dogtail or pigtail as the stars in their wake. Gladioli in bunches ready as our welcome to whatever the Ilium transported. We were blinded by the huge shape, as eventually, now in our own real time, the Ilium lowered to brow level, its moving lights being upon the brink of the nth power of encounter with us natural denizens of Earth. Yet we sense they, whoever they were, were overnatural, while the Rhombus, their sole reconnaissance agent already planted among us, was merely supernatural by dint of its near-invisibility as four mathematical lines with angles. Just an amalgam of made-up words inserted surreptitiously into our dictionaries to prevent plagiarism by doppelgängers.  Figuratively speaking. 

The craft had landed. It looked disappointingly makeshift close-up, once its lights were extinguished. Cobbled together, custom built by unagile analog means. With streamers at its tail that seemed made of human or animal hair. We dropped our glad bouquets of welcome, and started sneering at its ungodly amateurishness as an invading force. It was not even disguised as a wooden horse, though the streamers perhaps were meant to be mistaken as its tail! When the clunky door lifted up as if in an old movie, we jeered even more. But the door’s lift became painstakingly slow, indeed almost coming to a glottal stop, and we are still stuck there today watching it open.

***

A FRACTAL FATALITY

“Eh eh, hold your horses!” he said ending with hisses, this being his customary catchphrase of naive surprise. Spoken to no person in particular, but maybe to the gods above who he imagined might be watching him. Jack gazed around in every direction as he gradually saw a still evolving pattern of landed Iliums, all so impressive and shining like sleek bones when they haunted the blue sky, now ditched and decrepit contraptions with large wheels upon wheels and an endlessly slow opening of what appeared to be wooden doors.  Yet, despite their ugly exteriors, the shapes when in silhouette made them seem in unskewed configurations of mathematics that straightened out any irregular features into a stricter format of tessellation. From above, when viewed by drones, they would show as lop-sided rhombuses, but from below where Jack stood, they became fractious certainties, ghosts with straight edges and black middles. “Is futility ever finished?” Jack wondered to himself, more in hope than expectation.. 

It was only when he got closer he saw their wear and tear. He, too, in later real-time, was silently entranced by one of them and its ceremony of perpetual slow-motion as a vehicle with a door of possible exit, or indeed entrance. No longer his expletive of wooden horses being held, simply a fatal flaw in human attention-spanning that allowed through a re-enacted vision of a broken bridge between birth and death. We never knew the whereabouts of the gaps in its structure so that we could avoid falling through mid-span. And there was a mind-spinning, too, with a giddiness that trustily guided Jack rather than beguiled him. A spinning that made a perfectly whole silhouette from grains that otherwise gurned as they continued to granulate. Calf Art it would be called once the Iliums’ herds emerged in order to call anything anything at all. Their moos as an overarching muse as a maze within a fractal of others like it. Bridges with no abridgements nor aberrations as glottal stops. 

“Is fatality ever final?” he wondered aloud, now uncharacteristically using an over-sophisticated wordiness with further fancy fricatives as a filigree of style, all spoken alongside an eventernal consciousness of equine equations that balanced out any yays nays and ehs in  the otherwise engrained battle of hope and despair as overseen by a shadowy third called expectation.

***

CROCODILE TEARS

There was no denying it, the Iliums or makeshift Trojan Horses, as they may have been seen to be, had been landed here to stay forever, but it also appears that we shall never know their purpose as the crafts’ doors stubbornly fail to open while remaining in a permanent status of painstakingly opening up, with minuscule miniatures of gap between door and frame building upon previous ones. It surely would eventually open up sufficiently to allow whatever was within to slither forth. Although ‘slither’, when it finally transpires, may be discovered the wrong description altogether. There were rumours of mooing noises coming from within, even a bleat or two, and our minds began to shift from crafts to arks. 

Whatever the case, the Iliums presented quite a panoply of dereliction across the widths of Earth, having been previously seen as sleekly geometrical in the skies above. As if their perfect lines without any width at all had become algebraic letters employed to create the clunky words that we used to continue describing their phenomenon, including what is designed here to be read about them in real-time. For example  the word ‘rhombus’ is ugly, while its meaning as a clean uncluttered shape made from lines and emptiness inside such lines was immaculate even if, to our human eyes, we sensed the shape strangely lop-sided and emanating ghostly qualities. 

We should get our story straight, and iron out any differences of perception  between each miniature stab at describing them. No crocodile tears even if eventually those who are subjected to these tiny ‘histories’ should leave confused and shrugging their own shoulders as the doors still continue to open, as if blaming us for what was happening, or not happening. We felt  anyone who took the bother or had the privilege to actually read our descriptions were suspicious, in any event, and had agendas of their own, and wanted to be in ‘at the kill’, rather than us, hence their crocodile tears. Arks are close to Ask, and all they needed to do was open their jaws and bare their teeth or grin-and-bear whatever it was they felt they may lose by not staying for the final grand opening, and to simply ask us whether we would allow them to stay and share the glory with us upon the cusp of the tiniest moment of opening that would shift an imperceptible width to make the doors able at that very point to be deemed fully open enough to allow the Iliums’ crew members to disembark….

The tears, meanwhile, were not those of crocodiles and are turning out to be somehow connected to being part of our very descriptions. Discovering themselves complicit in this way must have discombobulated them to such an extent as they had to remain in order to make our descriptions true, and thus giving hope to the human race that the inhabitants of the Iliums were rescuers not destroyers. Once they shrugged their shoulders and left the scene, the whole of this description’s verisimilitude would collapse like a disused circus tent. A notch in every pole that once held up its canvas representing a trapezium accident.

Because they never did leave. They eventually became part of us. Party to creating the descriptions, not being described by the descriptions. Never to be differentiated again. Examining our communal teardrops under microscopes for evidence of sincerity. The Iliums’ now serrated shapes, come the only remembered nightfall, are now fast turning into jagged lines, around yawning spaces of white light, terrifying even those of us (indeed most of us) who otherwise saw nightmares into neat acceptable segments.