I had no soul. Yet the place where my soul should have resided did not feel entirely empty, did it? But one could never be exact as to the degree of such emptiness, unaware, as all emptinesses were, of how much space they were called upon to fill.
In my case, the place-of-no-soul eventually became a shrinking, if tantalising, fallowness, fraying at the edges and sucking me towards the middle of my own tiny body - or, at least, towards where the body's centre of gravity appeared to be.
A sense of absence - a sorrow without sadness - a wish without desire - a bereavement in a world where death was more by good luck than misjudgement - a pain that killed painkillers in ever-increasing circles - an anxiety for a loved one who was never to be born - a hope without faith - worse still, a faith without hope . . . these were the various symptoms of a missing soul.
I did not know my own name, but someone else did. She, this someone else, was Elspeth who, despite being a human being in contrast to my own elfinness, was even smaller than me. Many called her petite; many more a midget. She enjoyed that part of the day which was neither afternoon nor evening, but a bit of both, especially when the trees around her mother's cottage collected sighs for their leaves to articulate with their needlepoint of rustles.
Having left her mother to clear up after her own attempts at clearing up which her lack of height prevented her from perfecting, Elspeth wandered the place that, in her dreams, was her own garden with swing and see-saw. But, now, it was a nondescript expanse of set-aside belonging to a local farmer. Were it not for me, she would probably only play there during her actual dreams. Instead of which, she went there as often as possible; she knew, in her heart of hearts, that I was essentially a dream, albeit an insulated dream that lived autonomously in the waking world of reality.
"How are you today?"
As soon as Elspeth spoke, I emerged from behind a vision of myself which I had planted as a prop in my un-vanishing act, performed to amuse the girl.
"I have no soul, therefore I cannot possibly exist." My voice was spoken with confidence, as if it could actually be heard.
"You don't exist?" she said, inevitably ignoring my words. "But who wants to exist? My life is nothing but trouble."
There was a grain of truth in her statement, although it had primarily been made as a comfort, like a nurse with a dying child.
I, the 'dying child' in question, looked at the girl from my greater height and said in pining troubled tones: "At least trouble is something. It's better than nothing."
"You are silly!" she announced, suddenly aware of the paradox regarding the simultaneous awareness of my own predicament.
At that moment, the sun performed its own un-vanishing act, having earlier duped we pair of playmates with its version of Peek-a-Boo between some distant trees. A shaft of gold penetrated our heads, causing eyes to become torches playing noughts-and-crosses, and, then, who-blinks-first.
We played touch-catch, with nobody winning, until there was no longer any doubt that night had lost the need to cheat in its tenebrous game of hide-and-seek. After Elspeth, amid blown kisses, had departed for real dreams under cottage-thatch and cot-top, I loitered in the soon-to-become-even-more-nondescript meadow, along with the memories of our games. Anxiety was something I could manage to set aside. But love was something else altogether. My emptiness, still yearning for a soul, vowed to wish fulfilment of different thoughts tomorrow, one of which might make us play leap-frog - instead of the ardently breathless chase involved in touch-catch. Meanwhile, Elspeth was a wayward sleeper, stretching her legs towards the cot bars, to test if they were now long enough to reach the end.
So as to sleep, she told herself stories . . . and, once upon a time, there was a Prince who loved the river flowing through the beautiful birdsong wood. Although the Prince owned the wood, he wondered if he owned the river or, at least, that part of the river flowing through his wood or, at the very least, the river-bed under that part of the river flowing through his wood or, at the very very least, the edges of the river-bank. Such considerations regarding the rights of ownership stirred him further to consider things - and one such consideration related to the air directly above the wood's winding river. Indeed, what about all the air in the wood?
And then, of course, there was the sky itself above the wondrous wood - and one must not forget the earth reaching from below the wood towards the Antipodes - and beyond. The Prince sat in his beautiful birdsong wood musing upon considerations that fed further considerations until his brow furrowed. And while he sat musing, he dabbled his toes in the flowing river itself and, thus, he mused not only upon the edge of the river-bank but also upon the edge of the selfsame river-bank both by subject-matter and position of his posterior. He wondered if, at the very very very least, he owned his own toes. But further considerations ceased as, suddenly, the wood erupted with squawks of birds scattering from the Prince's trees into the wide blue sky...
In a second story which she abruptly told to rectify the inconsequentiality of the first one, Elspeth herself swung an axe at a mighty bole. The sun, doubled by sweat in the eyes, lifted in unseasonable speed above the other shaggy trees, stage-lighting the forest-clearing in readiness perhaps for the Prince's grand re-entrance. Her voice picked out heart-felt ditties - ditties from those shanty song-cycles often forced out between oldster's crooning lips in despairing lullabyes, at dead of night when the deep pan moon floated into antique windows.
She kept a weather eye on the inn, where a-woman-with-no-name would even now be speaking half-truths to nobody but the ghosts. Then, wiping her face with the bottom of her blouse, Elspeth turned in the other direction to see whether the ferry across the river was back in action. The ferry-keeper had been poorly for some days, so the cargo-stacks queued along both banks further than she could ever remember those henges to stretch. But most important of all, there was one area she scanned with more anxiety than the rest - the forest path along which I, thePrince, had earlier departed with the earthenware jug. She hoped I would soon return it, brimful with the sweet coolness of golden spring wine.
Not long since dawn - even so, the giant silver bird-fish which emerged from the rivers of the sun were more surprising for their punctuality than ever their lateness or earliness could evoke. These were the carving mysteries of the heavens above, which Elspeth had never questioned because, like the sun itself, they were simply always there. Her ancient parents - whom she'd concocted specially for this story - despite the blind spot of their lives between childhood and old age, said these smooth-lined fish had always brooded in the sky's heartlands, visiting Earthen by-ways within certain tolerances of timing. The plumes of fire from tails and gills were the strangest ingredients of bird-fish flight which, paradoxically, appeared the most normal. Elspeth would often place her hand in mock salute above her big brown eyes, thus shading them from the glare, whilst keeping watch on those she suspected kept watch on her.
Today, again, she dabbed her watering eyes with the end of her blouse, fleetingly revealing the underswell of young breasts. At the back of her mind, she was intrigued and amused by the contrast between the ferry on its rust-cranking cross-river chain and the sleek silver bird-fish frictionlessly forging the sky. It made her feel uncharacteristically depressed. I was longer than usual making my anticipated entrance and the grain of the wood seemed set against her strokes. She took a plait of hair from the back of her head and placed it across her upper lip like a man's moustache, soaking up the ever-renewing beads of sweat. Her skirt fell about her legs as if it had a sculptor's will of its own, the complex pleats changing like a map in motion above the pretty ankles. She was bare of feet, long since transformed by weathering into the appearance of fine-textured wood themselves.
The other men who shifted around between fresh-cloven boles had only eyes for her, deeply jealous of my place in her soul. None noticed the hovering of one particular bird-fish within a proximity of which history had never spoken, even in the books which none now ever opened for fear of the pages being found welded together like spongey wood. The fact that none could read or write was another, secondary, factor.
The glinting underside passed over her head and then roofed the river. Even the old ferry-keeper could be seen emerging from his hut, face raised at an impossible angle, curved fingers crabbing at the back of his neck. His ferry was the only way to cross - and his croaking words could be vaguely heard despite the roaring fires which cindered the tree-lines on the opposite bank. The woman-with-no-name tottered from the inn, her drink slopping out of the tureen in her hand. She waved a fist at the intruder, her words, too, heard, but misheard, beneath the seething of the other bird-fish even now settling upon the river's wide kiss.
Where was I? Elspeth accepted everything in life, but not my absence.
Adventures were pleasurable risks - whenever I was about to calm the nerves and stroke the nape. But, now, all was coming apart in her hands, as she held fingers in snailshells to her smarting eyes. This squeezed prison of sight could thus discern pointed faces at the holes neatly arranged along the bird-fish's silver flank. Never even thinking that, one day, she, of all people, would be called upon to write new history books, the moment passed without her truly realising its importance. The humming monsters re-soared into the sky, their plumes of fire eventually forming a corona of tails around the story-book sun.
After hours into days into bigger units of time than could be countenaced by brief existences such as Elspeth, my princely corpse was eventually discovered near a spring of the river's source, a body incredibly and inexplicably bereft of its toes. Her tears had already dried in advance of real sorrow's proof source and inner pain. She knelt beside the man she loved. I, the Prince.
Wiping a sprig of hair from the tearless sweat, she kissed my dislocated lips with a passion that could only dig her deeper towards my mollusc soul.
I had possibly believed that the spring's golden flush held wondrous qualities of mind-change and, thus, it was my favourite haunt. I had once told Elspeth the source of the jug's contents, but she never believed me until now. My face was quite beyond recognition, but my buckled skins, freshly sliced each morning from dew-damp boles, were still clinging to my thews. My bone-case had become one with rank decay, however, my eyes blindshot and the inner carcass a taxidermist's false start.
Elspeth married me, as had been planned ... or as good as married me, by marrying my corpse that was being supported (by the best - or, at least, a better - man) on limp limbs at the woodside altar. The corpse was then placed to rest in the marriage cot, whereby for the years ahead, the-woman-with-no-name would help Elspeth with the regular ablutions and worship of the corpse-turned-human-soaked-quagmire. As the age-blotched moon dipped to peep beneath the eaves, the two women crooned shanties, eager for the renewal of the river's rusty cranking - forth where Elspeth never again chose to venture. Not being able to read nor form words, her previously overheard recitations from the old books she had read aloud (to the-woman-with-no-name-but-whom-Elspeth-once-called-mother) had merely been ad hoc pretence. Thus, the new history assigned to Elspeth remained unwritten - even though the neatly slivered wood paper had been specially supplied for so doing by the forest workers who loved her.
But the history was written, eventually - that is, when I, now daughter of Elspeth, spawned from my father's prolonged throbbing of rigor-mortis on the wedding night, grew up and taught myself to write out her lullabyes . . . but only writing them out when I'm not busy playing lonely games of touch-catch and who-blinks-first on hillsides swept by the translucent girders of golden Godly eyesight.
The silver bird-fish have not returned, no doubt blaming the sky for an earth they now cannot sur-fly. Yet, at deepest night, disowned moons tend to ghost their way into my cottage window, with dead-pan eyes and twitching gill-like craters.
Thus ends another anonymous story.
(previously published on Internet - Boneusers?)
==================================
A LYTTONY
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www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
House Trained / The Imprimatur of the Monster
HOUSE TRAINED
My name is Matthew Shakewell and I nearly died yesterday.
I shall try to relate as closely as I can my experience, but please keep your hand on your heart and read this story in the clear light of day...for you may die of fright, as I so very nearly did. Please take care, make sure my words are not those of a mad man or one who wants to frighten you gratuitously; make sure you do not put too much credit in their meaning as appreciation of their truth could have damnable effect on the mild-mannered or the nervous...but, as I write this, I genuinely believe each word I am about to devote to paper.
So much for the warning, now for the facts.
***
I snuggled into the warmth of the carriage as the train churned through acre upon acre of English countryside. It was impossible to view the trees and village stations we must have passed through, for the night enshrined everything; so the most sensible thing to do was to try and sleep until the time for arrival at my destination, where my uncle would be waiting to greet me.
I slept for how long and with what vague dreams? Nebulous vistas of strange dimensional cities intruded, warped visages staring and tentacles clutching, wet lips and things sucking near. I awoke to the carriage, the formless darkness sliding away past me and an old man snoring in the corner. I was quite shaken by my dreams as the memory of them lingered incoherently. But I soon realized on looking at my timepiece that I should have arrived at my destination about an hour before!
It was then that I comprehended I had not seen one thing from the carriage window. True, I was travelling through a comparatively uninhabited part of England, but this was decidedly peculiar; even though there were no stars nor moon, I should have seen the distant glow of some big town or the lonesome light of a spinster's cottage. But absolutely nothing could I see, presumably on acoount of the unusual blackness of the night through which I was speeding in a corridorless train. Might it be fog?
I relaxed back into the seat and viewed my sleeping companion. The fog would explain the lateness of the train, but what about its apparent speed?
I was convinced the train was traveling at a phenomenal speed, but it was now two hours overdue--without precedence on that line. I resolved to wake my companion and I stepped over to shake him. What curled from the hood of the duffel coat was an evilly scarred face and, on unwinding, gave me an imbecilic smile: a moon-face topped by a schoolboy's cap, giggling in the depth of its rasping throat.
"Mutation" is a word too medical, too clinical, as what I saw was essentially unwholesome; nothing created by a mother on this world, but fashioned far away in dim lands beyond the galaxy we know. The transfiguration took me completely by surprise as, before my eyes, the monstrosity literally dissolved and dripping from the brown duffel coat was a green, sticky slime, forming a viscid puddle on the swaying floor.
It held all the smells which disgust man throughout the world and others completely new to his nose, recalling my dream vistas and certain other things I could not quite place.
My first thought was to pull the communication cord, but I felt the train was slowing down--presumably my destination had been reached. My mind was a maelstrom as the train drew to a halt. On jumping to the platform, I realized it was not my intended destination, but a strange station ... and the nightmare train was drawing out, leaving me bewildered and valiseless. Amid the chaos of my mind, I knew I had to find a porter and share the horror I with him.
Empty tins and scraps of paper scuttled along the deserted platform, driven by the night wind. So, no fog! Visibility was excellent, but it still puzzled me why I could not see the moon nor the stars. I shouted for assistance, but none came: a forsaken station, forgotten by all who used to work there, those who, under a happy sun, waved green flags and blew whistles, carted parcels and drank tea. Dazed, I shuffled along the cluttered platform towards the station-house, sithouetted against the ceiling of the sky, ominous and spectral.
I came to a turnstile and, not surprisingly, it was enlaced with choking cobwebs, twining through the bars. The only exit I could see was through there, and so I pulled myself together to cut a path through its creeping entropy. As I entered, an over-nourished spider skittered to its lair. I wish to God I had not looked to the left into the ticket-collector's cab, for here was not a deserted seat, but the ticket collector himself sitting, not as he used to be, but a decaying skeleton-creature with a puncher in the bones of a hand. A plump worm coiled through his skewered ribs ... and I screamed ... ran from that blasphemous railway station...
...into avenues of ill-lit horror, through lines of trees, black and twisted against the blacker sky, along country roads twining between untended hedgerows ... until exhaustion put paid to my progress ... I saw the House; it rose out of the darkness, looming forbodingly. It was more of a castle than a house, and had two towering wings, pointing and mocking at the sky.
I should not fear its occupants, I told myself--they would probably disperse my fears and show my position on the map - so I plucked up enough courage to walk to the main door. Its massive oaken surface and golden knocker filled me with awe, but I grasped the knocker, pulled it heavily from the wood, and let it drop with a crash echoing throughout the whole house. It was such a loud noise that it startled me and put the fear back. There, I waited for what Fate would bring to the door, waiting, eternally waiting. But no one came. No one deigned to answer my call for help, so I decided to force my way in for shelter, but the door looked too mighty for entrance there. But I was mistaken as a single trial caused the door to swing open with a splitting creak revealing ... only darkness. I coughed as the atmosphere tightened in my chest and I felt for a suitable position to sleep the night out.
It was then that I heard something which I can hear even now inside my head, a funeral moan, harmonically illogical, resonant, deep but also shrill, coming from up above me, approaching down a rickety staircase, a moan carrying at one and the same time the horror of the graveyard, the scream of delight as ghouls ecstatically lift a prutrescible corpse from its resting place, the terror of a lunatic's laugh as he carves his own flesh, and all the pain and panic of the Pit where shapeless elementals vaguely swim in fire, chewing off the heads of the human damned.
After, came a slithering and bumping above me: a thing was moving across the floor and, then, it was squelching down the stairs emitting the long drawn-out moan. The alternate slithering and bumping rode the creaking, teetering stairs, inexorably drawing closer, nearer, faster, down, down, down...
...it seemed as if I were in another world, sucked in by intangible forces to a revelation of the cosmos, a panorama of all time; stars and streaks of light reaching to infinitudes of chaos and cult, ethereal glows and fresh, unmathematical lands. I saw a city with dome-like, square buildings on plains of kaleidoscopic bubbles and, in each bubble, a grotesque gargantuan gargoyle leering at the citizens in the buildings. Those citizens themselves were immaterial, covered by jellified green slime and motivated by an ectoplasm of orange exactly in the middle of its soul-light.
I saw vague ski-runs of blue effulgence stretching for aeons from
the mamnoth, bubbly planet past the barrier of time and space, almost an interpenetration of two universes. I saw an enormous sled skim down the runnels, carrying those unfathomably huge monstrosities of green slime, and it looked as if they were waving and laughing, gobs of jelly forming into limb-strands and mouth-holes where the orange ectoplasm turned into a flickering tongue.
They laughed! They waved! They grew even larger! And on their interuniverse journey, they bred more and more of themselves as they neared a familiar planet...
The vision changed: I was looking at the cities of earth--London, Paris, New York, all empty except for ill-twisted skeletons littering the streets, doing exactly what they were doing when they died. Until the visions faded...
I was still in the House blanketed in darkness. The slithering and bumping grew yet nearer until I could see it!
It was a luminous blob of green pus - looking as if it had plucked itself unceremoniously from the incubating slime of its huge host monster following arrival on Earth. By turns it materialized and dematerialized as it squirmed and hobbled towards me... and I imagined I saw a crease of a wicked smile where the green fat folded and twitched. I screamed and screamed. It touched my foot. It actually touched my foot! My blood curdled as I felt it gradually creep up my body. The breathing gunge greened me over, covering my face like slobbering clay. I was then a gibbering, juddering puppet, insane with disgust, but tittering in ecstasy. I felt it enter my mouth, ooze into my throat, a seething, thickening mess of spitting, burping stew.
I found myself back in the train, watching an old man in a brown duffel coat sleep opposite me ... and out of the window the distant glow of a city.
It must have been a nightmare.
***
The train was three hours late when it arrived at my destination. I feel an impending doom on our world. Nothing to be done. As I lie here in a hospital, the doctors are amazed and disturbed by my body, which is dyed a hideous green in and out.
(Previously e-published)
===========================================
THE IMPRIMATUR OF THE MONSTER
I forget whether my memory is as good as it used to be.
I once knew how it all ended, but now I despair of remembering it. All I can do is make various attempts at retracking - rat-tracking through the sewers of the past.
I decided to pay another visit to the house where, all those years before, events transpired which mythology has all but subsumed. It is said that the past is a monster waiting to return from the direction of the future, with green-flecked lips and accusing eyes. But, I vowed to ignore such fears and to face out any residual shame from such ill-reported times.
***
Could the house be in the mind, thus not just a simple train journey away? I sat in the shuddering carriage watching the leather window-strap swing from side to side. I itched to tug the red-painted alarm chain in the slot above the warning to passengers not to lean out. The tunnels seemed to be prolific - dark interludes in an otherwise straightforward succession of events. From all available evidence, there was no other passenger in the long corridorless train. But how was I to know for certain either its length or population? Only by disembarking.
I pulled down the arm-rest from its niche in the carriage's uphostlery and leaned my greasy head of hair upon the lightly engraved antimacassar. I desperately wanted to dream, in case reality had played me false and would land me in an incomplete scenario of trackless trains heading for infernal countries of night.
I did dream, I think. I saw visions of others who had dreamed before me - lands where history had come clean and laid bare the bones of its villainous participants - scores of skeletons clacking above the sleepers, like the tail-to-tail bony carapaces of unfreighted flesh - cities of scientists who went mad with religion - plain upon plain of inverted mountains....
I woke with a start. I had not been dreaming at all, only dreaming that I had. The train was pulling into a station, since I saw white boards flashing by with its name written up in clearer and clearer, and yet unattainable, definition.
I had embarked at Paddington, since the house I sought I knew to be in Wales. This principality had not yet been affected by the changing disguise of Europe, unlike the more malleable souls in London such as myself. During my last days in the hospital, I had ranted, it seemed, in my sleep, about the Black Mountains, where Creature Beings perched and spoke in the same Celtic lilt as I, the dreamer. Such Beings, through me, spoke goldenly of a Race older even than themselves which represented the most important group of Beings which Time and Space could ever encompass. And that Older Race, in turn, spoke of even greater Beings who managed to exist, in spite of their intrinsic untenability.
Now, as the train drew to a juddering halt, I, in a moment of misplaced logic, wondered if there were yet other Beings immeasurably greater than even those. And so on, ad infinitum and, perhaps, absurdum, until...
"Until you come to Man himself." A porter, or one I took to be such, had opened the carriage door for me and spoken as if continuing a conversation. In the dim flickering lights of the wind-swept platform, I saw his face possessed an imbecilic cast, topped off with a purple schoolboy's cap far too small for the head. Snot bubbled at one enlarged nostril. After he took my luggage, I saw he had a graveyard lurch, as he headed towards the station house and its waiting-room.
As I followed him, I heard the train shunting behind me, steaming up for the rest of its journey and, fleetingly, I turned to see faces pressed up against the grimy windows of that hissing beast. They were yearning with their eyes and I do not know whom I pitied most, me or them, as they sashed up and down upon the surface of the glass in a strange indulgent rhythm of farewell.
The thing in the cap motioned me towards a gas-fire which warmed one corner of the waiting-room. I rubbed my hands slowly above its glowing grid of orange bone, my mind inevitably drifting from the more natural courses of my thought-patterns. I had come to revisit the house, where I believed I had once been granted a vision of the future - when mankind would amount to nothing in the scheme of things. But now I suspected that the monster of green squelch I had faced then, had traversed the interlocking entropies of unimaginable existence from hyper-spiritual worlds, not as a precursor of Earthly colonisation, but as an emblem of the truth that had prevailed prior to the onset of reality itself. Or, at best, tangential to it.
***
One can learn to grow less afraid of any monster, if it is believed it is real, rather than a concoction of one's own terrified mind. Such is the crux of the matter, since I now realised (in the true sense of that word) I had come to this spot to lay the ghost which I myself once created, and I would achieve this by proving beyond reasonable doubt that it was truly *real*. And still is. Hence this rite of passage across the neat meadows of England...
To staunch the onward tread of worse and worse nightmares that are not nightmares at all, I needed to ascertain that the house contained a true monster of flesh and blood in its own terms, a monster that I could rationalise, encapsulate and even believe explicity when it spoke of forthcoming human doom in its characteristic voice of slimy conviction. Only by believing the truth of its message, could I exorcise and, consequently, nullify its effect.
***
I left the station behind me, as I trudged the once familiar country lane. There was the house. But, no, not yet, just a head of woods, grown together to present a common front to the hurricanes now so prevalent in this part of the world. A seat of green amid the swirling greys.
I was grateful for the warm-up in the waiting-room. How long I had been there listening to the ludicrous tales of the overgrown schoolboy, I could only measure by the growth of beard. He told me that the house was no longer in situ, since it had contracted a teetering, cancerous stairwell and collapsed in upon itself, even before the seasonal hurricanes had become endemic. I could not believe him, of course, because he also told me that I was a different person to the one who had come here all those years ago - not the one who had been frightened by the skeleton of a railway ticket-collector in his platform booth. He looked bemused when I countered by saying that I had not been afraid of the skeleton as such but by the plump worm for which its bones acted as home.
My dismay was great when he said he wanted to come with me to find the house. However, he spotted another train steaming towards the station and he went off to categorise it, number it and wave it through.
I left the woods behind me and, just as one of those lilty Creature Beings cut a screaming wedge of yellow light in the sky's blanket of night, I spotted the house itself, just as I think I remembered it.
But, incredibly, it was careering towards me out of the past, with steam churning from every chimney-stack.
Lights were being flashed on and off in every window, greenness slicking down the glass like net curtains of foullest slime. The monster had actually become the house, rather than remained an inhabitant of it. I put my fists to my ears to dull its pained bellowing - it had originally come to destroy the whole of mankind, but had merely managed to get up a sufficient head of steam to destroy only myself.
I realised I had, since my earliest times, absorbed the vile imaginings that this monster had created. Its metagalactic imprimatur was to mythologise the only tenable beings in existence who happened to be Earth's humans - and I now knew I had rescued the future for humanity. By fixing the monster under the impenetrable varnish of my creativity, I also fixed its dreams of us and made them real. As I sucked its Hell into my brain, the better was our chance to become angel-eyed and paramount - shimmering creatures in our own right with grains of honest phantasy - happily wandering among the gildenspires of the Heavenly City.
***
I am that house, I am that train, I am that ghoulish schoolboy, I am that ideologue weirdmonger...
I made myself actually become that monster. And, without me, you would never have been you, with desires and dreams and fancies and loves, all fit for gods and goddesses. You would have been mere puppet-jerks of Older and Younger Races, with a blood-engorged worm in the night-hutch of the head to replace that human brain of infinite possibilities.
To stop my own head from exploding into a thousand bone-shards, I ask you, please, I beg you, to hold me close - let me nuzzle in your cosy lap, so that such love and care will enable me to bear man's worst nightmares on your behalf.
***
But I look up and see that awful schoolboy's moon-face leering at me imbecilically, the maggot-riddled flesh slowly drooling from the sicker bones within - and my despair at forgetting how it all ended is never-ending.
Published 'Crypt of Cthulhu' 1994
My name is Matthew Shakewell and I nearly died yesterday.
I shall try to relate as closely as I can my experience, but please keep your hand on your heart and read this story in the clear light of day...for you may die of fright, as I so very nearly did. Please take care, make sure my words are not those of a mad man or one who wants to frighten you gratuitously; make sure you do not put too much credit in their meaning as appreciation of their truth could have damnable effect on the mild-mannered or the nervous...but, as I write this, I genuinely believe each word I am about to devote to paper.
So much for the warning, now for the facts.
***
I snuggled into the warmth of the carriage as the train churned through acre upon acre of English countryside. It was impossible to view the trees and village stations we must have passed through, for the night enshrined everything; so the most sensible thing to do was to try and sleep until the time for arrival at my destination, where my uncle would be waiting to greet me.
I slept for how long and with what vague dreams? Nebulous vistas of strange dimensional cities intruded, warped visages staring and tentacles clutching, wet lips and things sucking near. I awoke to the carriage, the formless darkness sliding away past me and an old man snoring in the corner. I was quite shaken by my dreams as the memory of them lingered incoherently. But I soon realized on looking at my timepiece that I should have arrived at my destination about an hour before!
It was then that I comprehended I had not seen one thing from the carriage window. True, I was travelling through a comparatively uninhabited part of England, but this was decidedly peculiar; even though there were no stars nor moon, I should have seen the distant glow of some big town or the lonesome light of a spinster's cottage. But absolutely nothing could I see, presumably on acoount of the unusual blackness of the night through which I was speeding in a corridorless train. Might it be fog?
I relaxed back into the seat and viewed my sleeping companion. The fog would explain the lateness of the train, but what about its apparent speed?
I was convinced the train was traveling at a phenomenal speed, but it was now two hours overdue--without precedence on that line. I resolved to wake my companion and I stepped over to shake him. What curled from the hood of the duffel coat was an evilly scarred face and, on unwinding, gave me an imbecilic smile: a moon-face topped by a schoolboy's cap, giggling in the depth of its rasping throat.
"Mutation" is a word too medical, too clinical, as what I saw was essentially unwholesome; nothing created by a mother on this world, but fashioned far away in dim lands beyond the galaxy we know. The transfiguration took me completely by surprise as, before my eyes, the monstrosity literally dissolved and dripping from the brown duffel coat was a green, sticky slime, forming a viscid puddle on the swaying floor.
It held all the smells which disgust man throughout the world and others completely new to his nose, recalling my dream vistas and certain other things I could not quite place.
My first thought was to pull the communication cord, but I felt the train was slowing down--presumably my destination had been reached. My mind was a maelstrom as the train drew to a halt. On jumping to the platform, I realized it was not my intended destination, but a strange station ... and the nightmare train was drawing out, leaving me bewildered and valiseless. Amid the chaos of my mind, I knew I had to find a porter and share the horror I with him.
Empty tins and scraps of paper scuttled along the deserted platform, driven by the night wind. So, no fog! Visibility was excellent, but it still puzzled me why I could not see the moon nor the stars. I shouted for assistance, but none came: a forsaken station, forgotten by all who used to work there, those who, under a happy sun, waved green flags and blew whistles, carted parcels and drank tea. Dazed, I shuffled along the cluttered platform towards the station-house, sithouetted against the ceiling of the sky, ominous and spectral.
I came to a turnstile and, not surprisingly, it was enlaced with choking cobwebs, twining through the bars. The only exit I could see was through there, and so I pulled myself together to cut a path through its creeping entropy. As I entered, an over-nourished spider skittered to its lair. I wish to God I had not looked to the left into the ticket-collector's cab, for here was not a deserted seat, but the ticket collector himself sitting, not as he used to be, but a decaying skeleton-creature with a puncher in the bones of a hand. A plump worm coiled through his skewered ribs ... and I screamed ... ran from that blasphemous railway station...
...into avenues of ill-lit horror, through lines of trees, black and twisted against the blacker sky, along country roads twining between untended hedgerows ... until exhaustion put paid to my progress ... I saw the House; it rose out of the darkness, looming forbodingly. It was more of a castle than a house, and had two towering wings, pointing and mocking at the sky.
I should not fear its occupants, I told myself--they would probably disperse my fears and show my position on the map - so I plucked up enough courage to walk to the main door. Its massive oaken surface and golden knocker filled me with awe, but I grasped the knocker, pulled it heavily from the wood, and let it drop with a crash echoing throughout the whole house. It was such a loud noise that it startled me and put the fear back. There, I waited for what Fate would bring to the door, waiting, eternally waiting. But no one came. No one deigned to answer my call for help, so I decided to force my way in for shelter, but the door looked too mighty for entrance there. But I was mistaken as a single trial caused the door to swing open with a splitting creak revealing ... only darkness. I coughed as the atmosphere tightened in my chest and I felt for a suitable position to sleep the night out.
It was then that I heard something which I can hear even now inside my head, a funeral moan, harmonically illogical, resonant, deep but also shrill, coming from up above me, approaching down a rickety staircase, a moan carrying at one and the same time the horror of the graveyard, the scream of delight as ghouls ecstatically lift a prutrescible corpse from its resting place, the terror of a lunatic's laugh as he carves his own flesh, and all the pain and panic of the Pit where shapeless elementals vaguely swim in fire, chewing off the heads of the human damned.
After, came a slithering and bumping above me: a thing was moving across the floor and, then, it was squelching down the stairs emitting the long drawn-out moan. The alternate slithering and bumping rode the creaking, teetering stairs, inexorably drawing closer, nearer, faster, down, down, down...
...it seemed as if I were in another world, sucked in by intangible forces to a revelation of the cosmos, a panorama of all time; stars and streaks of light reaching to infinitudes of chaos and cult, ethereal glows and fresh, unmathematical lands. I saw a city with dome-like, square buildings on plains of kaleidoscopic bubbles and, in each bubble, a grotesque gargantuan gargoyle leering at the citizens in the buildings. Those citizens themselves were immaterial, covered by jellified green slime and motivated by an ectoplasm of orange exactly in the middle of its soul-light.
I saw vague ski-runs of blue effulgence stretching for aeons from
the mamnoth, bubbly planet past the barrier of time and space, almost an interpenetration of two universes. I saw an enormous sled skim down the runnels, carrying those unfathomably huge monstrosities of green slime, and it looked as if they were waving and laughing, gobs of jelly forming into limb-strands and mouth-holes where the orange ectoplasm turned into a flickering tongue.
They laughed! They waved! They grew even larger! And on their interuniverse journey, they bred more and more of themselves as they neared a familiar planet...
The vision changed: I was looking at the cities of earth--London, Paris, New York, all empty except for ill-twisted skeletons littering the streets, doing exactly what they were doing when they died. Until the visions faded...
I was still in the House blanketed in darkness. The slithering and bumping grew yet nearer until I could see it!
It was a luminous blob of green pus - looking as if it had plucked itself unceremoniously from the incubating slime of its huge host monster following arrival on Earth. By turns it materialized and dematerialized as it squirmed and hobbled towards me... and I imagined I saw a crease of a wicked smile where the green fat folded and twitched. I screamed and screamed. It touched my foot. It actually touched my foot! My blood curdled as I felt it gradually creep up my body. The breathing gunge greened me over, covering my face like slobbering clay. I was then a gibbering, juddering puppet, insane with disgust, but tittering in ecstasy. I felt it enter my mouth, ooze into my throat, a seething, thickening mess of spitting, burping stew.
I found myself back in the train, watching an old man in a brown duffel coat sleep opposite me ... and out of the window the distant glow of a city.
It must have been a nightmare.
***
The train was three hours late when it arrived at my destination. I feel an impending doom on our world. Nothing to be done. As I lie here in a hospital, the doctors are amazed and disturbed by my body, which is dyed a hideous green in and out.
(Previously e-published)
===========================================
THE IMPRIMATUR OF THE MONSTER
I forget whether my memory is as good as it used to be.
I once knew how it all ended, but now I despair of remembering it. All I can do is make various attempts at retracking - rat-tracking through the sewers of the past.
I decided to pay another visit to the house where, all those years before, events transpired which mythology has all but subsumed. It is said that the past is a monster waiting to return from the direction of the future, with green-flecked lips and accusing eyes. But, I vowed to ignore such fears and to face out any residual shame from such ill-reported times.
***
Could the house be in the mind, thus not just a simple train journey away? I sat in the shuddering carriage watching the leather window-strap swing from side to side. I itched to tug the red-painted alarm chain in the slot above the warning to passengers not to lean out. The tunnels seemed to be prolific - dark interludes in an otherwise straightforward succession of events. From all available evidence, there was no other passenger in the long corridorless train. But how was I to know for certain either its length or population? Only by disembarking.
I pulled down the arm-rest from its niche in the carriage's uphostlery and leaned my greasy head of hair upon the lightly engraved antimacassar. I desperately wanted to dream, in case reality had played me false and would land me in an incomplete scenario of trackless trains heading for infernal countries of night.
I did dream, I think. I saw visions of others who had dreamed before me - lands where history had come clean and laid bare the bones of its villainous participants - scores of skeletons clacking above the sleepers, like the tail-to-tail bony carapaces of unfreighted flesh - cities of scientists who went mad with religion - plain upon plain of inverted mountains....
I woke with a start. I had not been dreaming at all, only dreaming that I had. The train was pulling into a station, since I saw white boards flashing by with its name written up in clearer and clearer, and yet unattainable, definition.
I had embarked at Paddington, since the house I sought I knew to be in Wales. This principality had not yet been affected by the changing disguise of Europe, unlike the more malleable souls in London such as myself. During my last days in the hospital, I had ranted, it seemed, in my sleep, about the Black Mountains, where Creature Beings perched and spoke in the same Celtic lilt as I, the dreamer. Such Beings, through me, spoke goldenly of a Race older even than themselves which represented the most important group of Beings which Time and Space could ever encompass. And that Older Race, in turn, spoke of even greater Beings who managed to exist, in spite of their intrinsic untenability.
Now, as the train drew to a juddering halt, I, in a moment of misplaced logic, wondered if there were yet other Beings immeasurably greater than even those. And so on, ad infinitum and, perhaps, absurdum, until...
"Until you come to Man himself." A porter, or one I took to be such, had opened the carriage door for me and spoken as if continuing a conversation. In the dim flickering lights of the wind-swept platform, I saw his face possessed an imbecilic cast, topped off with a purple schoolboy's cap far too small for the head. Snot bubbled at one enlarged nostril. After he took my luggage, I saw he had a graveyard lurch, as he headed towards the station house and its waiting-room.
As I followed him, I heard the train shunting behind me, steaming up for the rest of its journey and, fleetingly, I turned to see faces pressed up against the grimy windows of that hissing beast. They were yearning with their eyes and I do not know whom I pitied most, me or them, as they sashed up and down upon the surface of the glass in a strange indulgent rhythm of farewell.
The thing in the cap motioned me towards a gas-fire which warmed one corner of the waiting-room. I rubbed my hands slowly above its glowing grid of orange bone, my mind inevitably drifting from the more natural courses of my thought-patterns. I had come to revisit the house, where I believed I had once been granted a vision of the future - when mankind would amount to nothing in the scheme of things. But now I suspected that the monster of green squelch I had faced then, had traversed the interlocking entropies of unimaginable existence from hyper-spiritual worlds, not as a precursor of Earthly colonisation, but as an emblem of the truth that had prevailed prior to the onset of reality itself. Or, at best, tangential to it.
***
One can learn to grow less afraid of any monster, if it is believed it is real, rather than a concoction of one's own terrified mind. Such is the crux of the matter, since I now realised (in the true sense of that word) I had come to this spot to lay the ghost which I myself once created, and I would achieve this by proving beyond reasonable doubt that it was truly *real*. And still is. Hence this rite of passage across the neat meadows of England...
To staunch the onward tread of worse and worse nightmares that are not nightmares at all, I needed to ascertain that the house contained a true monster of flesh and blood in its own terms, a monster that I could rationalise, encapsulate and even believe explicity when it spoke of forthcoming human doom in its characteristic voice of slimy conviction. Only by believing the truth of its message, could I exorcise and, consequently, nullify its effect.
***
I left the station behind me, as I trudged the once familiar country lane. There was the house. But, no, not yet, just a head of woods, grown together to present a common front to the hurricanes now so prevalent in this part of the world. A seat of green amid the swirling greys.
I was grateful for the warm-up in the waiting-room. How long I had been there listening to the ludicrous tales of the overgrown schoolboy, I could only measure by the growth of beard. He told me that the house was no longer in situ, since it had contracted a teetering, cancerous stairwell and collapsed in upon itself, even before the seasonal hurricanes had become endemic. I could not believe him, of course, because he also told me that I was a different person to the one who had come here all those years ago - not the one who had been frightened by the skeleton of a railway ticket-collector in his platform booth. He looked bemused when I countered by saying that I had not been afraid of the skeleton as such but by the plump worm for which its bones acted as home.
My dismay was great when he said he wanted to come with me to find the house. However, he spotted another train steaming towards the station and he went off to categorise it, number it and wave it through.
I left the woods behind me and, just as one of those lilty Creature Beings cut a screaming wedge of yellow light in the sky's blanket of night, I spotted the house itself, just as I think I remembered it.
But, incredibly, it was careering towards me out of the past, with steam churning from every chimney-stack.
Lights were being flashed on and off in every window, greenness slicking down the glass like net curtains of foullest slime. The monster had actually become the house, rather than remained an inhabitant of it. I put my fists to my ears to dull its pained bellowing - it had originally come to destroy the whole of mankind, but had merely managed to get up a sufficient head of steam to destroy only myself.
I realised I had, since my earliest times, absorbed the vile imaginings that this monster had created. Its metagalactic imprimatur was to mythologise the only tenable beings in existence who happened to be Earth's humans - and I now knew I had rescued the future for humanity. By fixing the monster under the impenetrable varnish of my creativity, I also fixed its dreams of us and made them real. As I sucked its Hell into my brain, the better was our chance to become angel-eyed and paramount - shimmering creatures in our own right with grains of honest phantasy - happily wandering among the gildenspires of the Heavenly City.
***
I am that house, I am that train, I am that ghoulish schoolboy, I am that ideologue weirdmonger...
I made myself actually become that monster. And, without me, you would never have been you, with desires and dreams and fancies and loves, all fit for gods and goddesses. You would have been mere puppet-jerks of Older and Younger Races, with a blood-engorged worm in the night-hutch of the head to replace that human brain of infinite possibilities.
To stop my own head from exploding into a thousand bone-shards, I ask you, please, I beg you, to hold me close - let me nuzzle in your cosy lap, so that such love and care will enable me to bear man's worst nightmares on your behalf.
***
But I look up and see that awful schoolboy's moon-face leering at me imbecilically, the maggot-riddled flesh slowly drooling from the sicker bones within - and my despair at forgetting how it all ended is never-ending.
Published 'Crypt of Cthulhu' 1994
Friday, July 06, 2007
Zencore Competition
A competition relating to the book ZENCORE!: Scriptus Innominatus published by Megazanthus Press on 9th June 2007.
The authors' names are listed on the back cover. Just link these names individually to the story titles either by luck or judgement*. The person with the most correct links will win a prize from myself: the editor/publisher of Zencore. If there is a tie, the people winning will share this prize.
The prize will be of deemed maximum value of £75 - as agreed by the winner(s) and myself from items in my book/magazine collection and/or cash.
The more people who enter the competition the bigger value (up to the maximum) to be won outright or shared.
No entry fee. No silly rules other than the fact that the authors themselves are not directly eligible to enter.
I shall do everything possible that whoever wins will be pleased with the prize. You will have to trust me as I trust those who choose to enter. My decision is final.
To be eligible, your entry needs to be sent to: bfitzworth@yahoo.co.uk
Deadline Midnight GMT on 8 December 2007 after which the authors' names are due to be officially linked to their stories.
The running order of the stories in ZENCORE is as follows:
"Torsion"
"MMM – Delicious"
"Undergrowth"
"Fugly"
"The Nightmare Reader"
"The Secret Life of the Panda"
"Upset Stomach"
"The Awful Truth About The Circus"
"Red Velvet Dust"
"The Coughing Coffin"
"Terminus"
"Mary’s Gift, The Stars and Frank’s Pisser"
"Blue Raspberries"
"Berian Winslow & The Stream Of Consciousness Storyteller"
"The Plunge"
"England and Nowhere"
"Word Doctor"
The stories' authors in alphabetical order (not necessarily in story order):
Anonymous, Daniel Ausema, Charles Black, Dominy Clements, Scott Edelman, Nick Jackson, M.P. Johnson, Kek-W, Tim Nickels, Reggie Oliver, Ursula Pflug, Steven Pirie, Brian Rappatta, Patricia Russo, E. Sedia, S.D. Tullis, Mark Valentine.
The book can be purchased HERE.
*You can enter this competition up to a maximum of three times, and your answers can derive from luck (ie you do not even need to have the book), from serious guesses based on reading the stories, from reading reviews, blogs etc. or from surreptitious knowledge (!) - and you will not be questioned about your methods. If you enter the competition more than once, each entry will be treated separately.
=============================
EDIT: 9 Dec 07: RESULTS IN TODAY'S COMMENT BELOW
=============================
The authors' names are listed on the back cover. Just link these names individually to the story titles either by luck or judgement*. The person with the most correct links will win a prize from myself: the editor/publisher of Zencore. If there is a tie, the people winning will share this prize.
The prize will be of deemed maximum value of £75 - as agreed by the winner(s) and myself from items in my book/magazine collection and/or cash.
The more people who enter the competition the bigger value (up to the maximum) to be won outright or shared.
No entry fee. No silly rules other than the fact that the authors themselves are not directly eligible to enter.
I shall do everything possible that whoever wins will be pleased with the prize. You will have to trust me as I trust those who choose to enter. My decision is final.
To be eligible, your entry needs to be sent to: bfitzworth@yahoo.co.uk
Deadline Midnight GMT on 8 December 2007 after which the authors' names are due to be officially linked to their stories.
The running order of the stories in ZENCORE is as follows:
"Torsion"
"MMM – Delicious"
"Undergrowth"
"Fugly"
"The Nightmare Reader"
"The Secret Life of the Panda"
"Upset Stomach"
"The Awful Truth About The Circus"
"Red Velvet Dust"
"The Coughing Coffin"
"Terminus"
"Mary’s Gift, The Stars and Frank’s Pisser"
"Blue Raspberries"
"Berian Winslow & The Stream Of Consciousness Storyteller"
"The Plunge"
"England and Nowhere"
"Word Doctor"
The stories' authors in alphabetical order (not necessarily in story order):
Anonymous, Daniel Ausema, Charles Black, Dominy Clements, Scott Edelman, Nick Jackson, M.P. Johnson, Kek-W, Tim Nickels, Reggie Oliver, Ursula Pflug, Steven Pirie, Brian Rappatta, Patricia Russo, E. Sedia, S.D. Tullis, Mark Valentine.
The book can be purchased HERE.
*You can enter this competition up to a maximum of three times, and your answers can derive from luck (ie you do not even need to have the book), from serious guesses based on reading the stories, from reading reviews, blogs etc. or from surreptitious knowledge (!) - and you will not be questioned about your methods. If you enter the competition more than once, each entry will be treated separately.
=============================
EDIT: 9 Dec 07: RESULTS IN TODAY'S COMMENT BELOW
=============================
Saturday, June 23, 2007
A Restless Night
Published 'After Hours' 1990
It sprung from the direction of the bedroom window, only visible by being darker than the impenetrable darkness itself. He flinched, expecting whatever it was to cover him with a further blanket on his bed. He wondered why he was awake in the first place; but perhaps the Thing had released the smallest sound before shedding itself. The room was as he usually liked it: without even a glimmer of light, the way he dreamed his sleep would one day become: without those disturbing images that often fleet across the dozing mind’s eye, either to be forgotten in the flurry of life’s waking business or merely half-remembered, only to join up with its other (perhaps better) half, come the following night, when the whole would become a new half of an even more important harrowing. And so forth, until the one true Sleep finally took over late in the day of life. The circle completed
He certainly felt warmer. The Thing had spread itself over the top of his duckdown, its deep black surface rippling like a pond with a sea’s consistency.
The bed should have been the safest place to stay. As a child, he’d considered it a sanctuary against those fears that lurked underneath it and in the corners of the room. He’d crawl down deeper, knowing in his heart of hearts that even the worst bomb of all could not harm him, even if it made a direct hit on the house.
Now, older, with all the hang-ups that adult versions of children can so easily suffer, even the bed lost its glamour as a safehouse. The creature of his nightmare had become part and parcel of the bedcovers themselves.
Secretly, he knew, deep down within himself, as far as he could get from the surface of his body, was a soul, a pinprick of essential spirit, which his whole life heretofore had been spent in protecting. That tiny core was him: the rest was mere masquerade. Others, less knowledgeable than him, had not protected these little fellahs, these tiny bits of themselves, had not realised the dire necessity of so doing, and had consequently lost them in one careless moment of body-letting. Such sparks, thus released, would then wander the universe until they found new vehicles for their manipulative ambitions. Tonight, an evil soul which had once lived upon the Earth inside a body and escaped one morning of flatulence and bleary-eyed unalertness, had decided to seek reunitement with matter and had found purchase in the heavy bedroom curtains: finding some unnatural skein of near-vitality in the material’s woof, it had pounced like a huge faceless vulture moth upon the next rung up in the cycles of existence
But two souls cannot live in one human body.
Most things are possible, except the impossible, and even that becomes possible in time. Never, though, can one body have more than a single master.
#
He woke with a panic. The window was shining with the beginnings of dawn: the impermeable drapes had parted raggedly at the middle, as if a sleepwalker had gone off half-cock in the reasonless desire to undraw them, only managing to crossthread some of the rings along the rails by tugging down instead of across. The waker could not see whether the sash was up or down. He’d wanted to sleep till noon, but the unseasonable rip of light had evidently stirred him. And the cold, too, since most of the covers had slewed off him in the night. He tried to recall a dream he was having just before rudely waking. It certainly figured the curtains, but he couldn’t be sure. He turned over and was relieved to see his wife drowsing peacefully. More beautiful than he ever remembered her.
She suddenly opened her eyes upon him and screamed…
It sprung from the direction of the bedroom window, only visible by being darker than the impenetrable darkness itself. He flinched, expecting whatever it was to cover him with a further blanket on his bed. He wondered why he was awake in the first place; but perhaps the Thing had released the smallest sound before shedding itself. The room was as he usually liked it: without even a glimmer of light, the way he dreamed his sleep would one day become: without those disturbing images that often fleet across the dozing mind’s eye, either to be forgotten in the flurry of life’s waking business or merely half-remembered, only to join up with its other (perhaps better) half, come the following night, when the whole would become a new half of an even more important harrowing. And so forth, until the one true Sleep finally took over late in the day of life. The circle completed
He certainly felt warmer. The Thing had spread itself over the top of his duckdown, its deep black surface rippling like a pond with a sea’s consistency.
The bed should have been the safest place to stay. As a child, he’d considered it a sanctuary against those fears that lurked underneath it and in the corners of the room. He’d crawl down deeper, knowing in his heart of hearts that even the worst bomb of all could not harm him, even if it made a direct hit on the house.
Now, older, with all the hang-ups that adult versions of children can so easily suffer, even the bed lost its glamour as a safehouse. The creature of his nightmare had become part and parcel of the bedcovers themselves.
Secretly, he knew, deep down within himself, as far as he could get from the surface of his body, was a soul, a pinprick of essential spirit, which his whole life heretofore had been spent in protecting. That tiny core was him: the rest was mere masquerade. Others, less knowledgeable than him, had not protected these little fellahs, these tiny bits of themselves, had not realised the dire necessity of so doing, and had consequently lost them in one careless moment of body-letting. Such sparks, thus released, would then wander the universe until they found new vehicles for their manipulative ambitions. Tonight, an evil soul which had once lived upon the Earth inside a body and escaped one morning of flatulence and bleary-eyed unalertness, had decided to seek reunitement with matter and had found purchase in the heavy bedroom curtains: finding some unnatural skein of near-vitality in the material’s woof, it had pounced like a huge faceless vulture moth upon the next rung up in the cycles of existence
But two souls cannot live in one human body.
Most things are possible, except the impossible, and even that becomes possible in time. Never, though, can one body have more than a single master.
#
He woke with a panic. The window was shining with the beginnings of dawn: the impermeable drapes had parted raggedly at the middle, as if a sleepwalker had gone off half-cock in the reasonless desire to undraw them, only managing to crossthread some of the rings along the rails by tugging down instead of across. The waker could not see whether the sash was up or down. He’d wanted to sleep till noon, but the unseasonable rip of light had evidently stirred him. And the cold, too, since most of the covers had slewed off him in the night. He tried to recall a dream he was having just before rudely waking. It certainly figured the curtains, but he couldn’t be sure. He turned over and was relieved to see his wife drowsing peacefully. More beautiful than he ever remembered her.
She suddenly opened her eyes upon him and screamed…
Friday, June 22, 2007
Revery
Published 'Purple Patch' 1989
As I sit inside St Paul’s Cathedral, I write and, by writing, I make the moment true.
Waiting for Doom, some say, is worse than Doom itself. Others, that Triumph and Disaster should be treated as the equal Impostors they both surely are. But what price Death, I ask.
There are many religions in the world, but the only one for me, I think, is Life - where else can you trust your Faith? The rest is Doubt and Dogma.
The Cathedral is echoing with some men stacking chairs. I suspect they are not allowed to swear inside here — labourers haps recruited rather for Manners than Muscle. The endemic Tourists have yet to arrive, probably still partaking of portmanteau breakfasts at their respective hotels. The great insides of the Dome are always empty, except for the odd midget or two crawling round the high circular gallery.
The Second World War was fought within that Dome, I fancy, toylike planes dodging and weaving, dropping pellets smaller than pigeons’ eggs to the marble floor. All the lights had to be extinguished inside the Cathedral, because of the Blackout; so the worshippers in the pews could see nothing but the sparkles and flashes, amid the cracks and gunrattles. Then feel the fluttering of dead wings past their upturned faces.
History books tell us that the War took place outside the Dome; that mighty Dome withstanding all the onslaughts to which its purlieus so easily submitted. Eyewitnesses remember it that way, too.
Life itself lives only in Memory, as the passing of each remembered second becomes the only evidence of existence. What price History, then, when human faculties grow to such a pitch of Doubt,while the Machines march?
The Cathedral’s factotums leg it past me in unison, their senses in the off mode.
As I leave, I wonder indeed whether everything is in my head.
(Written inside St Paul’s, 17.5.89)
Outside, life seems to be going on as normal.
(Written outside St Paul’s, 17.5.89)
As I sit inside St Paul’s Cathedral, I write and, by writing, I make the moment true.
Waiting for Doom, some say, is worse than Doom itself. Others, that Triumph and Disaster should be treated as the equal Impostors they both surely are. But what price Death, I ask.
There are many religions in the world, but the only one for me, I think, is Life - where else can you trust your Faith? The rest is Doubt and Dogma.
The Cathedral is echoing with some men stacking chairs. I suspect they are not allowed to swear inside here — labourers haps recruited rather for Manners than Muscle. The endemic Tourists have yet to arrive, probably still partaking of portmanteau breakfasts at their respective hotels. The great insides of the Dome are always empty, except for the odd midget or two crawling round the high circular gallery.
The Second World War was fought within that Dome, I fancy, toylike planes dodging and weaving, dropping pellets smaller than pigeons’ eggs to the marble floor. All the lights had to be extinguished inside the Cathedral, because of the Blackout; so the worshippers in the pews could see nothing but the sparkles and flashes, amid the cracks and gunrattles. Then feel the fluttering of dead wings past their upturned faces.
History books tell us that the War took place outside the Dome; that mighty Dome withstanding all the onslaughts to which its purlieus so easily submitted. Eyewitnesses remember it that way, too.
Life itself lives only in Memory, as the passing of each remembered second becomes the only evidence of existence. What price History, then, when human faculties grow to such a pitch of Doubt,while the Machines march?
The Cathedral’s factotums leg it past me in unison, their senses in the off mode.
As I leave, I wonder indeed whether everything is in my head.
(Written inside St Paul’s, 17.5.89)
Outside, life seems to be going on as normal.
(Written outside St Paul’s, 17.5.89)
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Snow at Midnight
Cheryl never knew whether it was exactly midnight when the snow silently started falling; but the morning’s thickness of covering indicated it must have started at least as early as that – judging by the current steady rate of fall seen through her bedroom window, a rate projected into the past until reaching the time it must presumably have begun falling. Not that the process was as scientifically thought out as that.
Cheryl was as old as she could ever remember being, and that was not very old, but legally old enough to drive alone in a car but only if she could first pass her driving test. Today’s driving lesson had already been cancelled, not because of the weather but because of the instructor being ill, but, of course, if he had not been ill, Cheryl assumed, it would have been cancelled first and foremost because of the weather. Cheryl was not old enough to bear disappointments very easily but, in her heart of hearts, she was not really disappointed at all as driving lessons often made her feel nervous, nervous enough for her then never to do justice to her driving abilities.
It was difficult to identify her own emotions – as if she were someone else, someone even more inscrutable than the teacher she never understood; his lessons were always just above her head; his lessons steadily increased in difficulty but she was always just that one degree short of comprehension however quickly her intelligence grew with age.
Was she disappointed at her driving-lesson being cancelled? Nah!
The answer had come quick: a snap judgement that Cheryl was used to exercising whenever wonder hit wonder’s solution head-on. She would be able to lie slug-a-bed watching the snow powdering past upon puffs of wind; she would be able, too, not to worry about meeting her parents head-on, as it were, until much later in the day. It would be just their voices through the door that she would need to face at the moment. She may not have been old enough to make major decisions, but she was still young enough to cherish making minor decisions against the grain of others’ major wishes.
“Can you put the dish-washer on, Cheryl?” she heard her mother’s voice shout from downstairs.
“Is it already unloaded?” she counter-queried.
“Yes, you’ve just got to load it with the new stuff,” came the reply.
Old stuff, you mean, thought Cheryl. The dirty old stuff.
“Is it snowing hard?” Cheryl asked, making small talk between the two floors of the house.
“Yes, but not hard enough to stop me going to work,” came the next reply.
“Shame!” Cheryl called back, puckishly.
“Yes, I could have done with a day off!”
“Dad gone?”
“Yes, he had to clear the drive with the wooden shovel.”
“Shame!” Cheryl replied, with a different tone of voice. She now remembered the earlier scraping sounds, gradually growing more distant the nearer, she now assumed, they approached the other end of the drive.
“I think he did his back in. Good job they already cancelled your lesson, Cheryl.”
“Yes.”
“Well, bye. Don’t forget the dish-washer.”
“No, I won’t.”
The back door banged, just as Cheryl sat up in bed again to look through the window so as to check the hardness of the snowfall for herself. The increasing daylight revealed that it was dirty snow, as if it had come through layers of pollution. Or as if it had taken on the stains of its Midnight starting-point.
She was old enough to assume she must have dozed off again, because waking again, as she did, would indicate either the simple fact of having dozed off again or a more inscrutable dovetail with a dream that she forgot as soon as she remembered it ... and she maturely believed that it was more mature to believe the straightforward reasons for things rather than the more indefinable wishful-thinking reasons connected with dreams or religion.
She had been woken by a car crunching slowly over the snowy road with a barely perceptible engine noise. Then silence. She looked through the window. The snow had just stopped. She looked at her watch: exactly twelve noon. She must have imagined the crunching tyres. She slumped back on the bolster pillows. She mustn’t forget the dish-washer or they’d have her guts for garters.
It was then she heard the distant scraping noise – growing louder as it grew nearer. More a groaning than a scraping the nearer it grew, as if the implement used for scraping was grinding against its own internal knots thus making its business-end less edge-efficient for dealing with the encrusted ice and snow on the drive. Her Dad must have been allowed home early because of the weather. Dozing off again made her wonder against wonder. It was all part of a dream ... or of learning to dream.
But she was woken yet again by the back door slamming.
Dad never came through the back door. That was Mum’s way. Cheryl found herself now fully awake, eager to discover which of them it truly was. One was more fiercesome than the other and she was newly conscious of the dish-washer.
She’d better face the music straightaway, rather than let retribution catch her still in bed.
“Foot lightly on pedal ... through to the spinning brushes...ignition off...”
She could hardly see anything in front of her face. Flakes of sleep rather than simply dirty snow. Waking was never quite so difficult and one needed to reverse before going forward again....
It was dark in her bedroom when she finally woke. She looked at her watch. One minute to Midnight. She looked out the window. It was now not snowing at all. Cheryl felt relieved that the only parts being manipulated in and out of gear were her mind and her mind’s dreams, not any other parts of her. She was old enough to understand, but still young enough not to understand that she understood.
(written and published today)
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THE WELSH WRISTWATCH
===============================
Cheryl was as old as she could ever remember being, and that was not very old, but legally old enough to drive alone in a car but only if she could first pass her driving test. Today’s driving lesson had already been cancelled, not because of the weather but because of the instructor being ill, but, of course, if he had not been ill, Cheryl assumed, it would have been cancelled first and foremost because of the weather. Cheryl was not old enough to bear disappointments very easily but, in her heart of hearts, she was not really disappointed at all as driving lessons often made her feel nervous, nervous enough for her then never to do justice to her driving abilities.
It was difficult to identify her own emotions – as if she were someone else, someone even more inscrutable than the teacher she never understood; his lessons were always just above her head; his lessons steadily increased in difficulty but she was always just that one degree short of comprehension however quickly her intelligence grew with age.
Was she disappointed at her driving-lesson being cancelled? Nah!
The answer had come quick: a snap judgement that Cheryl was used to exercising whenever wonder hit wonder’s solution head-on. She would be able to lie slug-a-bed watching the snow powdering past upon puffs of wind; she would be able, too, not to worry about meeting her parents head-on, as it were, until much later in the day. It would be just their voices through the door that she would need to face at the moment. She may not have been old enough to make major decisions, but she was still young enough to cherish making minor decisions against the grain of others’ major wishes.
“Can you put the dish-washer on, Cheryl?” she heard her mother’s voice shout from downstairs.
“Is it already unloaded?” she counter-queried.
“Yes, you’ve just got to load it with the new stuff,” came the reply.
Old stuff, you mean, thought Cheryl. The dirty old stuff.
“Is it snowing hard?” Cheryl asked, making small talk between the two floors of the house.
“Yes, but not hard enough to stop me going to work,” came the next reply.
“Shame!” Cheryl called back, puckishly.
“Yes, I could have done with a day off!”
“Dad gone?”
“Yes, he had to clear the drive with the wooden shovel.”
“Shame!” Cheryl replied, with a different tone of voice. She now remembered the earlier scraping sounds, gradually growing more distant the nearer, she now assumed, they approached the other end of the drive.
“I think he did his back in. Good job they already cancelled your lesson, Cheryl.”
“Yes.”
“Well, bye. Don’t forget the dish-washer.”
“No, I won’t.”
The back door banged, just as Cheryl sat up in bed again to look through the window so as to check the hardness of the snowfall for herself. The increasing daylight revealed that it was dirty snow, as if it had come through layers of pollution. Or as if it had taken on the stains of its Midnight starting-point.
She was old enough to assume she must have dozed off again, because waking again, as she did, would indicate either the simple fact of having dozed off again or a more inscrutable dovetail with a dream that she forgot as soon as she remembered it ... and she maturely believed that it was more mature to believe the straightforward reasons for things rather than the more indefinable wishful-thinking reasons connected with dreams or religion.
She had been woken by a car crunching slowly over the snowy road with a barely perceptible engine noise. Then silence. She looked through the window. The snow had just stopped. She looked at her watch: exactly twelve noon. She must have imagined the crunching tyres. She slumped back on the bolster pillows. She mustn’t forget the dish-washer or they’d have her guts for garters.
It was then she heard the distant scraping noise – growing louder as it grew nearer. More a groaning than a scraping the nearer it grew, as if the implement used for scraping was grinding against its own internal knots thus making its business-end less edge-efficient for dealing with the encrusted ice and snow on the drive. Her Dad must have been allowed home early because of the weather. Dozing off again made her wonder against wonder. It was all part of a dream ... or of learning to dream.
But she was woken yet again by the back door slamming.
Dad never came through the back door. That was Mum’s way. Cheryl found herself now fully awake, eager to discover which of them it truly was. One was more fiercesome than the other and she was newly conscious of the dish-washer.
She’d better face the music straightaway, rather than let retribution catch her still in bed.
“Foot lightly on pedal ... through to the spinning brushes...ignition off...”
She could hardly see anything in front of her face. Flakes of sleep rather than simply dirty snow. Waking was never quite so difficult and one needed to reverse before going forward again....
It was dark in her bedroom when she finally woke. She looked at her watch. One minute to Midnight. She looked out the window. It was now not snowing at all. Cheryl felt relieved that the only parts being manipulated in and out of gear were her mind and her mind’s dreams, not any other parts of her. She was old enough to understand, but still young enough not to understand that she understood.
(written and published today)
===============================
THE WELSH WRISTWATCH
===============================
Monday, May 28, 2007
My review of Thomas Ligotti's major new work
This is my on-the-hoof review during my first reading of The Conspiracy Against The Human Race (CATHR): a major 'non-fiction' work by Thomas Ligotti that has just been kindly presented HERE prior to book publication.:
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I have just returned from a short holiday with my wife ... 'distraction'?
And got on straightway with reading The Conspiracy Against the Human Race at the first opportunity. Thanks to TL and Dr B for making it available here.
I thought I would make some brief passing comments in media res - and I have reached the text up to Footnote 8 on page 7 (including the reading of footnotes). I don't want my passing thoughts to shade off into hindsight as I read on, so this is why I want to comment periodically as I read it (not guaranteed how quickly).
I have enjoyed this TL's 'sublimation' by means of the text so far ... more 'distraction' by means of such 'enjoyment' on my part?
Sublimation is indeed how I read it .... so far.
I wrote a line of poetry in 1965: "It is futile to call life futile as it is."
Not sure how this will pan out. Enjoyed it and been instructed. Instructive that such thoughts could be thought at all .... and made current in the context of one of my favourite 'fiction' writers ever ('anchoring'?). (I've put fiction in quotes as a safeguard pending my own further thoughts.... if any there be).
I feel as if I am swimming. But I can't swim, have never been able to swim, despite having been brought up in a seaside resort as a child!
======================
I've now reached reading to the end of 'Thinking Horror' and I see I shall have to re-read the whole magnificent tour de force one day, but, meanwhile, to comment as I promised: piecemeal ...
I'm currently unsure whether we are being made to imagine the most selfless numinous (nemonymous) self (in connection with the Proustian selves described in this section of CATHR) or to affirm one's identity so that one can doff it with grander effect!
For example, by wearing identity one becomes even more identitiless when one does become identitiless after having an identity once (a single self not doffed in favour of separate selves within the same headlease (if powerless) self but in favour of the non-technological 'singularity' of an unself) ... and writing fiction is thus the identity (or job) one shall later doff in this way??
Is the fiction writer the potentially suicidal God?
PS: Meanwhile, I hang my head (with its self snailed within it) in confused dismay for having been a 'breeder' during my lifetime.
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"You live a day a day to put life in" is another line of my poetry from the sixties.
I have just read 'Enlightenment' in 'Facing Horror', and I somehow thought of the word 'Zencore' (a word I chose to be the title of an anthology of Horror (nihilist?) fiction (at the printers as I speak)), as well as Zencore already being the name of a herbal 'medicine' with the advertised effects that 'viagra' has on male 'performance'. Seems somehow appropriate! Or misappropriate in an appropriate way!
I think literature is a religion in itself. And TL's CATHR (so far) is an (advertised) non-fiction (a Short Life of Horror) description of the nullities of ego, life's futility etc. and layered descriptions of thinking of the nullity of ego etc. (and then thinking of that thinking...), and all the ramifications that thinking has for death wishes, spiritual seeking ...
TL's non-fiction, so-called, in this essay, is also literature, I feel ... highly honed, professionally couched, fascinating, fulfilling, satisfying, basically 'true' (so far) to my own unarticulated thinking, and thus making my life more worthwhile (intrinsically worthwhile?), and presumably TL's life, too, by having written such a life-changing tour de force.
Just a mid-term brainstorming. More later. I don't want to give birth prematurely ... if at all.
No place for smileys here.
=====================
I have now reached the end of 'Intolerance' in 'Facing Horror'.
This rings loud bells with me for my relationship with blood relations and even chosen friends vis a vis conflicts of religious temperament. I am not even on the same map of (non)-belief as most people I know. It is a hard cross to bear. Pretentious, too.
I see CATHR is subtitled 'A Short Life of Horror'. This is reflective, I feel, of Peter Ackroyd's history of London entitled LONDON: A BIOGRAPHY. This is the essence of it (so far): we are talking about someone's life, a biography, an overview by the life itself of itself. An eternal philosophical dilemma of a mind examining itself with unknown and unknowable filters between. This is how the author of CATHR is so clever in bringing puppetry into the equation. But as yet I fail to see how he will eventually solve this conundrum. He may have of course even cleverer prestidigitations up his sleeve as I read on.
I think 'potentially suicidal gods' (the thread title given by Dr B to my original post) sums it up neatly .... but will they remain for ever 'potential' suicides as most reckonable suicides are, because they are not suicides ... yet? And to 'reckon' a true suicide one would indeed need to be a God to come back and tell us about a true 'happened' suicide. (All other sucides are just hearsay). And without a 'true' God in the equation, the whole CATHR falls apart. But it also falls apart with a God in it, of course.
addendum: here: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2007/03/27/ are my own gauche thoughts that were published in 'Roadworks ' (1999) under the title 'Beyond Death' as gathered and trimmed by exegesis frm my earlier wildly immature thoughts in several 'Tentacles Across The Atlantic' columns in 'Deathrealm' during the mid-nineties.
=====================
I’ve been thinking more about the title of this thread: What is Natural is Futile.
Having now read to the end of the ‘Facing Horror’ section, I feel unhappy because nothing further naturally flows to my mind to say publicly at this stage about my reading of CATHR. “Keep quiet then, till you have!” I hear shouted. But this very thought has made me question whether my earlier posting of comments actually made me feel happy – when I (in fits and starts) ostensibly had something natural, instinctive, organically-subsequent-to-what-went-before, to say. In contrast, it is dreadfully downbeat to have to say something, i.e. to force yourself to concoct something to say, rather than depending on the natural flow of thought in life’s discourse-of-least-resistance.
But expressed thoughts-at-length are generally not natural, not auditable except, possibly, in rare moments of genius or inspiration that only ‘magic non-fiction’ such as CATHR can produce – and this is probably why and how its author does not break down into tears of despair (as one would otherwise expect with any author) during the polished treatments of blinding futility, cynicism, pessimism, visions of frightening nothingness, cultured barrenness etc. that he is managing to articulate so manfully, so meticulously, so learnedly, so downright calmly for us to absorb. Because it is a natural flow, not concocted, and this makes him (arguably) happy.
No natural flow in this thread, however, unless someone else enters it with his or her own flow of thought to channel me away from false concoctions.
=======================
My first readng of CATHR has now reached the end of 'Fictions' in 'Consuming Horror', with some disconnnected notes ....
I am beginning to wonder if the nemophile and nemophobe are the same person.
Did you know that on the Titanic there was a musical band that continued to play in the lounge right up to the very moment of the ship's final sinking?
Is there such a thing as a gratuitous act?
And if one takes the thrust of CATHR (so far) to its own rational conclusions, would a mass killing (or mass suicide pact) in the ultimate (if hopeless) hope that universal cleansing would then ensue - even within the constraints of an ostensibly logicalised philosophy - be untouchable by laws that were intended to prevent such events? This may be something that any publisher of this work would have to be wary of. But, of course, anyone studying CATHR should finish it before making any such judgement of speculation.
The Suicide of a God by writing philosophy about its Godhood?
======================
I have now reached reading to the end of 'Supernaturalism' in 'Consuming Horror'.
I like the concept of the sense of the supernatural, as opposed to the supernatural itself.
What is SuperNatural is not Futile (to coin a new thread title)?
Mention of Joseph Conrad makes me think that 'Chance' is the plaster that our dire wounds (described in various ways in CATHR) need, ie. wounds inflicted upon us from simply having life - plus bandage-layers of narrators or of ego/id/nemo viewpoints that we can scatter around like placebos or decoy-puppets or shadows.
Aren't shadows on the wall sometimes more revelatory than seeing the people that cast them? CHANCE is a novel by Joseph Conrad. Here, the characters and particularly the heroine are drained of any motive or sympathy because of the layering of narrative: we hear a spoken voice telling an inscrutable narrator of someone else’s view of someone else’s view of certain events, mix and match between. But it does not seem to lessen one’s interest in the book: it is character-driven and sympathy is allowed to take a backseat in preference to exploring one’s own motives for assigning certain motives to certain types of people just on the basis of hearsay and chance. Conrad writes in introduction to CHANCE: “And it is only for their intentions that men can be held responsible” and this novel seeks to show, I think, that any intentions are essentially unknowable. I propose that even one's own intentions are unknowable: being shadows, too. The heart of darkness.
=============================
Overnight I've wondered if the title - Conspiracy Against The Human Race - is double-edged (whether intentional or not, multiple bluff or not), inasmuch as CATHR itself is to become a conspiracy against the human race and/or, even, the author's own conspiracy against himself.
I intend to have a short break from reading CATHR today as it is, I feel, the sort of work from which the reader needs respite - a respite from its headiness of texture and its cocktail of shadows. However, I may be tempted back into its enticing maw sooner rather than later.
What is SuperNatural is not Futile (to coin a new thread title)?
Maybe this is an echo of my earlier thought: 'magical non-fiction'.
Magic Fiction turns fiction into reality (non-fiction) -- please see separate thread on Magic Fiction and Magic Realism -- whilst Magic Non-Fiction is vice versa. The only way, perhaps, for CATHR to counter any charges of incitement towards despair etc. is for it to call itself Magic Non-Fiction rather than a plain 'non-fiction' as it calls itself at the moment.
Style outdoing the subject-matter by means of being outdone by the subject-matter (as tendered on the 'Potentially Suicidal Gods' thread re Lovecraft)?
I shall later try to rationalise some new thoughts of mine regarding 'word clones' or 'word clowns'.
=============================
Well, I couldn't keep away for long from this unique reading experience that is CATHR. It is both deeply serious and laced with a deep cynical humour (I sense), a humour which does not relieve the dark seriousness but alters it like a pungent spice would make a stew a curry.
I have now reached reading to the end of 'Consuming Horror' - 'Style'.
Lovecraft is not a writer, I feel, but a phenomenon that is his writing. If you read his letters to Kleiner, you might not wonder how he needed his future reputation as a person to be blotted out by cosmic horror! His prose style is aso blotted out by the same cosmic horror; so his style autonomously creates the cosmic horror with blatant over-dramatic coagulants of semantics, graphology, phonetics and syntax ... indescribable reams of adjectival feasts ... a lurking fear that outdoes its style by, paradoxically, being outdone by it! And this paradox relates to the cocktail of shadows that is CATHR. It is more than its parts. And I genuinely believe (and I repeat) (with the sole current reservation that I have not yet finished my first reading of CATHR) that we have a God here who is destroying Himself by writing a cogent work of Philosophy to prove His own non-existence*. As Lovecraft needed to do, whether intended or not.
*And this is the prestidigitation I predicted earlier, perhaps, whereby the author of CATHR is solving the conundrum of a mind examining its own mind...
==========================
'Something unforeseen must have happened. You know, even grown-up people cannot always do what they want most.'
'Oh! Then why grow up?'
From Part 3 (1) of 'The House in Paris' (1935) by Elizabeth Bowen
----------
Is that not a better question than "Oh! Then why be born"?
Something to be said for being childlike (not childish).
I have now reached the end of the 'Living Horror' section in my first reading of CATHR. My ambiant self continues to be attuned to these (self-confessed?) self-righteous articulations of morbidity and futility and cynicism. I am glad I have been able to live long enough to read this genuine masterpiece. I have (always?) believed - but not articulated - that I was born simply to make bowel movements, assuaged by my (only) drugs of alcohol, art and family-building.
I shall make more comments when I've finished 'Creating Horror'. The greatest despair of all has not yet been articulated within CATHR, the despair of Namelessness. Perhaps that's why Lovecraft did not major on the Unnameable but on Azathoth.
To doff one's name, to remove it from the authorship of CATHR for example, would be the way to bring a Death-before-Death as trenchant as one could hope, a meaning to meaninglessness so meaningless it would no longer seem important to reach it. One's Name is the last God to write out of existence.
I call it Nemonymity. I, for one, have failed to reach this Heaven.
Addendum: For Easter (a short novelistic take on death): http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2006/04/for-easter.html
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I have now completed my first reading of CATHR up to the end of 'Sickness' in 'Living Horror'.
Maybe I can be forgiven being a 'breeder' during my lifetime, by having named my daughter Berenice in 1974. :-)
Under this thread title, I think it appropriate to quote this extract from Stefan Grabinski:
"Wrzesmian wasn't too popular. The works of this strange man, saturated with rampant fantasy and imbued with strong individualism, gave a most unfavourable impression by inverting accepted aesthetic-literary theories and by mocking established pseudo-truths. His output was eventually acknowledged as the product of a sick imagination, the bizarre work of an eccentric, maybe even a madman. Wrzesmian was an inconvenience for a variety of reasons and he disturbed unnecessarily, stirring peaceful waters. Thus his premature eclipse was received with a secret sigh of relief." FROM "THE AREA" BY STEFAN GRABINSKI.
Re Nabokov and metaphor, is it a metaphor that what I consider to be his greatest novel is entitled ADA but pronounced ARDOR?
============================
The fiction and the non-fiction by Thomas Ligotti are symbiotic. But which is which?
Is CATHR, in view of its articulations formally here labelled 'non-fiction', going to entail that the printed book of CATHR is going to be anonymous, i.e. when all traces are removed from this site? Authorship will then be a rumour ... like death.
============================
I have now finished my first reading of CATHR. I can't tell if I am a changed man as a result of reading it other than, perhaps, by having the foresight to record my initial thoughts piecemeal during the reading! Is this a new way to review books - a whole review spread in time split between two electronic threads, i.e. this thread (Potentially Suicidal Gods?) and the other thread (What is Natural is Futile), both of which badly need other posters than me to complete the Jungian circle, the universal review in time and electronic space. But these spaces (infinitely wide threads?) have remained mostly fallow...so far.
I am enormously impressed by CATHR as a whole. It is original and thought-provoking, encouraging the readers to become even more original in their reactions. It is a template for us. The author of CATHR calls us you in the long seemingly heart-felt Shakespearean soliloquy at the end of 'Plot' which is about losing the plot. You to us to them. How do we know we are the only creatures on Earth who are aware of our future death?
Death is Natural. But we are Supernatural, immune within our body-car, till it crashes...
If there is the sense of the Supernatural which is tantamount to the Supernatural itself, why can not there also be a sense of our immortality, where we learn all the mistakes of life and become essentially happy forever? A sense of fiction. A sense that is magically stronger than reality. A regaining of the lost plot. A regaining of Proustian lost time. A casacade of selves that is us.
I am, however, ominous:
How can CATHR infer a mind that writes CATHR as well as being the same mind examined within CATHR? Perhaps by disassociation created by word clones and word clowns. Puppet strings tied to the letters before the post-performance letters become indelible insects squashed to the page in deceptively neat ranks ... and by brilliantly 'anchoring' (to recoin that word) the thoughts in CATHR to a learned array of references elsewhere in the literature of morbidity.
Would this also solve the danger of CATHR - in some hands - becoming its own Bible of multi-destruction?
Is CATHR a conspiracy against the world, rather than a description of that conspiracy.
Is it ontologial suicide?
des
=======
Addendum:
Something I wrote some years ago below. It's a bit dated. Now I'm gone neo-ominous!
---------------------
The Ominous Imagination
My greatest love in fiction is the 'Horror/Dark Fantasy' core that I find in most sorts of literature, old and new, literary and otherwise.
For me, this core should be and is being expanded by the current vogue in fiction genre-crossing and genre-betweening (Interstitiality), i.e. acting like a magnet, and making other fiction traditions conducive to the 'Horror' spirit or, as I would like it to be called, 'The Ominous Imagination'. Indeed, I believe, most good fiction is (and has always been) imbued with and steeped in this type of imaginative spirit, in any event.
Those who publish genre-specific outlets in the Horror fiction field, for example, perhaps allow the hard-fought beach-heads of 'Horror/Dark Fantasy' to crumble and separate out, thus allowing these particles of fiction already gathered for the 'Horror/Dark Fantasy' core to escape from that core because such genre-narrowing outlets tend to crystallise that core AS a core rather than as a magnet.
===
I hope Thomas Ligotti will accept being the high priest of the magnet, not of the core.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Friday, May 18, 2007
POGROM PANJANDRUM
POGROM PANJANDRUM
First published 'The Night Side' 1991
The music was a backing track: the sound of the military brass band in the park nearby.
Johnny liked the library for its quietness, broken only by the odd bluebottle or by some other reader's fingers flicking pages for a moving image. Today, however, Johnny was on his own. Even the lady with the stern expression, who usually sat at the front of the reading-room in a high desk, had outstared herself into a state of ever-increasing nothingness.
Johnny enjoyed browsing through old photographs of the town, particularly brown ones of the Market Square during wartime and of Temperance Street when the school was for infants only. Any old photographs, come to that, were appealing. They conjured up past eras better than the eras themselves. Better than words, he mused. Definitely better than any words. He often brought in his own family albums, since the ambience of the ancient library lent a tantalizing dimension to the memories that the photographs contained.
Not all the snapshots in the albums were real memories of his, however. Johnny had been born long after, for instance, the time of that yellowed oval of his great grandmother, in stiff wide skirts and a look too stern for the passage of time to diminish. One showed his parents sitting at opposite ends of a large family gathering. In later albums, he saw his mother, big with himself, sitting proudly beside the father he was never to know, she in the frilly clothes of her period and her husband in what appeared to be a religious get-up.
The library was hot today. Being a bank holiday, he had been surprised it was open at all. It was a pleasant refuge from the people in frolicsome mood outside. He turned the pages of the albums quickly, so as to allow the pages to breathe, seasoning the stipply grain of the images whilst they flashed by cinematically. He knew them by heart as well as eyes, so there was no real need to study the detailed backgrounds to the main subjects. All were pictures of people, formulating a dynastic flow of faces, amid a panoply of weddings, christenings, first communions, confirmations, Christmases and, last but not least, funerals.
Johnny finally arrived at a little nipper, bringing him to a halt. He never liked to stare at this photograph, there being something deliciously unhealthy in delving behind the tiny eyes, seeking the creature that twitched within, all the time knowing this was but a younger extension of himself Johnny by another name -- perhaps a realer Johnny. Tinged with sadness, this child�s soul he once owned was just outside his grasp.
As the brass band struck up their rendition of Oklahoma! he abruptly decided to return to the library book which had taken his fancy before resorting to the familiar albums. This contained a photographic history of the Falklands War, where Johnny's brother had been killed. In fact, one of the professional shots showed his brother in a group of other smiling marines only a few days before they were all burnt to death. Johnny wondered why he did not cry upon looking at this. It must be something to do with being the younger twin, he supposed, if only just.
He eased his club foot further under the trestle table, striking up chords along his ratchetted spine, which made him flinch. He shouldn't be here at all today. The lights were off and he had not seen anybody, except perhaps the shadow of the stern lady.
He concentrated back on the snapshot of himself as an infant. He was shocked to see a detail in the faded background which he had not noticed before. This was unbelievable, in view of literally hours upon hours of scrutinizing its every angle and facet. He was standing there with seaside bucket and spade clamped within a tiny hand. His sharp-creased white shorts showed no sign of blemish nor underlying manhood. His large-for-its-age face was poised in unassuming manner within what he then thought to be the all-encompassing innocence and safety of the world. The lips that formed the mouth pursed quaintly....
But the sign of the shop in the parade across the road from him, which he had always seen as CHINA AND CUT GLASS, actually said POGROM PANJANDRUM. Johnny put his nose nearer to the colourless surface and managed to discern a faint image in the shop window of a puppet on strings, rather like Muffin the Mule, but with bigger ears and a distended udder of tubes dangling from the belly-bottom.
A spider crawled across the library table, looking from side to side as if it were crossing a busy road with only the rudiments of kerb drill.
Johnny could no longer hear the brass band and, with the growing darkness, he could hardly make out the only door from the reading room.
Things crawled and slithered across the photographs, some even seeming to emerge from the frozen images themselves, things which should have stayed in the wings: thumb-sized monsters with hairy-ended backs, never photographed for posterity since they were ever beyond the range of the widest-panning cameras: living toy soldiers with red bubbly skin from over-exposure, twitching in the darkness like half-crushed insects: dollish women stuck halfway in giving birth, finger-holing eyes in the babies' beads, which reared from their red nests: creatures of every conceivable sex, in coitus interruptus, squeezed out from between other album pages, with sticky corners. And real children, who would never have lived at all if it were not for Johnny, pushing wormcasts before them in the shifting egg-sands of existence. And one who was Johnny now, or maybe his double, fleeing with flailing limbs but caught inextricably in its body's own knitting.
The brass band struck up the opening chords of Rule Britannia, while, unknown to those who would never know until too late, Johnny froze into black and white images little better than words on a printed page.
First published 'The Night Side' 1991
The music was a backing track: the sound of the military brass band in the park nearby.
Johnny liked the library for its quietness, broken only by the odd bluebottle or by some other reader's fingers flicking pages for a moving image. Today, however, Johnny was on his own. Even the lady with the stern expression, who usually sat at the front of the reading-room in a high desk, had outstared herself into a state of ever-increasing nothingness.
Johnny enjoyed browsing through old photographs of the town, particularly brown ones of the Market Square during wartime and of Temperance Street when the school was for infants only. Any old photographs, come to that, were appealing. They conjured up past eras better than the eras themselves. Better than words, he mused. Definitely better than any words. He often brought in his own family albums, since the ambience of the ancient library lent a tantalizing dimension to the memories that the photographs contained.
Not all the snapshots in the albums were real memories of his, however. Johnny had been born long after, for instance, the time of that yellowed oval of his great grandmother, in stiff wide skirts and a look too stern for the passage of time to diminish. One showed his parents sitting at opposite ends of a large family gathering. In later albums, he saw his mother, big with himself, sitting proudly beside the father he was never to know, she in the frilly clothes of her period and her husband in what appeared to be a religious get-up.
The library was hot today. Being a bank holiday, he had been surprised it was open at all. It was a pleasant refuge from the people in frolicsome mood outside. He turned the pages of the albums quickly, so as to allow the pages to breathe, seasoning the stipply grain of the images whilst they flashed by cinematically. He knew them by heart as well as eyes, so there was no real need to study the detailed backgrounds to the main subjects. All were pictures of people, formulating a dynastic flow of faces, amid a panoply of weddings, christenings, first communions, confirmations, Christmases and, last but not least, funerals.
Johnny finally arrived at a little nipper, bringing him to a halt. He never liked to stare at this photograph, there being something deliciously unhealthy in delving behind the tiny eyes, seeking the creature that twitched within, all the time knowing this was but a younger extension of himself Johnny by another name -- perhaps a realer Johnny. Tinged with sadness, this child�s soul he once owned was just outside his grasp.
As the brass band struck up their rendition of Oklahoma! he abruptly decided to return to the library book which had taken his fancy before resorting to the familiar albums. This contained a photographic history of the Falklands War, where Johnny's brother had been killed. In fact, one of the professional shots showed his brother in a group of other smiling marines only a few days before they were all burnt to death. Johnny wondered why he did not cry upon looking at this. It must be something to do with being the younger twin, he supposed, if only just.
He eased his club foot further under the trestle table, striking up chords along his ratchetted spine, which made him flinch. He shouldn't be here at all today. The lights were off and he had not seen anybody, except perhaps the shadow of the stern lady.
He concentrated back on the snapshot of himself as an infant. He was shocked to see a detail in the faded background which he had not noticed before. This was unbelievable, in view of literally hours upon hours of scrutinizing its every angle and facet. He was standing there with seaside bucket and spade clamped within a tiny hand. His sharp-creased white shorts showed no sign of blemish nor underlying manhood. His large-for-its-age face was poised in unassuming manner within what he then thought to be the all-encompassing innocence and safety of the world. The lips that formed the mouth pursed quaintly....
But the sign of the shop in the parade across the road from him, which he had always seen as CHINA AND CUT GLASS, actually said POGROM PANJANDRUM. Johnny put his nose nearer to the colourless surface and managed to discern a faint image in the shop window of a puppet on strings, rather like Muffin the Mule, but with bigger ears and a distended udder of tubes dangling from the belly-bottom.
A spider crawled across the library table, looking from side to side as if it were crossing a busy road with only the rudiments of kerb drill.
Johnny could no longer hear the brass band and, with the growing darkness, he could hardly make out the only door from the reading room.
Things crawled and slithered across the photographs, some even seeming to emerge from the frozen images themselves, things which should have stayed in the wings: thumb-sized monsters with hairy-ended backs, never photographed for posterity since they were ever beyond the range of the widest-panning cameras: living toy soldiers with red bubbly skin from over-exposure, twitching in the darkness like half-crushed insects: dollish women stuck halfway in giving birth, finger-holing eyes in the babies' beads, which reared from their red nests: creatures of every conceivable sex, in coitus interruptus, squeezed out from between other album pages, with sticky corners. And real children, who would never have lived at all if it were not for Johnny, pushing wormcasts before them in the shifting egg-sands of existence. And one who was Johnny now, or maybe his double, fleeing with flailing limbs but caught inextricably in its body's own knitting.
The brass band struck up the opening chords of Rule Britannia, while, unknown to those who would never know until too late, Johnny froze into black and white images little better than words on a printed page.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
The Regency Cafe
First published 'Memes' 1991
I always returned to the Regency Cafe. There was nowhere else like it.
Many of my friends said they didn't know where it was and even after I'd given them exhaustive directions to meet me there after dark, none of them arrived, later telling me that they had searched high and low, turned right where I'd said, and equally left where I'd also said, but no sign of the Regency Cafe.
This was quite beyond me because, of an evening, its music (usually Edith Piaf) echoed loudly down the surrounding side-streets. Its lights shone out and yellowed the wet cobblestones like old-fashioned diseases. How could you miss it, I wondered.
Still, there were times when even I found it more difficult to locate. I put this down to the weather - because the elements often alter the way the land lies as well as one's own frame of mind. But I always did find it in the end. Those were usually the evenings when a big football match was being held in the city, with the consequent lack of customers drinking black coffee.
The city was ever full of mist. One wondered if the floodlights penetrated sufficiently to pick out the players and the ball.
The air could be seen to coil upwards at street corners. This was indeed a feature of our city, something to do with disused underground railways, I'd always thought.
My mind was wandering. I had no set goal in life. The visits to the cafe were, believe it or not, the highlights of each dark afternoon which imperceptibly turned into night. When my friends didn't turn up, I began to suspect they were not friends any longer or, even, that I never had any friends at all.
The steaming coffee urns were a comfort to watch, however, as was the waitress who tended them. They had a beautiful shape. I'd never seen urns like them. The steam hissed gently, the tenebrous fluid gurgled, as the whole of my life scried before my very eyes within the dissolving coffee grounds.
One day, the waitress looked beautiful herself. I'd never really examined her closely. I knew her general demeanour was one of the positive things of life. But there it had ended. So, on a particularly misty afternoon, with the street thermals more than a little active, I turned my eyes towards her, as towards a recently polarised magnet. The other customers had already become shadowy glimpses bent over lonely cups in every corner. She became the fixation: a paramount image of one I should have loved all these months, rather than ignored. I needed to speak to her: and she opened her mouth as if to speak to me just as kindly...
There were hearty slaps on my back. My so-called friends had at last discovered the Regency Cafe and I spent the rest of the night entertaining them amid the loud French music. I hoped none of them would ever come again.
The following dark afternoon, there was a waiter on duty. He told me that the waitress had left the cafe ... for good.
I always returned to the Regency Cafe. There was nowhere else like it.
Many of my friends said they didn't know where it was and even after I'd given them exhaustive directions to meet me there after dark, none of them arrived, later telling me that they had searched high and low, turned right where I'd said, and equally left where I'd also said, but no sign of the Regency Cafe.
This was quite beyond me because, of an evening, its music (usually Edith Piaf) echoed loudly down the surrounding side-streets. Its lights shone out and yellowed the wet cobblestones like old-fashioned diseases. How could you miss it, I wondered.
Still, there were times when even I found it more difficult to locate. I put this down to the weather - because the elements often alter the way the land lies as well as one's own frame of mind. But I always did find it in the end. Those were usually the evenings when a big football match was being held in the city, with the consequent lack of customers drinking black coffee.
The city was ever full of mist. One wondered if the floodlights penetrated sufficiently to pick out the players and the ball.
The air could be seen to coil upwards at street corners. This was indeed a feature of our city, something to do with disused underground railways, I'd always thought.
My mind was wandering. I had no set goal in life. The visits to the cafe were, believe it or not, the highlights of each dark afternoon which imperceptibly turned into night. When my friends didn't turn up, I began to suspect they were not friends any longer or, even, that I never had any friends at all.
The steaming coffee urns were a comfort to watch, however, as was the waitress who tended them. They had a beautiful shape. I'd never seen urns like them. The steam hissed gently, the tenebrous fluid gurgled, as the whole of my life scried before my very eyes within the dissolving coffee grounds.
One day, the waitress looked beautiful herself. I'd never really examined her closely. I knew her general demeanour was one of the positive things of life. But there it had ended. So, on a particularly misty afternoon, with the street thermals more than a little active, I turned my eyes towards her, as towards a recently polarised magnet. The other customers had already become shadowy glimpses bent over lonely cups in every corner. She became the fixation: a paramount image of one I should have loved all these months, rather than ignored. I needed to speak to her: and she opened her mouth as if to speak to me just as kindly...
There were hearty slaps on my back. My so-called friends had at last discovered the Regency Cafe and I spent the rest of the night entertaining them amid the loud French music. I hoped none of them would ever come again.
The following dark afternoon, there was a waiter on duty. He told me that the waitress had left the cafe ... for good.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Fall From Grace
First published 'Song of Cthulhu' (Chaosium Books) 2001
Written in Sark 1992
There can only be more fear coming with the words. But I simply write them to keep more worrying ones at bay.
"This is where the hinge would have gone," announced the well-endowed woman as she passed her arm up through the hole. A tongue of stone, near the top of the Cyclopean boulder, was a protrusion which her demonstration proved was not entirely solid. Judging by the difficulty she had withdrawing her arm, the dimensions of the aperture were evidently not great. I could imagine the wooden pole that was inserted there years ago and the huge gate hung from it across the lane. But why a gate here?
"Why was a gate needed here?"
Somebody else in the group had beaten me to the same question. In any event, 'hinge' didn't strike me as the best word, the one the buxom woman had decided to use, but I could not think of a better one. Whilst I was thus day-dreaming, my mind slipped a gear upon this and other preoccupations - and I had missed the answer to the question. So I provided my own answer: the road once needed to be blocked to prevent the easy transit of things that should not have walked the Earth.
I sucked my Polo mint from the middle outwards and trudged after the tassel of tourists as it coiled in the woman's wake. The day was hot, a fact which, based on the summer so far, was quite extraordinary - but ever since I'd arrived for a holiday, the sun had not failed to disperse the desultory clouds. The island was 3½ miles by 1 mile, irregularly ringed with back-breaking climbs down to craggy bays. And the lack of cars was a heaven, despite the few tractors to which it would have been uncharitable not to permit the five hundred inhabitants to have access. The tourists pedalled along the island's dusty lanes on hired push-bikes or clip-clopped around in horse-drawn buggies. The names of the bays rang alien to my English ears, with words I had seen written on the island map, like Leng, Rl'yeh and Tekeli-li!
In any event, the islander woman who chatted to us batches of holiday-makers on foot, as we accompanied her in constituent groups of twos and threes, was an expert on the gossipy sights of the island, including tales of an Occupation, which I took to be the German one during the Second World War. It was strange to believe that some of the old inhabitants had actually been subject to the Iron Heel of the Nazis ... but even stranger to hear said that the oldest ones had submitted themselves to other invading forces which were somehow softer, looser and, paradoxically, crueller.
One sight to which the large woman trooped us along was the very hotel in which I happened to be staying, a hotel that boasted a room where Victor Hugo had once slept. Yet some of the poems she read aloud to us spoke of things like Yuggothian Fungi and were, to my mind, as far from Hugo as it was possible to get.
In any event, the group tagging behind the woman guide was treated to coffee at this my hotel and I was delighted to see that some of the waitresses (who attended my table during dinner in the evenings) were milling about amid the clinking cups and saucers. The waitresses were indeed attractive: one in particular with boyish looks and confident mien, some others in the early blossom of womanhood, a few younger than I would have thought possible in such an occupation, all dressed smartly, if sombrely, from silky shirt to short skirt to black stockings - most with bashful looks on their faces, some more than others. In the evening, one or two of these waitresses seemed to sink back into the shadows of the dining-room wall to keep careful watch over us eaters, so that, presumably, they could the sooner clear up used crockery, whilst the other waitresses were in the kitchen making girlish noises to whomsoever prepared the excellent French-style cuisine. The diners themselves were predominantly French and it was a delight to hear the waitresses stutter in neither English nor French but some hybrid of both. Shyness incarnate, those waitresses. Prettiness personified. But I often felt a fear that they were not quite what they seemed: a feeling with no evidence to support it. Even the boyish waitress could not have looked sinister if she tried.
As I finished my Polo mint earlier in the day, I realised indeed that word association had caused me to think of 'pole'. 'Post' was better. Gate-post. I determined to repeat the question regarding the mysterious need for such gates on the island, since I had indeed spotted a few of those stone tongues elsewhere. I hastened after the female guide - but that was when we had, surprisingly, via paths I had not previously traversed, reached my hotel for coffee and for a Victor Hugo so foreign he ceased to be simply foreign.
So, the question of the hinge, ineluctably, faded from the forefront of my mind. I vaguely recall that I dreamed that night of a long pork snake that threaded the stone hole with the consequent squeezing of a moveable thinner section along its malleable extent. And its snorting noises seemed like a mixture of Welsh, French and German, with backsliding gutturals that belonged to none of these languages.
It was peculiarly difficult to sleep on the island, with its background of silence. This was in contrast to the quietest spots on England's mainland that were endemically infected with an insidious hum of traffic, the most distant of which seemed to be borne in on you by all means of mental and physical channels. But, here on the island, with the sea's insulation, paradoxically accentuated by cry of gull and wave's watery whispers, there was silence in its true sense - except for the occasional light footsteps of waitresses heading to their beds in their hotel annexe. Yet sleep, once established, was all the more powerful in its grip, resulting from its own satiation on such silence. Sleep was blacker than I ever remembered it on the mainland, but not without vague hints of impending curses and of echoes that leapfrogged words whilst retaining some nagging meaning which only a pukka language could convey.
The pre- and post-prandial drinks in the bar, with which I often tended to indulge myself when on my holidays, added to the initial restlessness as I tossed and turned upon the squeaky wooden bed-frame - but, then, with a single click of night's fingertips, I would drift into seamless slumber. The day's energetic clambering of crags and sunlit rock-pools also enabled the body thus to slip the mind's sticky spider-web more easily. All of which could not account for the incursion of that particular dream I later tried to recall but which, now, I've completely forgotten without rereading the worrying words I have written above.
When I woke in the morning, peculiarly unrefreshed, I found it troublesome, for the first time during my stay, to meet even the tolerant requirements of the hotel's availability of a cooked breakfast in the dining-room. The waitresses were not so pretty in the mornings, I had already noticed - and their attentiveness was imperfectly maintained. Still, young girls are infamously inconsistent. The boyish one had had her hair cropped even closer upon her day's leave yesterday across in a larger island nearby called Guernsey. However, I eschewed mentioning her change of hairstyle - not that I had ever held any meaningful conversations with her (or with any of the other waitresses) before this morning, so she probably didn't notice I was off colour and untalkative. I normally requested more toast after consuming the full English breakfast, but not this morning. I overheard the French conversations mumbling around my central table and, uncharacteristically, I did not bother to stumble through a clumsy translation. The difference between hearing and listening, I suppose.
Today, I determined to visit Derrible Bay (thus pronounced in the French way), one of the very few locations (named on my map) that I had not yet explored during my stay. I suspected it would be as similar to the other bays as they were to each other, such as Dixcart Bay (again thus pronounced in the French manner) and, yes, the ones whose strange names I had forgotten.
One such newly nameless bay had a particularly steep (even for this island) climb to its sandy cove: close to the causeway that led to a nearly separate peninsular of the coast, one which reminded me of an annexe or, in a more physiological likening, an appendix. It was almost as if it had been left unsqueezed at the bottom of a shapeless toothpaste tube.
In any event, Derrible Bay was to be my venture today. I would save my visit to the peninsular until my last full day on the island (tomorrow). Even so, I was sure there were other parts of the coastline I hadn't visited even once. But, for the first time, I noticed that the whole island was becoming slightly claustrophobic, yearning, as my subconscious probably was, for a good stretch in a train journey and a refresher course in resorts. A number of bikers nearly knocked me off my feet and I mentally shook a fist at their receding backs, as they pedalled off, no doubt, to the gardens and maze at La Seigneurie. It was then I noticed another of those stone tongues poking from the side of an islander's house. I decided, for no obvious reason, to put my own arm through it, as if, in hindsight, that would complete a circuit between me and the island's heart: an attempt at reconciliation.
The place had seemed so idyllic when I first arrived on the small ferry from St Peter Port, I had imagined I could stay forever in such a Shangri-La as this island. Now, I wasn't so sure. My arm just fitted the hole in the stone tongue but I could wobble it about, my hand emerging from the top like a five-feathered head-dress on a totem. As previously with the woman guide, it was more difficult to remove the arm than insert it. However, once accomplishing the withdrawal, I touched the outside of the stone that encompassed the hole. It vibrated, I'm sure, echoing my own metabolism. With some reluctance, I continued towards Derrible Bay and my assignation with yet one more alcove of contemplation. I couldn't get certain words out of my head, although, as I write, they have entirely vanished.
The path spiralled down towards the rocks where I could see somebody sun-bathing, draped across a rock in what I considered to be a most uncomfortable position. I soon gathered it was one of the waitresses from my hotel, respectably, if scantily, clad. This was the first time I had see a waitress out of uniform and I was surprised how surprised I actually was at such a sight. So surprised I almost slipped.
Her vulnerability as a human being was particularly striking. I decided to return towards the gull-screeching cliff and leave the poor girl in solitude. Yet, before I could accomplish my escape, she raised her head - and smiled. Simply that. All the waitresses in the hotel had often smiled in my direction, but this smile, in comparison, was more focussed - human, yet with an indefinable animal's instinct, if not with a bird's or, even, fish's. Her rearing stance from the rock allowed me to glimpse the tops of her small breasts. I waved, as if to say: "I do recognise you, but it's not fitting for a guest to acknowledge a waitress outside the hotel, especially here, when nobody else is about, not safe, not anything." And I ran all the way back, despite my normal inability even to walk such island paths without stopping to catch my breath.
The boyish waitress - who I later believed to have been that very "creature from the deeps" (as I tend to think of her now) whom I had encountered in Derrible Bay - served me my meal that evening. As I munched through the Duck a l'Orange, washed down with a half litre of dry white house wine, as was my habit, I wondered for the first time why there was no Gideon's Bible in my room (as was the wont in most hotels I had previously visited) but only a strange black-skinned book with Arabic-looking words. I also mused that there had been no yachts moored in Derrible Bay that day - which was strange because I'd never visited an empty bay before on this holiday: being August, there were many such white triangles around the whole island, peppered along its coastal outskirts like mosquitoes kissing the waves. Before the duck, I had struggled with a starter of a lobsterish fish, described in the menu by a French word I hadn't dared ask to be translated, but it was almost alive, I thought, as I held down its unwieldy tail with my fork whilst forcing off, with my knife, segments of pink meat from the central fan-nerved bone. I cannot recall its taste, but it does somehow dredge up another dream that disrupted the deep parts of my sleep that night....
Instead of silence outside the hotel, I heard the trundle of horse-traps and the gentle rumblestrips of bikers. But, surely, that could not be right, it being the dead of night. I dared not move but, in spite of such immobility, the bed squeaked - of its own volition. I dared not move because I simply knew I could not move even if I tried. The boyish waitress walked towards me and I could see as if I saw through her luminous eyes - but then I knew she did not walk at all, for she dragged part of herself behind her, across the carpet, and she held out her arms, with each five-pointed hand like a sculptor's about to mould clay into new shapes.
The next day I could not stir myself to do anything, except for a spot of packing and sitting in the hotel garden reading a Henry James novel. Towards evening the weather finally broke down with doses of drizzly wind. Yet, on the day after that, my spirits returned, as my body returned, as it were, to Guernsey, on the small ferry. I was childishly eager for the bigger ferry that would take me on to England. I now sat inside the ferry, in contrast to my excited sentry-like stance at the bows on the outward journey, waiting for what was then to have been the first glimpse of my holiday island. I tentatively felt all round my neck. Felt the collar bones. And deliciously scratched my back on the deck-rail. The break had been of at least some benefit. I was decidedly more in tune with my own body, with all that climbing in and out of the craggy bays.
I looked down at the tops of my own small breasts. Yes, no doubt about it, the break had done me a whole world of good. Leaner and fitter, indeed, for the encroaching chills of Autumn. And I relaxed my mind, listening to the other passengers drawl and prattle in words I wouldn't care to translate even if I could.
====================
Written in Sark 1992
There can only be more fear coming with the words. But I simply write them to keep more worrying ones at bay.
"This is where the hinge would have gone," announced the well-endowed woman as she passed her arm up through the hole. A tongue of stone, near the top of the Cyclopean boulder, was a protrusion which her demonstration proved was not entirely solid. Judging by the difficulty she had withdrawing her arm, the dimensions of the aperture were evidently not great. I could imagine the wooden pole that was inserted there years ago and the huge gate hung from it across the lane. But why a gate here?
"Why was a gate needed here?"
Somebody else in the group had beaten me to the same question. In any event, 'hinge' didn't strike me as the best word, the one the buxom woman had decided to use, but I could not think of a better one. Whilst I was thus day-dreaming, my mind slipped a gear upon this and other preoccupations - and I had missed the answer to the question. So I provided my own answer: the road once needed to be blocked to prevent the easy transit of things that should not have walked the Earth.
I sucked my Polo mint from the middle outwards and trudged after the tassel of tourists as it coiled in the woman's wake. The day was hot, a fact which, based on the summer so far, was quite extraordinary - but ever since I'd arrived for a holiday, the sun had not failed to disperse the desultory clouds. The island was 3½ miles by 1 mile, irregularly ringed with back-breaking climbs down to craggy bays. And the lack of cars was a heaven, despite the few tractors to which it would have been uncharitable not to permit the five hundred inhabitants to have access. The tourists pedalled along the island's dusty lanes on hired push-bikes or clip-clopped around in horse-drawn buggies. The names of the bays rang alien to my English ears, with words I had seen written on the island map, like Leng, Rl'yeh and Tekeli-li!
In any event, the islander woman who chatted to us batches of holiday-makers on foot, as we accompanied her in constituent groups of twos and threes, was an expert on the gossipy sights of the island, including tales of an Occupation, which I took to be the German one during the Second World War. It was strange to believe that some of the old inhabitants had actually been subject to the Iron Heel of the Nazis ... but even stranger to hear said that the oldest ones had submitted themselves to other invading forces which were somehow softer, looser and, paradoxically, crueller.
One sight to which the large woman trooped us along was the very hotel in which I happened to be staying, a hotel that boasted a room where Victor Hugo had once slept. Yet some of the poems she read aloud to us spoke of things like Yuggothian Fungi and were, to my mind, as far from Hugo as it was possible to get.
In any event, the group tagging behind the woman guide was treated to coffee at this my hotel and I was delighted to see that some of the waitresses (who attended my table during dinner in the evenings) were milling about amid the clinking cups and saucers. The waitresses were indeed attractive: one in particular with boyish looks and confident mien, some others in the early blossom of womanhood, a few younger than I would have thought possible in such an occupation, all dressed smartly, if sombrely, from silky shirt to short skirt to black stockings - most with bashful looks on their faces, some more than others. In the evening, one or two of these waitresses seemed to sink back into the shadows of the dining-room wall to keep careful watch over us eaters, so that, presumably, they could the sooner clear up used crockery, whilst the other waitresses were in the kitchen making girlish noises to whomsoever prepared the excellent French-style cuisine. The diners themselves were predominantly French and it was a delight to hear the waitresses stutter in neither English nor French but some hybrid of both. Shyness incarnate, those waitresses. Prettiness personified. But I often felt a fear that they were not quite what they seemed: a feeling with no evidence to support it. Even the boyish waitress could not have looked sinister if she tried.
As I finished my Polo mint earlier in the day, I realised indeed that word association had caused me to think of 'pole'. 'Post' was better. Gate-post. I determined to repeat the question regarding the mysterious need for such gates on the island, since I had indeed spotted a few of those stone tongues elsewhere. I hastened after the female guide - but that was when we had, surprisingly, via paths I had not previously traversed, reached my hotel for coffee and for a Victor Hugo so foreign he ceased to be simply foreign.
So, the question of the hinge, ineluctably, faded from the forefront of my mind. I vaguely recall that I dreamed that night of a long pork snake that threaded the stone hole with the consequent squeezing of a moveable thinner section along its malleable extent. And its snorting noises seemed like a mixture of Welsh, French and German, with backsliding gutturals that belonged to none of these languages.
It was peculiarly difficult to sleep on the island, with its background of silence. This was in contrast to the quietest spots on England's mainland that were endemically infected with an insidious hum of traffic, the most distant of which seemed to be borne in on you by all means of mental and physical channels. But, here on the island, with the sea's insulation, paradoxically accentuated by cry of gull and wave's watery whispers, there was silence in its true sense - except for the occasional light footsteps of waitresses heading to their beds in their hotel annexe. Yet sleep, once established, was all the more powerful in its grip, resulting from its own satiation on such silence. Sleep was blacker than I ever remembered it on the mainland, but not without vague hints of impending curses and of echoes that leapfrogged words whilst retaining some nagging meaning which only a pukka language could convey.
The pre- and post-prandial drinks in the bar, with which I often tended to indulge myself when on my holidays, added to the initial restlessness as I tossed and turned upon the squeaky wooden bed-frame - but, then, with a single click of night's fingertips, I would drift into seamless slumber. The day's energetic clambering of crags and sunlit rock-pools also enabled the body thus to slip the mind's sticky spider-web more easily. All of which could not account for the incursion of that particular dream I later tried to recall but which, now, I've completely forgotten without rereading the worrying words I have written above.
When I woke in the morning, peculiarly unrefreshed, I found it troublesome, for the first time during my stay, to meet even the tolerant requirements of the hotel's availability of a cooked breakfast in the dining-room. The waitresses were not so pretty in the mornings, I had already noticed - and their attentiveness was imperfectly maintained. Still, young girls are infamously inconsistent. The boyish one had had her hair cropped even closer upon her day's leave yesterday across in a larger island nearby called Guernsey. However, I eschewed mentioning her change of hairstyle - not that I had ever held any meaningful conversations with her (or with any of the other waitresses) before this morning, so she probably didn't notice I was off colour and untalkative. I normally requested more toast after consuming the full English breakfast, but not this morning. I overheard the French conversations mumbling around my central table and, uncharacteristically, I did not bother to stumble through a clumsy translation. The difference between hearing and listening, I suppose.
Today, I determined to visit Derrible Bay (thus pronounced in the French way), one of the very few locations (named on my map) that I had not yet explored during my stay. I suspected it would be as similar to the other bays as they were to each other, such as Dixcart Bay (again thus pronounced in the French manner) and, yes, the ones whose strange names I had forgotten.
One such newly nameless bay had a particularly steep (even for this island) climb to its sandy cove: close to the causeway that led to a nearly separate peninsular of the coast, one which reminded me of an annexe or, in a more physiological likening, an appendix. It was almost as if it had been left unsqueezed at the bottom of a shapeless toothpaste tube.
In any event, Derrible Bay was to be my venture today. I would save my visit to the peninsular until my last full day on the island (tomorrow). Even so, I was sure there were other parts of the coastline I hadn't visited even once. But, for the first time, I noticed that the whole island was becoming slightly claustrophobic, yearning, as my subconscious probably was, for a good stretch in a train journey and a refresher course in resorts. A number of bikers nearly knocked me off my feet and I mentally shook a fist at their receding backs, as they pedalled off, no doubt, to the gardens and maze at La Seigneurie. It was then I noticed another of those stone tongues poking from the side of an islander's house. I decided, for no obvious reason, to put my own arm through it, as if, in hindsight, that would complete a circuit between me and the island's heart: an attempt at reconciliation.
The place had seemed so idyllic when I first arrived on the small ferry from St Peter Port, I had imagined I could stay forever in such a Shangri-La as this island. Now, I wasn't so sure. My arm just fitted the hole in the stone tongue but I could wobble it about, my hand emerging from the top like a five-feathered head-dress on a totem. As previously with the woman guide, it was more difficult to remove the arm than insert it. However, once accomplishing the withdrawal, I touched the outside of the stone that encompassed the hole. It vibrated, I'm sure, echoing my own metabolism. With some reluctance, I continued towards Derrible Bay and my assignation with yet one more alcove of contemplation. I couldn't get certain words out of my head, although, as I write, they have entirely vanished.
The path spiralled down towards the rocks where I could see somebody sun-bathing, draped across a rock in what I considered to be a most uncomfortable position. I soon gathered it was one of the waitresses from my hotel, respectably, if scantily, clad. This was the first time I had see a waitress out of uniform and I was surprised how surprised I actually was at such a sight. So surprised I almost slipped.
Her vulnerability as a human being was particularly striking. I decided to return towards the gull-screeching cliff and leave the poor girl in solitude. Yet, before I could accomplish my escape, she raised her head - and smiled. Simply that. All the waitresses in the hotel had often smiled in my direction, but this smile, in comparison, was more focussed - human, yet with an indefinable animal's instinct, if not with a bird's or, even, fish's. Her rearing stance from the rock allowed me to glimpse the tops of her small breasts. I waved, as if to say: "I do recognise you, but it's not fitting for a guest to acknowledge a waitress outside the hotel, especially here, when nobody else is about, not safe, not anything." And I ran all the way back, despite my normal inability even to walk such island paths without stopping to catch my breath.
The boyish waitress - who I later believed to have been that very "creature from the deeps" (as I tend to think of her now) whom I had encountered in Derrible Bay - served me my meal that evening. As I munched through the Duck a l'Orange, washed down with a half litre of dry white house wine, as was my habit, I wondered for the first time why there was no Gideon's Bible in my room (as was the wont in most hotels I had previously visited) but only a strange black-skinned book with Arabic-looking words. I also mused that there had been no yachts moored in Derrible Bay that day - which was strange because I'd never visited an empty bay before on this holiday: being August, there were many such white triangles around the whole island, peppered along its coastal outskirts like mosquitoes kissing the waves. Before the duck, I had struggled with a starter of a lobsterish fish, described in the menu by a French word I hadn't dared ask to be translated, but it was almost alive, I thought, as I held down its unwieldy tail with my fork whilst forcing off, with my knife, segments of pink meat from the central fan-nerved bone. I cannot recall its taste, but it does somehow dredge up another dream that disrupted the deep parts of my sleep that night....
Instead of silence outside the hotel, I heard the trundle of horse-traps and the gentle rumblestrips of bikers. But, surely, that could not be right, it being the dead of night. I dared not move but, in spite of such immobility, the bed squeaked - of its own volition. I dared not move because I simply knew I could not move even if I tried. The boyish waitress walked towards me and I could see as if I saw through her luminous eyes - but then I knew she did not walk at all, for she dragged part of herself behind her, across the carpet, and she held out her arms, with each five-pointed hand like a sculptor's about to mould clay into new shapes.
The next day I could not stir myself to do anything, except for a spot of packing and sitting in the hotel garden reading a Henry James novel. Towards evening the weather finally broke down with doses of drizzly wind. Yet, on the day after that, my spirits returned, as my body returned, as it were, to Guernsey, on the small ferry. I was childishly eager for the bigger ferry that would take me on to England. I now sat inside the ferry, in contrast to my excited sentry-like stance at the bows on the outward journey, waiting for what was then to have been the first glimpse of my holiday island. I tentatively felt all round my neck. Felt the collar bones. And deliciously scratched my back on the deck-rail. The break had been of at least some benefit. I was decidedly more in tune with my own body, with all that climbing in and out of the craggy bays.
I looked down at the tops of my own small breasts. Yes, no doubt about it, the break had done me a whole world of good. Leaner and fitter, indeed, for the encroaching chills of Autumn. And I relaxed my mind, listening to the other passengers drawl and prattle in words I wouldn't care to translate even if I could.
====================
Dark Chintz
Gutger Kyle was to be our spokesman.
"Why him?" I asked, pointing towards the framed yellowy photograph on the wall of our bedsit.
"Why not him?" asked Lucy.
"That doesn't seem to be a good reason."
Lucy and I were ensconced in our love-pad, one where we'd not yet made love but one where we would make love one of these days, given the correct ceremony of foreplay or negotiation by a third party. We'd rented the place to live together in. An unspoken purpose, till there was someone purposeful enough to speak it. But what would a single man and woman rent a place for, other than to live together in? And being sound of limb and mind, what else could living-together mean if it were not loving-together? To live is to love had long been a maxim of mine. But to live together was doubly so. Yet, then, neither of us had accounted for Gutger Kyle.
When we first moved in on that dark, rainy, soggy-leaved Wednesday afternoon, the name Gutger Kyle was unknown to both Lucy and myself. Only gradually did the person behind the name impinge upon our consciousness. But everybody's name, at the end of the day, is a pseudonym for the body. So we should have not been surprised at the outcome, should we?
Lucy had certainly never heard of him before nor, obviously, met him in any shape or form. Me likewise. I suppose it being a furnished bedsit would help us both disown ownership of the photo. But why was this particular photo hiding its own shape of size on the chintzy wallpaper? - wallpaper pasted up on the plaster, no doubt, at the behest of the even chintzier landlady - who recommended the bedsit to us by its view of suburban roofscapes. But London was full of such scenes, I'd thought. Wet shades of grey, as the evenings drew in.
Several weeks passed before we put two and two together, which was never easy when there was only two of you to start off with. The photo was the same as that on a hardback's dust-wrapper - one of several motheaten books the landlady had left leaning against each other - presumably for show, since nobody, surely, read proper books in this neck of the London woods. Except, perhaps, Lucy and I. They seemed to be cast-offs from the time when Boots the Chemist issued you with library tickets as well as phials of cure-all medicine. Foxed and thumbrinted, with a strange label that centuries couldn't unstick. A squashed insect halfway down page 57. Something worse squashed on page 102. The tome in question with the photo was, of course, by Gutger Kyle, or how else would Lucy and I have known his name? Called GHOSTS A MILLION it was. Another by the same author was THE BLACK SPOOK. Another one - what was it called? - WILD HONEY. In fact, as I began to cast my eyes through them, I felt I knew the style of the prose already. Or was that the benefit of hindsight? Whatever the case, I, too, can write just like Kyle. Rubbed off on me. Got my word-wings caught in that damn honey!
In any event, judging by the bibliographical details inside the title pages, Gutger Kyle was more prolific than his lack of fame could explain. However, the most astonishing matter, to Lucy, as well as me, was the smell of the Kyle books. Many book-lovers and word-worms maintain that an intrinsic feature of a book's aesthetic value is the manner its 'nose' can remind one of better days, endless summer holidays, the wonder of childhood, bee-buzzing meadows, the nuances of nostalgia or the cloying of chintz. A cross between mustiness and turmeric. Cough linctus. Newness and oldness combined. And permutations of redolence. Speech-marks and spokesmoke. And whatever. There are no right words. Or all words are right. But redolence is the best. It springs to mind. The only way to convey the colour red in smell? Maybe. Or yellow. Or thick thick dandelion wine. Or liquid bees. Or, even, earwax.
The book which smelt, according to Stanley, strangely - so strong, so strange, it brought back memories you'd never had. The book was by Gutger Kyle, yes. Entitled. YELLOW TEARS.
Incidentally, Stanley was the landlady's - he told us Kyle rented our room in the thirties - hence his photo on the wall - but did that follow? - would Lucy's and my photo be put up, when we left? - yet I never asked the question - I needed someone else to ask. Stanley was a spiv. He sold things on - how shall we say? - like photos, I suppose, to people who didn't want to be taken. He set children on stuffed donkeys. Gave adults the organ-grinder's monkey to hold. Then snapped them. Clicked his fingers and waited for the money to turn itself into foodstuff for him and Mrs Ladle (the landlady). He said he had known Gutger Kyle. Took the very photo on the book jacket. And on the wall. All those years ago, when Stanley first started out as portrait painter of the single brushstroke. And Kyle was a young writer, without a publication to his name.
The time came, however, when Lucy and I started to smell the books purely in the hope of osmosis regarding the plots. But eventually we stopped not reading them: the only way I can describe our negative approach to fathoming their content. In fact, I tried to read them aloud to Lucy,in moments of desperate foreplay. At the same time, I was intent on not looking at the pages, in case I was infected by something in the shadows of the words and in their appearance on the yellow-mapped pages. We spent many a night making the small hours smaller, whiling them, not away, but back, as if summoning up a past that would not have existed if it weren't for us in that past's future: a future created by our very perusal of the pearls of wisdom which a certain Gutger Kyle had once decided to disseminate in the guise of novel ghosts. In short, we laid ourselves open to the serendipities of life and, hopefully, love.
Soon we read more into those books and, if it were not for the blur of memory tinged by dream, I'd be convinced that Stanley and the Landlady were merely characters in the fiction rather than the real people who were our neighbours in the house. Skylady and fancy man.
A story - one in an anthology that included several famous writers such as Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Lawrence Durrell, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Charles Dickens, as well as unknown ones such as Gutger Kyle - was particularly disturbing. Kyle seemed to have condensed his usual free-fall style that often ranged wide in plot, place and people into a more hard-core vision, where word was plot, white spaces and wide margins place and monsters people. In any normal sense, one couldn't relate to it other than as a pure poem which happened to be prose. I often glanced up at the photo as I read the story aloud, wondering how anybody could write like that, particularly a human being, one, presumably, with frailties and a brittle bone covering the brain.
Lucy listened breathless. I needed to breathe, however, in view of imparting the words from the page via my voice-box into her eyes - which eyes, in turn, spoke volumes as to her frightened reaction.
Halfway through there was a sudden knock on our door.
"It's only me!"
Evidently Mrs Ladle.
"Yes?"
Lucy broke her breath-fast with this single word.
"There's been a phone call. Didn't say who they were but it was a crossed-line, too, and one of those calling mentioned your names ... but then it went dead - and I wondered if you were expecting a call and would know who to call back..."
Mrs Ladle's voice was muffled by the closed door. I placed the anthology upon the bed-quilt and walked over to grab the handle, in the hope of instilling some sense into the end-game of her visit. Getting rid of the interruption was an art form in itself, even if a hard-nosed priority. I forget exactly the outcome but, apparently, Stanley was worried about anonymous callers. He called them undergrunts. He and the landlady were ex-directory while, by virtue of being tenants, Lucy and I were tantamount to nameless as far as most of the outside world was concerned. The Poll Tax authorities were sublimely ignorant of our existence, and aborted telephone calls seemed more sinister than the possible people making them.
Mrs Ladle had disappeared by the time I had opened the door to her, because she'd heard Stanley shouting - or, rather, banging the dinner gong in the downstairs hall.
"I wonder what all that was about," I said, returning to the anthology.
Lucy shrugged. I wanted her to kiss me.
I forget exactly the outcome, as I said, but, somehow, we had lost all enthusiasm for the Kyle story and its faltering synchronicities. In fact, the dream it described was interrupted by the relentless ringing of a phone which woke the story's protagonist - as I was to discover upon reading it to the end a few weeks later, when Lucy was out job-hunting. It transpired that the protagonist was a monster just like the monsters in the nightmares from which it had been woken up.
While failing to fathom my own motivation, I jumped up from the bed - where I usually sat for want of an easy chair - and peered under the photo on the wall. It took Lucy's absence to allow me to show off my bravado in such an act. Otherwise, I may have failed, with her watching, which would have been the worst of both worlds. Good job she was out job-hunting at the time, then. Well, beneath the framed image of Gutger Kyle (the image that had bedevilled our waking lives together, without us really realising it) was the oblong of wall it had covered for - how many years?. And there resided the faded imprint of the same image. Yet, instead of the sepia of the ancient photo, it was a sort of negative, not black and white, rather shades of grey. Shades of grey. That rang a bell. Ghost were shades of grey. But, no, it was more a mirror image where the mirror itself was as insubstantial as the reflection upon it. Nevertheless, it was proud from the wall - previously sunken, no doubt, into the inset frame's back, the one I'd just lifted up - as if the image was trying to escape the plaster. And, indeed, underneath, the wallpaper was neatly cut away, revealing this nether face, uncluttered by chintz. At the eyes, there welled waxen pearls of sorrow, gummy to my yellow touch.
My description fails because I am no mirror. I am more that type of insubstantial mirror I was actually trying to describe. Lucy would understand.
Of course, I questioned Mrs Ladle about it. She asked me to tell her Stanley. He was the one, she said, who saw to all the odd jobs. Not her.
Lucy never returned. Evidently got a job. Or so I was told by a mutual acquaintance who had a foot in both camps. As to Gutger Kyle, I never bothered to lift up his photo again, in case it had all been a dream. I needed to cherish madness while I could: to help me get over Lucy.
I conducted some research in the local library regarding Gutger Kyle. he did straddle, as I suspected, the turn of the century. He wrote many novels and was, at one time, as famous as those who remain famous now. He struck up a fleeting relationship with the authoress Ivy Compton-Burnett but as that is omitted from her biography, I wonder if it was true. In fact, that might be where I went wrong: believing what I read in books.
Lucy would understand. I can hear her breathing in the wall. Walls can collect sounds as well as memories. Places are people. Plots are pasts without a future. I'll have to get Mrs Ladle's Stanley up here to see to the pipes, I guess. He says he wants to take an old photo of me.
The job Lucy got, I hear, is one of being a real person. Or, at least, a spokesperson. Well, it's a promising start. Pity we never made it together, though.
(published "Dream From The Strangers' Cafe" 1994)
"Why him?" I asked, pointing towards the framed yellowy photograph on the wall of our bedsit.
"Why not him?" asked Lucy.
"That doesn't seem to be a good reason."
Lucy and I were ensconced in our love-pad, one where we'd not yet made love but one where we would make love one of these days, given the correct ceremony of foreplay or negotiation by a third party. We'd rented the place to live together in. An unspoken purpose, till there was someone purposeful enough to speak it. But what would a single man and woman rent a place for, other than to live together in? And being sound of limb and mind, what else could living-together mean if it were not loving-together? To live is to love had long been a maxim of mine. But to live together was doubly so. Yet, then, neither of us had accounted for Gutger Kyle.
When we first moved in on that dark, rainy, soggy-leaved Wednesday afternoon, the name Gutger Kyle was unknown to both Lucy and myself. Only gradually did the person behind the name impinge upon our consciousness. But everybody's name, at the end of the day, is a pseudonym for the body. So we should have not been surprised at the outcome, should we?
Lucy had certainly never heard of him before nor, obviously, met him in any shape or form. Me likewise. I suppose it being a furnished bedsit would help us both disown ownership of the photo. But why was this particular photo hiding its own shape of size on the chintzy wallpaper? - wallpaper pasted up on the plaster, no doubt, at the behest of the even chintzier landlady - who recommended the bedsit to us by its view of suburban roofscapes. But London was full of such scenes, I'd thought. Wet shades of grey, as the evenings drew in.
Several weeks passed before we put two and two together, which was never easy when there was only two of you to start off with. The photo was the same as that on a hardback's dust-wrapper - one of several motheaten books the landlady had left leaning against each other - presumably for show, since nobody, surely, read proper books in this neck of the London woods. Except, perhaps, Lucy and I. They seemed to be cast-offs from the time when Boots the Chemist issued you with library tickets as well as phials of cure-all medicine. Foxed and thumbrinted, with a strange label that centuries couldn't unstick. A squashed insect halfway down page 57. Something worse squashed on page 102. The tome in question with the photo was, of course, by Gutger Kyle, or how else would Lucy and I have known his name? Called GHOSTS A MILLION it was. Another by the same author was THE BLACK SPOOK. Another one - what was it called? - WILD HONEY. In fact, as I began to cast my eyes through them, I felt I knew the style of the prose already. Or was that the benefit of hindsight? Whatever the case, I, too, can write just like Kyle. Rubbed off on me. Got my word-wings caught in that damn honey!
In any event, judging by the bibliographical details inside the title pages, Gutger Kyle was more prolific than his lack of fame could explain. However, the most astonishing matter, to Lucy, as well as me, was the smell of the Kyle books. Many book-lovers and word-worms maintain that an intrinsic feature of a book's aesthetic value is the manner its 'nose' can remind one of better days, endless summer holidays, the wonder of childhood, bee-buzzing meadows, the nuances of nostalgia or the cloying of chintz. A cross between mustiness and turmeric. Cough linctus. Newness and oldness combined. And permutations of redolence. Speech-marks and spokesmoke. And whatever. There are no right words. Or all words are right. But redolence is the best. It springs to mind. The only way to convey the colour red in smell? Maybe. Or yellow. Or thick thick dandelion wine. Or liquid bees. Or, even, earwax.
The book which smelt, according to Stanley, strangely - so strong, so strange, it brought back memories you'd never had. The book was by Gutger Kyle, yes. Entitled. YELLOW TEARS.
Incidentally, Stanley was the landlady's - he told us Kyle rented our room in the thirties - hence his photo on the wall - but did that follow? - would Lucy's and my photo be put up, when we left? - yet I never asked the question - I needed someone else to ask. Stanley was a spiv. He sold things on - how shall we say? - like photos, I suppose, to people who didn't want to be taken. He set children on stuffed donkeys. Gave adults the organ-grinder's monkey to hold. Then snapped them. Clicked his fingers and waited for the money to turn itself into foodstuff for him and Mrs Ladle (the landlady). He said he had known Gutger Kyle. Took the very photo on the book jacket. And on the wall. All those years ago, when Stanley first started out as portrait painter of the single brushstroke. And Kyle was a young writer, without a publication to his name.
The time came, however, when Lucy and I started to smell the books purely in the hope of osmosis regarding the plots. But eventually we stopped not reading them: the only way I can describe our negative approach to fathoming their content. In fact, I tried to read them aloud to Lucy,in moments of desperate foreplay. At the same time, I was intent on not looking at the pages, in case I was infected by something in the shadows of the words and in their appearance on the yellow-mapped pages. We spent many a night making the small hours smaller, whiling them, not away, but back, as if summoning up a past that would not have existed if it weren't for us in that past's future: a future created by our very perusal of the pearls of wisdom which a certain Gutger Kyle had once decided to disseminate in the guise of novel ghosts. In short, we laid ourselves open to the serendipities of life and, hopefully, love.
Soon we read more into those books and, if it were not for the blur of memory tinged by dream, I'd be convinced that Stanley and the Landlady were merely characters in the fiction rather than the real people who were our neighbours in the house. Skylady and fancy man.
A story - one in an anthology that included several famous writers such as Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Lawrence Durrell, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Charles Dickens, as well as unknown ones such as Gutger Kyle - was particularly disturbing. Kyle seemed to have condensed his usual free-fall style that often ranged wide in plot, place and people into a more hard-core vision, where word was plot, white spaces and wide margins place and monsters people. In any normal sense, one couldn't relate to it other than as a pure poem which happened to be prose. I often glanced up at the photo as I read the story aloud, wondering how anybody could write like that, particularly a human being, one, presumably, with frailties and a brittle bone covering the brain.
Lucy listened breathless. I needed to breathe, however, in view of imparting the words from the page via my voice-box into her eyes - which eyes, in turn, spoke volumes as to her frightened reaction.
Halfway through there was a sudden knock on our door.
"It's only me!"
Evidently Mrs Ladle.
"Yes?"
Lucy broke her breath-fast with this single word.
"There's been a phone call. Didn't say who they were but it was a crossed-line, too, and one of those calling mentioned your names ... but then it went dead - and I wondered if you were expecting a call and would know who to call back..."
Mrs Ladle's voice was muffled by the closed door. I placed the anthology upon the bed-quilt and walked over to grab the handle, in the hope of instilling some sense into the end-game of her visit. Getting rid of the interruption was an art form in itself, even if a hard-nosed priority. I forget exactly the outcome but, apparently, Stanley was worried about anonymous callers. He called them undergrunts. He and the landlady were ex-directory while, by virtue of being tenants, Lucy and I were tantamount to nameless as far as most of the outside world was concerned. The Poll Tax authorities were sublimely ignorant of our existence, and aborted telephone calls seemed more sinister than the possible people making them.
Mrs Ladle had disappeared by the time I had opened the door to her, because she'd heard Stanley shouting - or, rather, banging the dinner gong in the downstairs hall.
"I wonder what all that was about," I said, returning to the anthology.
Lucy shrugged. I wanted her to kiss me.
I forget exactly the outcome, as I said, but, somehow, we had lost all enthusiasm for the Kyle story and its faltering synchronicities. In fact, the dream it described was interrupted by the relentless ringing of a phone which woke the story's protagonist - as I was to discover upon reading it to the end a few weeks later, when Lucy was out job-hunting. It transpired that the protagonist was a monster just like the monsters in the nightmares from which it had been woken up.
While failing to fathom my own motivation, I jumped up from the bed - where I usually sat for want of an easy chair - and peered under the photo on the wall. It took Lucy's absence to allow me to show off my bravado in such an act. Otherwise, I may have failed, with her watching, which would have been the worst of both worlds. Good job she was out job-hunting at the time, then. Well, beneath the framed image of Gutger Kyle (the image that had bedevilled our waking lives together, without us really realising it) was the oblong of wall it had covered for - how many years?. And there resided the faded imprint of the same image. Yet, instead of the sepia of the ancient photo, it was a sort of negative, not black and white, rather shades of grey. Shades of grey. That rang a bell. Ghost were shades of grey. But, no, it was more a mirror image where the mirror itself was as insubstantial as the reflection upon it. Nevertheless, it was proud from the wall - previously sunken, no doubt, into the inset frame's back, the one I'd just lifted up - as if the image was trying to escape the plaster. And, indeed, underneath, the wallpaper was neatly cut away, revealing this nether face, uncluttered by chintz. At the eyes, there welled waxen pearls of sorrow, gummy to my yellow touch.
My description fails because I am no mirror. I am more that type of insubstantial mirror I was actually trying to describe. Lucy would understand.
Of course, I questioned Mrs Ladle about it. She asked me to tell her Stanley. He was the one, she said, who saw to all the odd jobs. Not her.
Lucy never returned. Evidently got a job. Or so I was told by a mutual acquaintance who had a foot in both camps. As to Gutger Kyle, I never bothered to lift up his photo again, in case it had all been a dream. I needed to cherish madness while I could: to help me get over Lucy.
I conducted some research in the local library regarding Gutger Kyle. he did straddle, as I suspected, the turn of the century. He wrote many novels and was, at one time, as famous as those who remain famous now. He struck up a fleeting relationship with the authoress Ivy Compton-Burnett but as that is omitted from her biography, I wonder if it was true. In fact, that might be where I went wrong: believing what I read in books.
Lucy would understand. I can hear her breathing in the wall. Walls can collect sounds as well as memories. Places are people. Plots are pasts without a future. I'll have to get Mrs Ladle's Stanley up here to see to the pipes, I guess. He says he wants to take an old photo of me.
The job Lucy got, I hear, is one of being a real person. Or, at least, a spokesperson. Well, it's a promising start. Pity we never made it together, though.
(published "Dream From The Strangers' Cafe" 1994)
Friday, April 27, 2007
CAFÉ SOCIETY (2)
CAFE SOCIETY (1): HERE.
When I stumbled upon the disused café, I thought it was anything but.
The building seemed full of life; the air sounded with jiving ghosts from the fifties when the place was a milk bar; the walls only needed a lick of paint to bring them back to life. My wife needed a similar lick of paint, too, but priorities were to earn a living from property development, hopefully with a TV show following our efforts at renovation work, useful as a spur to progress as well as a fateful backhander by means of a fee. My wife would only be able to afford her mud-packs, toning-up weekends and mental sessions with an expensive shrink as soon as a real income was rolling in from the new property development. She had to get stuck in, too, meanwhile. No point in manicured nails when she had to spend the day sandpapering.
It was a disused café, however. The deeds told a million stories ... of its past, its period as a middle-class restaurant during the war years when they served three-course meals quite reasonably but only for people with manners. How they kept the riffraff out remained a mystery. However, it soon went to seed, before being revived as a milk bar with a juke box, then more latterly, a café with an eye on the passing lorry trade, then a café with posher pretensions but with no fail-safe method of deterring the everpresent onset of the riffraff again, then final dereliction as an empty shopfront always being bill-posted, and that was when me and my wife stepped in. We were riffraff ourselves, of course. But we had pretensions to property-owning grandeur following a reasonable lottery win scooping us from the gutter.
I was now unsure about the TV show. There was only a single camera that followed us round. We had effectively given up hope of proper sponsorship by a major ‘peeping tom’ outfit wanting to sneak glimpses into our business trials and tribulations for eventual broadcast to the world, revealing our innermost marital quarrels over the building project and how it affected the rest of our lives; but there was, however, this little guy with a shoulder shoot who did turn up on the first day of our building work; we assumed he was starting out himself in business as a TV programme creator, surely hoping to see the finished reels ending up in the hands of a big Channel 4 producer. So we turned a blind eye to him. We just allowed him in on most things, short of personal ablutions. We got used to his presence shadowing us with his whirring lenses, a sort of visionary overview becoming such a regular feature of our lives that he almost melted into the background. Forgotten, if pervasive. A cameraman we called Sam.
My wife did at first try to hold a conversation with Sam. But he was rather taciturn and we were really too busy to pay him much attention. We could have asked him what he did for a living if that was not already obvious. The circumstances of his sole purpose obviously being to film our actions on a day-to-day basis indeed cancelled out any opportunity for small talk other than the rather stylised interviews-to-camera that he arranged. I called them ‘interviews’, but it was rather Sam simply pointing the lens at us and letting us talk, spilling all our dreams, fears, setbacks, rages (with the project itself and with each other), even eliciting from us (by his silence) several gratuitous comments on current affairs and our taste in contemporary entertainment. Perhaps we were eventually to be shown on other light TV programmes unconnected with building projects.
We started to suspect that Sam wasn’t all that he seemed when, one day, he started pointing his camera obsessively towards the top corner of what had become our main showroom.
“What are you actually renovating this place for?” he suddenly asked, as if thinking he had now spotted our first attempts at stocking the place with goods to sell.
I stopped the hammer in mid-air; my wife halted sandpapering in mid-scrape. We had automatically assumed he must have known. Even a half-hearted pre-research or a cursory glance at our video diaries would have told him at least what our business plan happened to be. And how could we have ignored such ignorance when we knew full well that we were indeed renovating the disused café to ... well, wasn’t it obvious...?
I scratched my head in my own form of mid-scrape. My wife went into one of her famous televisual rages....
A clothes shop for riffraff. That was it. Boiler suits. Shell suits. Dungarees. Cheap tracksuits. Hand-me-downs. Nearly New garments. Seconds. Run-ups. Ready-mades. They were all the rage. Rail upon rail of hangers simply waiting for their own dressed ghosts swinging to the earth’s daily spin. Doing the empty hand-jive.
Sam’s own lenses continued to spin as we returned to the job in hand. Soon be time for a coffee break from the steaming percolator. Meanwhile, just the gentle scrape-scrape of wall against wall. A café society of ghosts re-living the high days of a Lyons Corner House or posh restaurant accompanied by palm court violins in mute bowing.
I don't know when I first realised it. None of us riffraff were there, of course. It was almsot as if I were a figment of the medium in which I was being filmed. A TV portrait of a TV portrait. A fabrikation of a fabrikation. My wife and I were merely temporary stuffing in a concoction of the future that the past had prematurely programmed for any rogue historians or history-makers (watching out for the onset of a peak viewing time) to wrap around costly commercials. But these thoughts of my own non-existence as riffraff (or as a diary-reporter of riffraff masquerading as riffraff) were only premonitions of what once might have been, given the ability to film it for wider audiences than just a backstreet cinema in wartime London. Or for examination by modern shrinks who got rich from doing 'mental sessions' on TV even before TV was invented.
Meanwhile, Sam peeps on.
===============
Another cafe story written today (13/5/07):
COOL WATER: HERE.
================
When I stumbled upon the disused café, I thought it was anything but.
The building seemed full of life; the air sounded with jiving ghosts from the fifties when the place was a milk bar; the walls only needed a lick of paint to bring them back to life. My wife needed a similar lick of paint, too, but priorities were to earn a living from property development, hopefully with a TV show following our efforts at renovation work, useful as a spur to progress as well as a fateful backhander by means of a fee. My wife would only be able to afford her mud-packs, toning-up weekends and mental sessions with an expensive shrink as soon as a real income was rolling in from the new property development. She had to get stuck in, too, meanwhile. No point in manicured nails when she had to spend the day sandpapering.
It was a disused café, however. The deeds told a million stories ... of its past, its period as a middle-class restaurant during the war years when they served three-course meals quite reasonably but only for people with manners. How they kept the riffraff out remained a mystery. However, it soon went to seed, before being revived as a milk bar with a juke box, then more latterly, a café with an eye on the passing lorry trade, then a café with posher pretensions but with no fail-safe method of deterring the everpresent onset of the riffraff again, then final dereliction as an empty shopfront always being bill-posted, and that was when me and my wife stepped in. We were riffraff ourselves, of course. But we had pretensions to property-owning grandeur following a reasonable lottery win scooping us from the gutter.
I was now unsure about the TV show. There was only a single camera that followed us round. We had effectively given up hope of proper sponsorship by a major ‘peeping tom’ outfit wanting to sneak glimpses into our business trials and tribulations for eventual broadcast to the world, revealing our innermost marital quarrels over the building project and how it affected the rest of our lives; but there was, however, this little guy with a shoulder shoot who did turn up on the first day of our building work; we assumed he was starting out himself in business as a TV programme creator, surely hoping to see the finished reels ending up in the hands of a big Channel 4 producer. So we turned a blind eye to him. We just allowed him in on most things, short of personal ablutions. We got used to his presence shadowing us with his whirring lenses, a sort of visionary overview becoming such a regular feature of our lives that he almost melted into the background. Forgotten, if pervasive. A cameraman we called Sam.
My wife did at first try to hold a conversation with Sam. But he was rather taciturn and we were really too busy to pay him much attention. We could have asked him what he did for a living if that was not already obvious. The circumstances of his sole purpose obviously being to film our actions on a day-to-day basis indeed cancelled out any opportunity for small talk other than the rather stylised interviews-to-camera that he arranged. I called them ‘interviews’, but it was rather Sam simply pointing the lens at us and letting us talk, spilling all our dreams, fears, setbacks, rages (with the project itself and with each other), even eliciting from us (by his silence) several gratuitous comments on current affairs and our taste in contemporary entertainment. Perhaps we were eventually to be shown on other light TV programmes unconnected with building projects.
We started to suspect that Sam wasn’t all that he seemed when, one day, he started pointing his camera obsessively towards the top corner of what had become our main showroom.
“What are you actually renovating this place for?” he suddenly asked, as if thinking he had now spotted our first attempts at stocking the place with goods to sell.
I stopped the hammer in mid-air; my wife halted sandpapering in mid-scrape. We had automatically assumed he must have known. Even a half-hearted pre-research or a cursory glance at our video diaries would have told him at least what our business plan happened to be. And how could we have ignored such ignorance when we knew full well that we were indeed renovating the disused café to ... well, wasn’t it obvious...?
I scratched my head in my own form of mid-scrape. My wife went into one of her famous televisual rages....
A clothes shop for riffraff. That was it. Boiler suits. Shell suits. Dungarees. Cheap tracksuits. Hand-me-downs. Nearly New garments. Seconds. Run-ups. Ready-mades. They were all the rage. Rail upon rail of hangers simply waiting for their own dressed ghosts swinging to the earth’s daily spin. Doing the empty hand-jive.
Sam’s own lenses continued to spin as we returned to the job in hand. Soon be time for a coffee break from the steaming percolator. Meanwhile, just the gentle scrape-scrape of wall against wall. A café society of ghosts re-living the high days of a Lyons Corner House or posh restaurant accompanied by palm court violins in mute bowing.
I don't know when I first realised it. None of us riffraff were there, of course. It was almsot as if I were a figment of the medium in which I was being filmed. A TV portrait of a TV portrait. A fabrikation of a fabrikation. My wife and I were merely temporary stuffing in a concoction of the future that the past had prematurely programmed for any rogue historians or history-makers (watching out for the onset of a peak viewing time) to wrap around costly commercials. But these thoughts of my own non-existence as riffraff (or as a diary-reporter of riffraff masquerading as riffraff) were only premonitions of what once might have been, given the ability to film it for wider audiences than just a backstreet cinema in wartime London. Or for examination by modern shrinks who got rich from doing 'mental sessions' on TV even before TV was invented.
Meanwhile, Sam peeps on.
===============
Another cafe story written today (13/5/07):
COOL WATER: HERE.
================
Saturday, April 14, 2007
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