The Lethal Chamber
posted Sunday, 8 May 2005
There were a couple of feet that needed shoe-horning. But those involved knew it was merely one foot and two shoes to share it between. Meanwhile, moored boats gulped soporifically upon the belly-wall of the Lake Carcosa. Not many visitors today, despite the friendly heat of the sun and it being the season's height. No much custom for the Lethal Chamber, today. Too much happiness about, for voluntary suicides. Only a short queue of miserabilist writers, looking glum as ever.
Alec speculated on the law of averages. What made places the favourite venue for a day? Everybody could decide to go to the seaside on Monday, whilst nobody went to Lake Carcosa. On Tuesday, vice versa. But, no, it couldn't happen. There was, after all, the supply and demand of Fate.
His children had already embarked on the lake, growing smaller and smaller as they rowed like slowly spinnning turtles beyond the islands. A few stragglers creaked in unison with clumsy oars. A number of geese slid far more easily through ripples of sparkling gold, as gulls dived to divert attention from the reflected food that both breeds confusedly envied. All seemed like recent-dipped sculpture returned to life.
A fleet of anceinet jets had just idled over the lake from the nearby reconstruct of an air base ... following each other like the bobbing geese, now truly frozen in time, bar flight. Alec had forgotten the proper name for these aircraft. Tank-busters, perhaps, from the Mother of all Battles. One of his children (Genevieve probably!) would be certain to remind him of the name, when they returned from the boat trip.
To the tune of the relentless gulping, he closed his eyes in the warm afternoon sunshine and floated off into pleasure dreams. But, in actual fact, was burnt to death by friendly fire. No need of the Lethal Chamber for him
"I'll help you unravel them, Nanny."
“You’re very naughty, messing about with my sewing basket," said Nanny to little Genevieve, whose universal sense of loss included the death of her father. But, after that fateful trip to Lake Carcosa, she never remembered her brothers and sisters, those fading faces who must have been fostered elsewhere before Genevieve’s less instinctive memory was born.
With the evenings now drawing in, the roaring coal fire stood out in the penny-pinching gloom as if Hell were homely.
"Sorry, Nanny, I didn't mean to get it all mixed up."
Genevieve was too old to simper, but simper she did, nervously threading her ringlets with fingers. She knew about fairies as well as ancient commandos.
"It will be the devil's own job to disentangle the silk cottons, specially yellow from yellow, with knots seeming to evolve merely by the act of looking for them," thought Nanny as she tugged impatiently at the misshapen inspirals, all a noodly black that the coloured yellow strands had seemed to become. From the tangle came a clatter of trawled thimbles, needles and tiny scissors.
"I'll help you unravel, Nanny."
"No point, Genevieve ... I'm leaving here tomorrow ... there'll be a newer nicer Nanny this time tomorrow evening."
Dark tealeaf tears gathered at the silver strainers of Nanny's eyes—whilst Genevieve smirked behind her hand, as she whispered: "I'll help you pack your luggage, then, instead, Nanny."
The fitful wind gulped in the chimney. Nanny had long since retired for her last night in the large rambling house. Genevieve felt she had also died ... died, out on Lake Carcosa all those years ago ... but, today, she was so hungry she needed to eat her own body, which had become easily digestible through the process of decomposition. She hadn't died, of course. She wasn't even dreaming. She merely enjoyed exercising her vivid imagination which a lack of peers and playfellows had engendered. She opened pop-up version of THE KING IN YELLOW and allowed her eyes to surf the pages without daring to intake meaning.
Unlike Genevieve, Nanny was scared of the dark and she sat bolt upright in the truckle bed looking back and forth from the faintly glowing curtains of her top storey room to the dark mouth of the empty fireplace. Only one more night to endure, then she'd be free of this insidious unnatural love, a love which she couldn't live without. Nanny thought that being besotted in both body and mind with Genevieve was not very dignified ... and she watched skeins of yellow tubing erupt from the chimney into the grate, as if the corpse of a yellow-clad Santa Claus had blurted out spools of its innards in one last foul spasm of many such spasms since Christmas, attempting to unbudge himself from the tight flue.
As dawn spread itself behind the house like a backdrop in a pantomime (or a war), shades of yellow began to curl from the many chimney-stacks—thus a sign that at least someone was up and about. A face had already been staring wistfully from the nursery window above the orchard garden for the first hour of the sun's shredded gold. Genevieve was praying that next Christmas she'd get the best present of all—a playmate of her own age ... or, at least, a real Nanny to taunt at bathtime, instead of the imaginary one.
Meanwhile, Santa Claus halted stitching together his disjointed noodles ... having failed to imagine a real girl like Genevieve to whom he could take presents next Christmas, like a real father would. And he imagined a city instead, one which was a picture of yellow roofs and chimneys rearing magnificently through the dawn mists. Alec had not died on the boating-lake but merely vanished into another world where he had been ejected from his mistress's flat at the first mere hint of daylight. Her flatmate, you see, was rather averse to having strangers in the place. But was he really the single stranger that all women feared? Surely, there must be at least one person who saw Alec as the familiar figure that everybody trusted. He laughed. Well, his mistress had indeed shared her bed with him. But trust could only thrive on a series of interactions, not on a single encounter, however intimate.
Most of the bodily dealings last night had been conducted under cover of darkness and they had met only briefly in the cocktail bar in advance of sacrificing the safety of life and limb to each other in this way. To call her a mistress was a trifle heavy-handed. Mistresses were merely fancy women of long standing or, at least, an intermittent acquaintance with whom a convenient mutual scratching of itches was the sole criteria for dating. Life's events for him were like promenading around an art gallery, praising or excoriating or, simply, remaining indifferent to each yellow-tinged pictures of ancient twentieth-century knights and kings, then passing on to the next. Memories were merely recognitions, when or if such pictures, by design or fortune, passed again in front of his indiscriminating viewfinder of a mind. He never expected to revisit a one-night stand or even a canvas on an easel entitled 'fancy woman'. Yet there was something a little out of the ordinary about this city and this world, an existence which had provided his latest partner of the dark. He shrugged, as was his wont when he consigned any particular memory to his sump of lost worlds and missing mistresses. He even smiled, a rarer occurrence, because, while he was searching such wastes of expended passion, trying to find a space for his newest forgettable femme, he suddenly came across a token of love—not the love he had for mere mistresses, but a real love, one that he had felt for someone about whom he must have completely forgotten. Yet this had been his one true love. His memories were surprisingly independent creatures, scurrying off to their earths at the first sign of hope or hunter.
A grown-up Genevieve, had, last night, been one mere veneer away from her father Alec: she being, coincidentally, the next door neighbour of Alec's latest mistress: this the Genevieve who feared strangers as much as thin partitions. But, now, she'd been left behind yet again with her dreaded books, as Alec traced a rite of passage which unfolded randomly within fate's strict parameters. Yet another world's city streets were never-ending, as if a puzzlehead cartographer once had a fidgetty day with the marking-pen, not taking it off the cartridge paper as a sort of Dare. Alec should have known it would not be easy to lose himself, when there were no corners to negotiate. Every building seemed to be a thriving Lethal Chamber.
Old Scratch was on his tail and Alec found it the devil's own job to shake him off. And, you see, Old Scratch had been queening it a bit in the D'Ys (as this part of the city was inexplicably called)—until Alec came along in an attempt to expose Old Scratch as a pretty low and common denominator. Alec did not know Old Scratch's face but, from the yellowing police records which he remembered somehow studying, he was sure he would recognise the rhythmic pace of the following footsteps and the ill-disguised snort of lungs. Alec guessed Old Scratch would be uglier than an eviscerated corpse half-floating in the whipping-crust outside the Bertambers Arms gentlemen's excuse-me.
As Alec escaped down the street, hoping to find at least one side-alley forgotten by the cartographer and thus dodge the searing limelight of Old Scratch's bulging, flameshot eyes, Alec spotted an urchin running towards him from the opposite direction of the limitless distance where the mapmaker had evidently confused perspective with phantasy. They both squatted on the pavement, regaining their breath in snorts.
"What's your name, ragamuffin?" Alec asked, trying to conceal the gabnash of his own teeth and gums.
"Robert." The girl lied, being Genevieve again, strutting upon a different stage of timeless fate. She was no older than Alec had been at her age, though she acted as if she had the knowledge of the whole cosmos upon her narrow shoulders.
"Robert? That be a 'trestin' name for a girl. Are yer runnin' up the street for any good reason?" Alec’s voice cracked. He could well believe he had not used it for centuries. Or he had gone back into the past where the future had not even cast its backward echo.
He was astonished, too, at his own crude dialect. He was in fact only to recall one reincarnation in which he had seen fit to talk. He kept looking over his shoulder to see if Old Scratch was lurking behind the back of his mind. And there was a corner shop just extending its awning like a tongue, opening for the afternoon session. Funny—he'd thought it was early closing day in this neck of the woods. The shop sold gobsuckers, the window being dressed with aniseed balls, penny chews, blackjacks, pear & acid drops, pineapple chunks, bullseyes, throat-stoppers &c. &c. He was convinced the shopkeeper would be finger-grating at his large bald pate to fill the lemon sherbets. The shopkeeper may have been Old Scratch himself in sudden disguise. Alec turned back to the urchin who now held out her begging-hand, with an expression on her grubby face indicating that she thought him a clinch-fist.
"I'm not goin' ter give yer any-fing, Robert, 'cause I can't even buy meself a clump-sole." He showed her the undersides of his shoes, next to useless without the hardened leather-flesh of feet to supplement them.
"You be pie-powdered," the girl enunciated painstakingly.
"I be not so dirty as I look, young 'un," Alec claimed, rising from the swill-gutter and tapping the precocious witmonger on the shoulder. It was meant to be a friendly gesture, but she flinched, her whole existence seeming to bodyjack before his very eyes. Good heavens, Genevieve might have been Old Scratch in disguise, for Alec saw the underfurrows of age unshrining, as if she had a different flavour inside. Her soul was wither-wrung, and Alec read words in her sticky mouth like sweets dissolving on the blotchy haft of a misshapen tongue and slicking a putrid throat which Alec could peer down if he stayed long enough to do so.
Seeing that the wacky cartographer had the space with which to work, he hived off some backstreet areas just to give them map room. Good job, too, seeing Alec was now in the relatively disease-free uncharted yard complexes of the city where the pubs were open all day. He ambled into the Bertambers Arms, as jolly and carefree as he could pretend, ready to order a tumbler of fizz for his narrow-billed lips and the sucking-sides of his throat. The landlord held out a webbed hand for payment of tuppence-ha'penny in exchange. Reddening to the bottom, Alec fumbled in his britches since his purse had been confounded with the umbilica of his intestines. Robert must have been a nifty pycke-purse. He could only find his Share Certificates in the Carcosa Cargo Company that had gone out of business when they first invented firearms. Smuggling, in any event, was hard on inland lakes.
He scrammed as quickly as he dared, with the first mouthful of fizz still bubbling against the shaft of his gristly clapper which waggled from the depth of his gullet. He hadn't savoured the look of the likes of the landlord, anyway, nor the foul-slanted cut of his jib, what with his humbug eyes and a speckled spray of spittle with every word from his lop-sided mouthful of lips. The landlord looked a trifle too much like Old Scratch—and, now, knowing the city streets better, the wanderer in Alec, somehow, tried to get lost, on a quest not unconnected with acting out dreams.
In a peculiar way, he knew that Old Scratch and the King in Yellow were one and the same. It sent a shiver down his spine. He would travel on the underground railway and alight at any random station with an unlikely name. Not a believer in aids such as the city map, he intended to wend the endless terraces and semi-avenues, loop closes, test cul-de-sacs—try, against all the odds, to abandon himself to the city's mystery. Come dusk, which was usually earlier and yellower than he ever expected, he would succeed in finding, in the nick of time, another underground station by which means, because of the over-simplified out-of-scale poster map therein, he could lead himself back to Square One—emerging into the darkness of the streets he had grown to know since the accident at Carcosa Lake.
But, like the underground map, nothing was ever what it seemed. Robert Alley quickly became Genevieve Avenue without even turning a corner. Lethal Chambers, here, were back-to-back, two-up-two-down, as well as side by side in dark terraces. He had been lost for unconscionable hours, yet through the sapping drizzle, he saw with some relief, the blurred sign for Friendly Fire Crescent, sending up dawnish yellow like ghostlight. Shaking from his exertions, he allowed himself to wander in his thoughts. If Santa Claus existed, it was probably true to say Old Scratch existed, too. Alec also allowed himself to be trundled down the empty half-lit wooden escalator, knowing that the untended lifts were simply asking for trouble and that the gaping hole of the spiral steps was trouble asking for him.
Later, as he clattered along upon the deserted train, he wondered why such a small station had possessed a triple choice of descent. Eventually, reaching a familiar station, the silver escalator was far longer than he recalled it, stretching, it seemed, limitlessly above, with a strong wind funnelling down upon him. He gathered a yellow overcoat about himself. Other people, people like doctors after patients, nannies after children, people after souls, descending in the parallel trough, watched him quizzically as Alec passed them upwards. They evidently found the slow speed sufficient and his demeanour more interesting than the tiered advert posters. Even the photos of people in piss-coloured underwear did not distract them from looking at Alec. He felt his face blush, dreading that the icy looks he suffered would guess what he wore under the overcoat. It was as if they picked his pockets with their eyes, snipping the purse-strings to his heart. Each coin was a silver bullet.
He suspected that the creature (call it the Mistress of all Changes or, rather, the Mother of all Fancies) who followed him through the various worlds had no respect for the law of any land they traversed, whilst scratching a living simply from breathing. But, at long last, the escalator delivered Alec, via the barrier, into some semblance of open air. Nobody collected tickets, only a slowly swivelling chair. The cold sponge of darkness was a shock to his system, especially as the streetwise set-up of back-doubles which he faced was confusing. He yearned for a friendly fire.
He always considered déjà-vu to be a fiction, which would make more sense without the use of the word 'always'. But he now depended on déjà-vu to find his way. Only the night before, he had dreamed of these surrounding. Each turning and line of houses were gentle reminders. He thanked God for small mercies, because it would have been far worse in a completely out-of-the-way area. He was at least on someone's common ground. The windows were mostly dark. Some, dully lit. As he rounded each corner, shadowy figures slammed doors, as if they had been lying in wait for him, only to make this obvious point of unwelcome. Curtains fluttered as did his own sodden eyelids. Silence was just the swishing of rubber blades on a windscreen. His engine gunned—and died.
He had drawn to a halt halfway down a road of high-rises. He had never owned a vehicle other than himself—yet, uncannily, the treads of his clump-soles squealed as he applied the wet weather brakes of his yellow taxi. Braces tightened against his upper frame, pulling the belt to which the braces' crocodile-clips were affixed like a band of hot iron. His sock-suspenders cramped his calves, turning them rock hard by guying the pinions of his searing sinews. His briefs cut into the groin, lifting and separating. The holster seared a diagonal line between the shoulder-blades and breast. The implement he toted within the holster had a hair-trigger too delicate for unwieldy fingers: a lady's jewel-studded automatic: ready-cocked, feather-alert, for beggars, muggers or other ne'erdowells.
The house, outside of which he had broken down, was between two high-rises, a Victorian Detached with twin attic towers and steeply stacked chimneys. The floral curtains in one bedroom were ostentatiously tweaked by Genevieve’s poster-white face. He tried desperately to recall the cutpurse incident from the night before, which was fast becoming a key to this night's reality. But having reached such a point, he had established a new spirit-of-place, irretrievably ... thus to set off again, mapless, upon the low-lying tracks towards station names, some not even appearing on the official simplified grid of coloured lines—which lines were not only out-of-scale but also inconsistently out-of-scale. The yellow one was called Circle. Many of the direction angles were misleading, too. But, tonight, the new world could not be shaken off, determined as it was to become real. The drizzle became sleet, as the door of the house opened and a couple of hooray-henries and their skittish molls galumphed down the steep porch-steps, pranging sticks against the metal banisters as if they were once tearaways now made good, clumsy muggers made citybright, urchin beggars made legal, ne'erdowells turned into prancing do-gooders.
The yellow cab into which they disappeared with slamming doors snorted off. Alec heard them shout a destination (in the posh side of the city) to the shadowy driver propped up at the large wheel. He scratched his head. He thought the tail-lights vanished towards the rough end of town, where dark Limehouse hunched against the horizon, made even darker by the now cascading lamp-lit snow. Reality or unreality, he was past caring, yet something told him that someone else sat waiting, with back scratching against night's warehouse wall. Thick-as-thieves, the creature was. Alec lightly touched the hardware he wore, confident with its presence. As he fingered the tiny nipple within its iron aureole, fire thrilled along his arm. Shivering, he negotiated the guttering street, determined this time to reach the end of this reality—or remember whom he feared so that he could make avoidance plans—or, at least, find another underground sign that would allow him to regain his bearings. Eventually, he thought he made out 'Lakeside Mews' on the sign. He prayed it would have an escalator and lifts and stairs, to cover the strange odds that only Fate could offer, it seemed. He felt extremely cold without the overcoat that he suddenly recalled once had his own shadowy body inside it.
Now, as luminous and numinous as the snowlit moon, he reflected off the glass wall of an anonymous city office-block. He was indeed a trifle too much like the creature who followed him, but even more like the one who followed the creature. No tongue to speak with, Alec and Old Scratch drew their weapons on the moment's spur, and they waited to see who would touch the trigger first. The scribbling of crack-deep scratches over the face-plate was the first Alec knew he was no longer there or, even, anywhere. Only an explosion of yellow fire.
A voice only sounded when everybody within hearing distance was asleep or, better, dead. That night, an ancient Genevieve was neither. It was a hot night and she dozed fitfully under a single smooth sheet as if she were still young enough for a Nanny to come with a goodnight kiss. Then she snored for a while in a relentless rhythm and, with the state of self-hypnosis thus engendered, she ceased breathing entirely. It was indeed a most realistic death. She had ensured the house was empty, having packed off the rest of her servants and other hangers-on. She was determined to lay the ghost, come what may.
The ghost was evidenced by knitted spools of yellow ectoplasm, discovered all over the carpets on the mornings following its supposed visitations. Tape recorders left running overnight picked up its crazy half-hearted attempts to haunt the house. Almost like a little girl's, it hinted at a lisping voice in the corners of night's white noise. But every time a sleeper was heard to stir, the tape indicated the ghost keeping deadly quiet. A shy thoughtful ghost perhaps, but ghosts were ghosts whose games needed stopping, in case they frightened the children and servants. Moreover, old Genevieve wanted very much to prove her own disbelief in them. Ghosts were indeed known to become more dangerous, the older they grew. Their age-yellowed winding-sheets would eventually flap across the dark landings and stairways, uncaring of whom they stung during their approach to a mutant fleshy reincarnation. Or so Genevieve believed, if she believed in them at all.
So, on that night, she was to get to the bottom of the ghost. As she lay there in her self-imposed state of refined existence, she heard its unprotected voice seeping through her auto-hypnotic defences. Not a tape-recording: a voice indeed unprotected by nothing but the air itself. Her muscles rippled and shimmered, as she heard the fateful voice:- "You who hearest my words via no prophylactick are sure to wear my body, me yours, thus able to scratch mutual backs in our endless struggle against non-existence."
No lisping this time, clear as a ringing bell. The sleeper woke, only to find she did not believe in herself let alone in any sign of exploding yellow, and forthwith curled into a dark foetus beneath the piss-stained sheet.
"I'm not goin' ter give yer any-fing," Alec and Robert announced in rash unison, but later toasting each other in friendly fire to celebrate that both had reached the real world. They had fought hand over fist to give birth to each other, finally realising that such fierce body-to-body in-fighting was more like love than even love itself. A sad king, meanwhile, sang a plaintive "I'm dreaming of a yellow Christmas" beside a friendly hot-chestnutted fire, and, nearby, Robert's Lethal Chambers set up in business in every available building. But the war soon did away with their need. In any event they though the King in Yellow had already killed himself and that was the reason why such places had been invented in the first place, awaiting their most important customer to come.
Finally, the King's plaintive voice spoke these words: "I'll help you unravel."
comments (1)
1. Paul Dracon left...
Friday, 5 August 2005 5:00 pm
This kind of fiction helps me unravel, too. Outstanding piece.
This sort of story blurs the distinction between lost and found, in my mind...
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.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Woken With A Kiss
Woken With A Kiss
posted Friday, 1 April 2005
I am not a human being - positively not. My mind is at least clear on that point.
So, the only element of doubt is why I have a mind at all preoccupied with such a self-conviction.
Perhaps, I’m imagining the mind - or it’s a ghost of a mind - or it’s someone else’s mind (your mind?) that I’m using.
I suspect it is a mind of sorts, but an alien template of a human one. I’d be a creature from outer space, if that wasn’t so laughable.
No, the truth surely resides somewhere else. The best clue is upon looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and seeing a complete stranger there with pouting lips and eyes tightly closed.
So, it’s all a dream. A dream without a dreamer.
Perhaps.
I only know I’ve fallen deeply in love with that zombie in the mirror. I close my eyes and lower my lips toward the glass. . .
(published 'The Ultimate Zombie' Dell 1993)
posted Friday, 1 April 2005
I am not a human being - positively not. My mind is at least clear on that point.
So, the only element of doubt is why I have a mind at all preoccupied with such a self-conviction.
Perhaps, I’m imagining the mind - or it’s a ghost of a mind - or it’s someone else’s mind (your mind?) that I’m using.
I suspect it is a mind of sorts, but an alien template of a human one. I’d be a creature from outer space, if that wasn’t so laughable.
No, the truth surely resides somewhere else. The best clue is upon looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and seeing a complete stranger there with pouting lips and eyes tightly closed.
So, it’s all a dream. A dream without a dreamer.
Perhaps.
I only know I’ve fallen deeply in love with that zombie in the mirror. I close my eyes and lower my lips toward the glass. . .
(published 'The Ultimate Zombie' Dell 1993)
Films as Ghosts
Films as ghosts
posted Friday, 20 March 2009
From this thread: http://www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/1698.html?1237558293
Q: I watched A PASSAGE TO INDIA last night for the first time in ages and was struck by its almost supernatural atmosphere. What other films have a similar mood without slipping over the line into the explictly ghostly?
My of-the-cuff answer:
The Passage to India film (as I recall it) simply reflects (in a good way) the book as you suggest.
All films for me have the presence of ghosts (perhap the cameramen and crew whose shadows can be often glimpsed or imagined (in a bad way)).
Many black and white films carry viruses of haunting, some intentional others not.
'Death In Venice' is probably the best example of a film that carries a supernatural soul that is not obviously fabricated by the film-makers.
posted Friday, 20 March 2009
From this thread: http://www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/1698.html?1237558293
Q: I watched A PASSAGE TO INDIA last night for the first time in ages and was struck by its almost supernatural atmosphere. What other films have a similar mood without slipping over the line into the explictly ghostly?
My of-the-cuff answer:
The Passage to India film (as I recall it) simply reflects (in a good way) the book as you suggest.
All films for me have the presence of ghosts (perhap the cameramen and crew whose shadows can be often glimpsed or imagined (in a bad way)).
Many black and white films carry viruses of haunting, some intentional others not.
'Death In Venice' is probably the best example of a film that carries a supernatural soul that is not obviously fabricated by the film-makers.
Jaded by Fiction?
Jaded by Fiction?
posted Sunday, 8 March 2009
From here: http://www.ligotti.net/showpost.php?p=17625&postcount=13
Quote Originally Posted by Alberto D. Hetman
It is being harder every time I pick a book to find something new, something that amazes me, that makes me wonder as much as when I read my first Poe's tale when I was 16.
I think most of us would be familiar with that feeling.
I still find the odd exciting fiction - often it is only published on the internet.
And there are writers I'm always amazed at: Elizabeth Bowen, Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman...
And I've been excitd by a whole tranche of good Horror stuff in some new books by new writers recently: eg: by Richard Gavin, Matt Cardin, Gary McMahon, Gary Fry, Simon Strantzas, Mark Samuels ....
....and Tamar Yellin.
It's never too late to cease being jaded with literature.
posted Sunday, 8 March 2009
From here: http://www.ligotti.net/showpost.php?p=17625&postcount=13
Quote Originally Posted by Alberto D. Hetman
It is being harder every time I pick a book to find something new, something that amazes me, that makes me wonder as much as when I read my first Poe's tale when I was 16.
I think most of us would be familiar with that feeling.
I still find the odd exciting fiction - often it is only published on the internet.
And there are writers I'm always amazed at: Elizabeth Bowen, Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman...
And I've been excitd by a whole tranche of good Horror stuff in some new books by new writers recently: eg: by Richard Gavin, Matt Cardin, Gary McMahon, Gary Fry, Simon Strantzas, Mark Samuels ....
....and Tamar Yellin.
It's never too late to cease being jaded with literature.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
I Hope You See What I Mean
I hope you see what I mean
posted Friday, 6 March 2009
From: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=2651
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quote Originally Posted by qcrisp
It's a selfish concern, but as someone who writes, I fear that I will be obsolete very soon. I am producing more and more complex fiction, and I feel like the human brain is, collectively, losing the ability to digest that kind of thing, as if I am writing in Latin or some other extinct language. As to what I will do when my obsolescence becomes complete, I don't know. Unlike some, I view the future almost entirely with dread.
I agree -- but I look forward rather than dread this inevitable outcome... and I continue to write my (complex?) prose but then immediately put it on the public internet as some sort of acceptance of the type of thing you say. I haven't submitted anything to a book or mag publisher since 1999 and I feel that is the best way to remain positive in a negative way! I hope you see what I mean.
comments (1)
1. Weirdmonger left...
Friday, 6 March 2009 12:11 pm
When I say not submitted anything since 1999, that means off my own bat. I have been solicited for work to be printed from time to time (not often!) and I have supplied it.
posted Friday, 6 March 2009
From: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=2651
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quote Originally Posted by qcrisp
It's a selfish concern, but as someone who writes, I fear that I will be obsolete very soon. I am producing more and more complex fiction, and I feel like the human brain is, collectively, losing the ability to digest that kind of thing, as if I am writing in Latin or some other extinct language. As to what I will do when my obsolescence becomes complete, I don't know. Unlike some, I view the future almost entirely with dread.
I agree -- but I look forward rather than dread this inevitable outcome... and I continue to write my (complex?) prose but then immediately put it on the public internet as some sort of acceptance of the type of thing you say. I haven't submitted anything to a book or mag publisher since 1999 and I feel that is the best way to remain positive in a negative way! I hope you see what I mean.
comments (1)
1. Weirdmonger left...
Friday, 6 March 2009 12:11 pm
When I say not submitted anything since 1999, that means off my own bat. I have been solicited for work to be printed from time to time (not often!) and I have supplied it.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Big Brother 11 (2011) - Part Three
continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2010/07/big-brother-11-2010-part-two.html
=============
I'm now getting muddled up between John James and JJ ...
Sam was of course right about Josie. An interesting moral dilemma later posed by Dave - should one be oneself and give honest views (as Sam claimed to be doing) or should one boost people's confidence so that they feel good (presumably meaning one could be two-faced in so doing)?
In the BB House, do your normal considerations apply, I ask Dave, rhetorically.
Equally, I suspect Sam has been set up by BB specifically to stir the pot (or pepper it!). Mutualy accepted by all as a semi-mole? Nod nod. Wink wink.
Corin's playground chanting brings a bit of the Fifties into the soul of the party.
She is a carefully groomed BB machine - a cross between Hilda Ogden, Hylda Baker, Caroline Hearne (from the Royle Family) and Bet Gilroy/Lynch (ex-Corrie) and other ingredients I have'nt yet identified. Spot the template.
She is so polished - she is bound to win.
.
Marion: He has remarkable sangfroid for one so young
Indeed. Or is Sam acting this sang-froid with equal sang-froid? I think he is a remarkably clever rascal. Someone it would not give me pleasure to know, though.
Jo was the BB in flesh, too. Another plant? Jo's assessment was a mistresspiece.
Catching yawns like infections? 'Stretched between the angel wings' they sometimes call this common phenomenon.
.
Corin and JJ in bed at the end of the show last night - certainly a genie of some sort or its bottle was being rubbed if the actions or implications of the words were to be believed. Corin is certainly perfecting her perfection as a winner to the Nth degree.
And John James, you're right, wants out from the mess he's in.
Josie with her worry duvet (sucked at the edges) - will be calling it a name soon like a favourite doll's name. Just mark my words.
Sam is a sprite, an 'imp of the perverse'. He has been dressed for the part by BB by giving him an impossible task to win his suitcase of normal clothes (assuming he had such a suitcase in the first place) - and Sam is colluding with this role.
Mario's dodgy 'randomness' - seems an emblem for this year's BB itself.
.
I, too, thought Corin's biting the Coin was excellent - as Scrooge. She has style, this lady, whether it is contrived or not.
John James was in foul mood. I think he is playing to go. He needs a fresh duvet. Perhaps you should not vote for him just to annoy him - or cloy the sticky tapestry further around him.
And why two Miss Havishams? Dickens never had two of things, like Tweedledum or Tweedledee. Except perhaps the Trotwoods.
Sam continues to be the imp of the perverse. A role forged by the Niebelung.
.
I hate this diffuse Dickens task - especially with the quite irrelevant, anachronous Gilbert & Sullivan Mikado music that regularly accompanies the drawings turning into people.
I hope all three evictees go tonight.
The only HM who seems to talk any sense is Sam Pepper of Middle Earth.
Sorry, I'm in a bad mood.
.
Rachel was too bubbly for her own good - a bit like a mad scientist's experiment gone wrong. Too much Bunsen on the brain.
"Oh, willow, titwillow, titwillow!"
.
Josie can be quite witty sometimes = eg sleeping with Darth Vader
Josie can be quite deep sometimes, inscrutable = is she really on heat?
I wish BB hadn't got into the habit of embroidering raw film with retrocausal effects, eg playing 'Oliver' music to edited cuts of the celebration Dickensian party.
.
But I nearly guffed out on Belinda Belinda Belinda.
Andrew's into Mario's left bollock and water melons.
See Steve in THE BOO MAN (Cert X) in a cinema near you.
See Josie in THE BLOB - the B Feature.
Didn't understand the 'Never' drinking game at all!
Sam to win.
.
With some expressions of her face, Jo is like our dear late lamented Jade.
BTW, Certificate X was given to many types of film that now get a 12 certificate.
John James and JJ - the nodding sages - have identified something in Corin that I have long identified. Their now 'planned' campaign against her merely shows thyat their actions are predominantly ignited by this being a prize game show.
.
Josie's Knee - another icon like Claire's Knee?
Dave is often master of a bed's multiple Brokeback Mountain - last night involving Sam on top.
JJ's space invading was all rather run-of-the-mill. There are so many mission nows, HMs just shrug when they see someone doing something odd. Hmm, he or she must be on a mission. Let them get on with it.
This BB series is by far the worst of all eleven BBs (and not only because of the poor personnel (other than possibly Sam and Ben and Sunshine)) - with its cheesy retrocausal filmic effects, its adulteration by outsiders in a bodily infiltration within the house (eg Davina, Marcus, that dance teacher etc etc), and serial (HM's personality contrived or speciously image-geared) tasks & missions. At least they have got rid of that really stupid Tree of Temptation as a chest of drawers. Or have they?
.
There is something more satisfying in being evicted with an interview than walking in sorrow.
I agree with everything Marion says about the gunking nominations, though it produced some interesting inscrutabilities of intention and mis-intention.
I agree Sam is safe. Our hybrid between Puck, Ariel, Caliban, Nebelung, Gollum, Marc Bolan, Hobbit - our own Bulbo Biggins.
To match Corin's own variegated hybrid I've listed out before (except I meant Caroline Aherne not Caroline Hearne as part of that list).
.
I spoke too soon. The Tree of Temptation was back. Why don't they call them into the DR as they used to do - "will one HM come to the DR?" - then the random DR thus given a job that may or may not suit them.
This series is one of "bespoke" tasks. It's become more of a game show guided by Game Show gods. And the HMs are Game Show constatants, like 'Deal or No Deal' contestants 'buzzed' up or morphed to compete with the Banker. instead of real people, real people that have gradually diminished as the BB series have progressed until this dire last edition that is BB11.
Having said all that, I still find intriguing conundrums of intention and mis-intention, of gamesmanship versus reality. But I'm glad Corin has been sussed ... one just needs to look at her as she plays to the camera rather than to her co-HMs. She'll win, though.
.
I take that point about Lewis Carroll, Marion, but overall BB has become too self-consciously intent on effects. Pre-planned and over-manipulative and later embellished by editorial techniques that create new impressions and interpretations that didn't really happen in real-time. [Also, Sam knows this is happening since he watched the programme at home before becoming a HM and he is exploiting this knowingly in instinctive collusion with his vision of the BB Production Team].
Editing lengthy tranches of the streaming into a manageable summary is one thing, but then putting that resultant summary through a tendentious filter is another. This is the first time that BB has done the latter. And it is a sell-out. I wish BB had ended with BB10 rather than BB11.
.
Much better tonight (other than the outside broadcast!)
Sam is quaintly Dadaistic.
Josie is indeed a unique phenomenon in the ranks of woman.
They're sparking off together quite creatively tonight.
More tomorrow...
.
Sam is either a quite brilliant Dadaist with lots of empathy regarding his HM colleagues and the unseen audience - or someone who is quite out of control with very little empathy.
Will this conundrum be solved?
.
I think John James just lost his temper for real but Samwise was acting being upset. But I could be wrong about the latter.
This is more like it. After interminable periods of incomprehensible mumbling by Josie and her ambivalent beau, we have a classic 'argument' scene in the bedroom - it needs no direction, it needs no script or retrocausal rehearsal, no hindsight application of special effects other than the real-time infra red lighting.
Jo to go!
.
Yes, things are certainly picking up.
All rolls Samwise.
I think Corin has been tainted by various actions recently - at least Nikki was half-believable.
John James is now a lumpen mass of twisted anger and mock humour.
Josie could win. If the Doris Day in her wins out.
.
All seems chummy. Nobody's nose is out of joint. Just a straight run through with a series of group hugs.
Steve to go first?
.
I would like none of them to stay. It is sad that I have no favourites.
.
Yes, it's going to be a good week. Thanks, Marion, I trust you and I would never say anything different in private or in the Diary Room or anywhere else.
There was duvet action in spades yesterday, including Mario and Andrew. A possible relationship starting there?
I think, when push comes to shove, I'm having to choose Mario as my favourite, although I think Josie will eventually win.
Steve's comment about 'new legs' was cynically made and hopefully sceptically received. A war hero deserves much from us, but he doesn't deserve to win a game show that he doesn't plainly deserve to win on the terms of that game show.
.
Marion wrote:
Corin was not pleased to be called scary.
She was even less pleased by John James' suggestion that the word may have been 'false'!
Sam's antics as a living shadow were memorable.
Corin's assumptions regarding all wrong-doing being official 'tasks' or 'missions' adds to the evidence that BB has over-egged the cake this year.
.
Corin starred tonight. Actually I'm coming round to accept her brand of everything including the kitchen sink as part of her BB 'persona' including a Jadean take on the Pope! Her appearance at the end poking her head into the nest to talk about her own fakery - classic!
.
Amazing! Thanks for that info on the flood.
I'm beginning to agree with you about Corin, btw. As I said just before your post, she certainly starred well in the last summary programme.
.
Indeed a deluge of retribution upon Western civilzation's celebrity ethos, the glory of fame in the belly gushing out- hopefully, by symbiosis, to reduce more serious floods elsewhere in the world. I think it is true to say that it was the only freak storm in the UK that night (where none were forecast), appearing over the BB house and as quickly disappearing. Done simply so that it could be thus interpreted here.
It is remarkable how Corin lives within another form of symbiosis i.e. with her make-up. Literally a life and death matter. Make-up - fake-up - is indeed symbolic of her game. She still deserves to win, however...compared to the other contenders.
John James went through a sea change of his own last night...
He is more interesting sometimes than he seems!
BB tried to big up the other JJ. I hadn't really noticed him before.
.
Marion wrote:
Wthout her slap, Corin is a young Thora Hird who will always work, kindly and twittering, in a shop; with it, she is Jordan, glamorous and ready for opportunity to come knocking. Bless her - she isn't the only woman in the world 'who prepares a face to meet the faces that she meets.'
Even TS Eliot would recognise she is not a well-mannered (Alan Bennett-loved) Thora Hird, but a young Hylda Baker crossed with an even younger Hilda Ogdon crossed with Bet Lynch crossed with Caroline Aherne. But, yes, someone I'd like to meet serving me in the corner shop. The hybrid that is Corin probably works for pornography films, however, as her pre-BB day job..
I'd like to get her out of that world. So I shall vote for her to win.
.
One of the best BBs ever - tonight. All misbegotten emotion here. More tomorrow...
CONTINUED HERE: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2010/08/big-brother-11-2010-part-four.html
=============
I'm now getting muddled up between John James and JJ ...
Sam was of course right about Josie. An interesting moral dilemma later posed by Dave - should one be oneself and give honest views (as Sam claimed to be doing) or should one boost people's confidence so that they feel good (presumably meaning one could be two-faced in so doing)?
In the BB House, do your normal considerations apply, I ask Dave, rhetorically.
Equally, I suspect Sam has been set up by BB specifically to stir the pot (or pepper it!). Mutualy accepted by all as a semi-mole? Nod nod. Wink wink.
Corin's playground chanting brings a bit of the Fifties into the soul of the party.
She is a carefully groomed BB machine - a cross between Hilda Ogden, Hylda Baker, Caroline Hearne (from the Royle Family) and Bet Gilroy/Lynch (ex-Corrie) and other ingredients I have'nt yet identified. Spot the template.
She is so polished - she is bound to win.
.
Marion: He has remarkable sangfroid for one so young
Indeed. Or is Sam acting this sang-froid with equal sang-froid? I think he is a remarkably clever rascal. Someone it would not give me pleasure to know, though.
Jo was the BB in flesh, too. Another plant? Jo's assessment was a mistresspiece.
Catching yawns like infections? 'Stretched between the angel wings' they sometimes call this common phenomenon.
.
Corin and JJ in bed at the end of the show last night - certainly a genie of some sort or its bottle was being rubbed if the actions or implications of the words were to be believed. Corin is certainly perfecting her perfection as a winner to the Nth degree.
And John James, you're right, wants out from the mess he's in.
Josie with her worry duvet (sucked at the edges) - will be calling it a name soon like a favourite doll's name. Just mark my words.
Sam is a sprite, an 'imp of the perverse'. He has been dressed for the part by BB by giving him an impossible task to win his suitcase of normal clothes (assuming he had such a suitcase in the first place) - and Sam is colluding with this role.
Mario's dodgy 'randomness' - seems an emblem for this year's BB itself.
.
I, too, thought Corin's biting the Coin was excellent - as Scrooge. She has style, this lady, whether it is contrived or not.
John James was in foul mood. I think he is playing to go. He needs a fresh duvet. Perhaps you should not vote for him just to annoy him - or cloy the sticky tapestry further around him.
And why two Miss Havishams? Dickens never had two of things, like Tweedledum or Tweedledee. Except perhaps the Trotwoods.
Sam continues to be the imp of the perverse. A role forged by the Niebelung.
.
I hate this diffuse Dickens task - especially with the quite irrelevant, anachronous Gilbert & Sullivan Mikado music that regularly accompanies the drawings turning into people.
I hope all three evictees go tonight.
The only HM who seems to talk any sense is Sam Pepper of Middle Earth.
Sorry, I'm in a bad mood.
.
Rachel was too bubbly for her own good - a bit like a mad scientist's experiment gone wrong. Too much Bunsen on the brain.
"Oh, willow, titwillow, titwillow!"
.
Josie can be quite witty sometimes = eg sleeping with Darth Vader
Josie can be quite deep sometimes, inscrutable = is she really on heat?
I wish BB hadn't got into the habit of embroidering raw film with retrocausal effects, eg playing 'Oliver' music to edited cuts of the celebration Dickensian party.
.
But I nearly guffed out on Belinda Belinda Belinda.
Andrew's into Mario's left bollock and water melons.
See Steve in THE BOO MAN (Cert X) in a cinema near you.
See Josie in THE BLOB - the B Feature.
Didn't understand the 'Never' drinking game at all!
Sam to win.
.
With some expressions of her face, Jo is like our dear late lamented Jade.
BTW, Certificate X was given to many types of film that now get a 12 certificate.
John James and JJ - the nodding sages - have identified something in Corin that I have long identified. Their now 'planned' campaign against her merely shows thyat their actions are predominantly ignited by this being a prize game show.
.
Josie's Knee - another icon like Claire's Knee?
Dave is often master of a bed's multiple Brokeback Mountain - last night involving Sam on top.
JJ's space invading was all rather run-of-the-mill. There are so many mission nows, HMs just shrug when they see someone doing something odd. Hmm, he or she must be on a mission. Let them get on with it.
This BB series is by far the worst of all eleven BBs (and not only because of the poor personnel (other than possibly Sam and Ben and Sunshine)) - with its cheesy retrocausal filmic effects, its adulteration by outsiders in a bodily infiltration within the house (eg Davina, Marcus, that dance teacher etc etc), and serial (HM's personality contrived or speciously image-geared) tasks & missions. At least they have got rid of that really stupid Tree of Temptation as a chest of drawers. Or have they?
.
There is something more satisfying in being evicted with an interview than walking in sorrow.
I agree with everything Marion says about the gunking nominations, though it produced some interesting inscrutabilities of intention and mis-intention.
I agree Sam is safe. Our hybrid between Puck, Ariel, Caliban, Nebelung, Gollum, Marc Bolan, Hobbit - our own Bulbo Biggins.
To match Corin's own variegated hybrid I've listed out before (except I meant Caroline Aherne not Caroline Hearne as part of that list).
.
I spoke too soon. The Tree of Temptation was back. Why don't they call them into the DR as they used to do - "will one HM come to the DR?" - then the random DR thus given a job that may or may not suit them.
This series is one of "bespoke" tasks. It's become more of a game show guided by Game Show gods. And the HMs are Game Show constatants, like 'Deal or No Deal' contestants 'buzzed' up or morphed to compete with the Banker. instead of real people, real people that have gradually diminished as the BB series have progressed until this dire last edition that is BB11.
Having said all that, I still find intriguing conundrums of intention and mis-intention, of gamesmanship versus reality. But I'm glad Corin has been sussed ... one just needs to look at her as she plays to the camera rather than to her co-HMs. She'll win, though.
.
I take that point about Lewis Carroll, Marion, but overall BB has become too self-consciously intent on effects. Pre-planned and over-manipulative and later embellished by editorial techniques that create new impressions and interpretations that didn't really happen in real-time. [Also, Sam knows this is happening since he watched the programme at home before becoming a HM and he is exploiting this knowingly in instinctive collusion with his vision of the BB Production Team].
Editing lengthy tranches of the streaming into a manageable summary is one thing, but then putting that resultant summary through a tendentious filter is another. This is the first time that BB has done the latter. And it is a sell-out. I wish BB had ended with BB10 rather than BB11.
.
Much better tonight (other than the outside broadcast!)
Sam is quaintly Dadaistic.
Josie is indeed a unique phenomenon in the ranks of woman.
They're sparking off together quite creatively tonight.
More tomorrow...
.
Sam is either a quite brilliant Dadaist with lots of empathy regarding his HM colleagues and the unseen audience - or someone who is quite out of control with very little empathy.
Will this conundrum be solved?
.
I think John James just lost his temper for real but Samwise was acting being upset. But I could be wrong about the latter.
This is more like it. After interminable periods of incomprehensible mumbling by Josie and her ambivalent beau, we have a classic 'argument' scene in the bedroom - it needs no direction, it needs no script or retrocausal rehearsal, no hindsight application of special effects other than the real-time infra red lighting.
Jo to go!
.
Yes, things are certainly picking up.
All rolls Samwise.
I think Corin has been tainted by various actions recently - at least Nikki was half-believable.
John James is now a lumpen mass of twisted anger and mock humour.
Josie could win. If the Doris Day in her wins out.
.
All seems chummy. Nobody's nose is out of joint. Just a straight run through with a series of group hugs.
Steve to go first?
.
I would like none of them to stay. It is sad that I have no favourites.
.
Yes, it's going to be a good week. Thanks, Marion, I trust you and I would never say anything different in private or in the Diary Room or anywhere else.
There was duvet action in spades yesterday, including Mario and Andrew. A possible relationship starting there?
I think, when push comes to shove, I'm having to choose Mario as my favourite, although I think Josie will eventually win.
Steve's comment about 'new legs' was cynically made and hopefully sceptically received. A war hero deserves much from us, but he doesn't deserve to win a game show that he doesn't plainly deserve to win on the terms of that game show.
.
Marion wrote:
Corin was not pleased to be called scary.
She was even less pleased by John James' suggestion that the word may have been 'false'!
Sam's antics as a living shadow were memorable.
Corin's assumptions regarding all wrong-doing being official 'tasks' or 'missions' adds to the evidence that BB has over-egged the cake this year.
.
Corin starred tonight. Actually I'm coming round to accept her brand of everything including the kitchen sink as part of her BB 'persona' including a Jadean take on the Pope! Her appearance at the end poking her head into the nest to talk about her own fakery - classic!
.
Amazing! Thanks for that info on the flood.
I'm beginning to agree with you about Corin, btw. As I said just before your post, she certainly starred well in the last summary programme.
.
Indeed a deluge of retribution upon Western civilzation's celebrity ethos, the glory of fame in the belly gushing out- hopefully, by symbiosis, to reduce more serious floods elsewhere in the world. I think it is true to say that it was the only freak storm in the UK that night (where none were forecast), appearing over the BB house and as quickly disappearing. Done simply so that it could be thus interpreted here.
It is remarkable how Corin lives within another form of symbiosis i.e. with her make-up. Literally a life and death matter. Make-up - fake-up - is indeed symbolic of her game. She still deserves to win, however...compared to the other contenders.
John James went through a sea change of his own last night...
He is more interesting sometimes than he seems!
BB tried to big up the other JJ. I hadn't really noticed him before.
.
Marion wrote:
Wthout her slap, Corin is a young Thora Hird who will always work, kindly and twittering, in a shop; with it, she is Jordan, glamorous and ready for opportunity to come knocking. Bless her - she isn't the only woman in the world 'who prepares a face to meet the faces that she meets.'
Even TS Eliot would recognise she is not a well-mannered (Alan Bennett-loved) Thora Hird, but a young Hylda Baker crossed with an even younger Hilda Ogdon crossed with Bet Lynch crossed with Caroline Aherne. But, yes, someone I'd like to meet serving me in the corner shop. The hybrid that is Corin probably works for pornography films, however, as her pre-BB day job..
I'd like to get her out of that world. So I shall vote for her to win.
.
One of the best BBs ever - tonight. All misbegotten emotion here. More tomorrow...
CONTINUED HERE: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2010/08/big-brother-11-2010-part-four.html
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Things are as they should be
Things are as they should be
posted Friday, 5 September 2008
From a discussion forum today:
> It is possible to be a powerful and influential writer without
necessarily
> being a good one.
My reply:-
I think a powerful and influential writer is automatically a good one,
because his style (however 'off-the-wall') must thus self-evidently be
the ideal conduit for the power and influence of his writing, as
perceived.
Things are as they should be. A symphony by Sibelius could have taken
many different turns to prevent it being the perfect familiar Sibelius
symphony that we already know, but self-evidently it didn't ...
couldn't.
posted Friday, 5 September 2008
From a discussion forum today:
> It is possible to be a powerful and influential writer without
necessarily
> being a good one.
My reply:-
I think a powerful and influential writer is automatically a good one,
because his style (however 'off-the-wall') must thus self-evidently be
the ideal conduit for the power and influence of his writing, as
perceived.
Things are as they should be. A symphony by Sibelius could have taken
many different turns to prevent it being the perfect familiar Sibelius
symphony that we already know, but self-evidently it didn't ...
couldn't.
Sparks of Dusk
Sparks of Dusk
posted Thursday, 18 November 2004
The old lady rocked gently in her chair, with icy stare upon the single orange bar of the electric fire. Agatha's skin visibly shrivelled, despite the relative lack of all-round heat. She dreamed of past loves, those originally encountered by means of either natural family bloodcourses or the fizzing streams of extramural passions. Past passions and past hopes trooped by like a proud butterfly infantry: blow-kissing grandchildren, mocking cousins, mooning elder sisters, maiden aunts, dead husbands in green uniforms, righteous grown-up daughters, blunt cutting businessmen disguised as her sons, her own father with red teardrops instead of eyes, the mother she had never even known and, finally, those other strangers who had been Agatha's lovers. They saluted, like toy soldiers, as they passed between the bright bone of the fire and Agatha's rocking-chair. Her face of knitted flesh laddered horizontally so that the mouth could smile. But this march-past faded as the light was sucked from the parlour window by a widow's peak of a thunderhead beating the night to the sky by at least half-an-hour. She listened to the rumbles with a shiver. Soon, she would need to crack her sinews apart so as to reach the light switch.
A creature with beady eyes scampered on all fours along by the skirting-board. So common was this rodent's foray from the dark underfloor, that she felt no need to carry to her soul the freight of frights it had made available to the weathering silence. Yet she knew, of course, it was not really a rodent but the midget miniature of an ex-lover, crawling on hands and knees, seeping blood at two eye-sockets, unknowing whither he crawled. Pity welled to her heart from the water in the brain. She clear-thought herself upright, once flaccid muscles stiffening to attention. That lover of forgotten name had long ago tormented her soul. Now, she would show him that kindness always wins.
Eventually, she cornered him between the sideboard and the fireplace.
"You were cruel to me once. But now I'll be kind to you," she said, placing the poor mite upon her wrinkled palm. He had evidently been wounded by a rival for her affections, since crimson stained his chest pelt from an apparent sword-prick. The march-past had been the first occasion many of her lovers had met each other, she guessed. She stroked his back, moistened the tip of a finger in her spit to polish his tiny shoes and then smarmed his hair with it. He squirmed against the heel of her thumb, not knowing in whose safe hands he had found himself. She untwirled his winkle with an embroidery needle and, smiling, plucked it with a tiny wrench from the rest of the body. Pity she had no vinegar handy...
The thunderhead dropped like a removal man having lost purchase on a hefty wardrobe upstairs. She switched on the light and settled back into the rocker with a sigh. She hoped the man who sold punnets of shrimps would be here in time for high tea. She dozed off and dreamed for the first time that day ... of a little boy who knelt at a nursery window, so that anybody strolling around the orchard garden in the shadow of the tall rambling house would, if they cared, just be able to discern his tousled carrottop and, with something like ancient zoom lenses, draw into close-up the boy's own swivelling bowls of sight. His knees were chafed, knickerbockers damp, since he had been dream-frozen into this position for most of the hot summer day. An ominous thunder roll sounded across his ear-drums. A flock of butterflies paraded through the cabbage patch in the garden below, their droopy wings draining the sunflowers of their gold by miscegenation of science and myth. He prayed at this window for one last vision of a ghost girl: a small mite, in pinafore frock, with cascades of peachblossom hair and flickering svelte legs. This girl's face was a delight, even through the haze of shortening sight.
The summer garden had no real people in it (other than the family's factotum): so the boy considered that a ghost was naturally second best. The rest of the household were unseasonably bed-ridden: ancient maiden aunts and older teasing cousins poisoned by the produce of the vegetable plot. The factotum was the only one able to minister to their daily needs, whose flat-capped and shrapnelled brain contained only demeaning loyalty. So the little boy was left more or less to his own devices. Toys were thrown into corners, where real tears sparkled at the ever-opening dollseyes of the night. His chair was on iron hoops, rocking in rhythm to the silence: a rocking-horse snickering in dream. Night was time for harsh reality. Day was for dream. And the ghost girl in the pinafore was the boy's anchor in such meanderings of the soul.
This particular afternoon, the flat cap could be seen floating along above the string-bean poles like an oriental sea-swagger. The factotum had just visited the pagoda at the edge of the boy's sweep of antique cinemascopic vision, now traipsing with the late hoe and the meticulously burnished garden fork's diamond daggers which left a scintilla of fireflies in its wake. Then, the dipping sun, having shrugged off the thunderhead, exploded with a thousand sloping shafts of the sky's cathedral light, leaning like translucent cantilever stanchions of gold through the unscrumped trees. Following the factotum's departure, the ghost girl came into view, askip with the scrolling ropelight of her overblown halo. She then made a grab for this circlet of angelic charisma and proceeded to roll it like a hoop between the maze of sweet peas. Finally, she yanked it in two with a deft manipulation of her small hand and, in the manner of a snake-whip, spun like a top the turnip she had just plucked with her long fingers from the factotum's root plot. Her butterfly hairclip glinted as she darted across the manicured lawn, with the green of the grass paradoxically brightening in the descending sun.
The boy's eyes were engorged with sunset and began to melt upon his dewy cheeks. He was in love with the ghost girl. The lithe flashing limbs became a slow motion ritual in his deep reverent adoration of her. He prayed that he would be able to shift from his kneeling position, held for most of the nigh endless day, sinews cracking, strange muscles stiffening. He yearned to visit the garden in person, despite the aunts and cousins forbidding him to do so, on pain of worsening illnesses in the house, through worry and disappointment. He never understood their meaning. At night, he would lay awake trying to fathom such ways of the world. His tears turned to sour vinegar at his lips, as he drowsed in the heavy dusk.
"You're so wistful!" The ghost girl suddenly stood beside him in the nursery, with shrivelled voice. Her face was bruised like a windfall...
Stirred from a seemingly ownerless dream, Agatha looked from the window for the shrimp man but saw only a little boy in a wheelchair being rocked by the factotum among the towering sunflowers. The boy's own tiny head nodded rhythmically with the silence of the ever-turning wheels, as he went to touch a particularly beautiful butterfly nearby. But he suddenly spotted the white poppy of a little girl's face at the nursery window and, zooming closer, he saw dollseyes unblinkingly open - with the largest ever darning-needle sparkling amid steepled fingers. As her own eyes fastened on his, she loudly hissed his forgotten name.
(First published 'Peeping Tom' 1990)
=================
comments (1)
1. Paul Dracon left...
Thursday, 4 August 2005 6:52 pm
I encounter an "overblown halo" from time to time! Excellent piece.
posted Thursday, 18 November 2004
The old lady rocked gently in her chair, with icy stare upon the single orange bar of the electric fire. Agatha's skin visibly shrivelled, despite the relative lack of all-round heat. She dreamed of past loves, those originally encountered by means of either natural family bloodcourses or the fizzing streams of extramural passions. Past passions and past hopes trooped by like a proud butterfly infantry: blow-kissing grandchildren, mocking cousins, mooning elder sisters, maiden aunts, dead husbands in green uniforms, righteous grown-up daughters, blunt cutting businessmen disguised as her sons, her own father with red teardrops instead of eyes, the mother she had never even known and, finally, those other strangers who had been Agatha's lovers. They saluted, like toy soldiers, as they passed between the bright bone of the fire and Agatha's rocking-chair. Her face of knitted flesh laddered horizontally so that the mouth could smile. But this march-past faded as the light was sucked from the parlour window by a widow's peak of a thunderhead beating the night to the sky by at least half-an-hour. She listened to the rumbles with a shiver. Soon, she would need to crack her sinews apart so as to reach the light switch.
A creature with beady eyes scampered on all fours along by the skirting-board. So common was this rodent's foray from the dark underfloor, that she felt no need to carry to her soul the freight of frights it had made available to the weathering silence. Yet she knew, of course, it was not really a rodent but the midget miniature of an ex-lover, crawling on hands and knees, seeping blood at two eye-sockets, unknowing whither he crawled. Pity welled to her heart from the water in the brain. She clear-thought herself upright, once flaccid muscles stiffening to attention. That lover of forgotten name had long ago tormented her soul. Now, she would show him that kindness always wins.
Eventually, she cornered him between the sideboard and the fireplace.
"You were cruel to me once. But now I'll be kind to you," she said, placing the poor mite upon her wrinkled palm. He had evidently been wounded by a rival for her affections, since crimson stained his chest pelt from an apparent sword-prick. The march-past had been the first occasion many of her lovers had met each other, she guessed. She stroked his back, moistened the tip of a finger in her spit to polish his tiny shoes and then smarmed his hair with it. He squirmed against the heel of her thumb, not knowing in whose safe hands he had found himself. She untwirled his winkle with an embroidery needle and, smiling, plucked it with a tiny wrench from the rest of the body. Pity she had no vinegar handy...
The thunderhead dropped like a removal man having lost purchase on a hefty wardrobe upstairs. She switched on the light and settled back into the rocker with a sigh. She hoped the man who sold punnets of shrimps would be here in time for high tea. She dozed off and dreamed for the first time that day ... of a little boy who knelt at a nursery window, so that anybody strolling around the orchard garden in the shadow of the tall rambling house would, if they cared, just be able to discern his tousled carrottop and, with something like ancient zoom lenses, draw into close-up the boy's own swivelling bowls of sight. His knees were chafed, knickerbockers damp, since he had been dream-frozen into this position for most of the hot summer day. An ominous thunder roll sounded across his ear-drums. A flock of butterflies paraded through the cabbage patch in the garden below, their droopy wings draining the sunflowers of their gold by miscegenation of science and myth. He prayed at this window for one last vision of a ghost girl: a small mite, in pinafore frock, with cascades of peachblossom hair and flickering svelte legs. This girl's face was a delight, even through the haze of shortening sight.
The summer garden had no real people in it (other than the family's factotum): so the boy considered that a ghost was naturally second best. The rest of the household were unseasonably bed-ridden: ancient maiden aunts and older teasing cousins poisoned by the produce of the vegetable plot. The factotum was the only one able to minister to their daily needs, whose flat-capped and shrapnelled brain contained only demeaning loyalty. So the little boy was left more or less to his own devices. Toys were thrown into corners, where real tears sparkled at the ever-opening dollseyes of the night. His chair was on iron hoops, rocking in rhythm to the silence: a rocking-horse snickering in dream. Night was time for harsh reality. Day was for dream. And the ghost girl in the pinafore was the boy's anchor in such meanderings of the soul.
This particular afternoon, the flat cap could be seen floating along above the string-bean poles like an oriental sea-swagger. The factotum had just visited the pagoda at the edge of the boy's sweep of antique cinemascopic vision, now traipsing with the late hoe and the meticulously burnished garden fork's diamond daggers which left a scintilla of fireflies in its wake. Then, the dipping sun, having shrugged off the thunderhead, exploded with a thousand sloping shafts of the sky's cathedral light, leaning like translucent cantilever stanchions of gold through the unscrumped trees. Following the factotum's departure, the ghost girl came into view, askip with the scrolling ropelight of her overblown halo. She then made a grab for this circlet of angelic charisma and proceeded to roll it like a hoop between the maze of sweet peas. Finally, she yanked it in two with a deft manipulation of her small hand and, in the manner of a snake-whip, spun like a top the turnip she had just plucked with her long fingers from the factotum's root plot. Her butterfly hairclip glinted as she darted across the manicured lawn, with the green of the grass paradoxically brightening in the descending sun.
The boy's eyes were engorged with sunset and began to melt upon his dewy cheeks. He was in love with the ghost girl. The lithe flashing limbs became a slow motion ritual in his deep reverent adoration of her. He prayed that he would be able to shift from his kneeling position, held for most of the nigh endless day, sinews cracking, strange muscles stiffening. He yearned to visit the garden in person, despite the aunts and cousins forbidding him to do so, on pain of worsening illnesses in the house, through worry and disappointment. He never understood their meaning. At night, he would lay awake trying to fathom such ways of the world. His tears turned to sour vinegar at his lips, as he drowsed in the heavy dusk.
"You're so wistful!" The ghost girl suddenly stood beside him in the nursery, with shrivelled voice. Her face was bruised like a windfall...
Stirred from a seemingly ownerless dream, Agatha looked from the window for the shrimp man but saw only a little boy in a wheelchair being rocked by the factotum among the towering sunflowers. The boy's own tiny head nodded rhythmically with the silence of the ever-turning wheels, as he went to touch a particularly beautiful butterfly nearby. But he suddenly spotted the white poppy of a little girl's face at the nursery window and, zooming closer, he saw dollseyes unblinkingly open - with the largest ever darning-needle sparkling amid steepled fingers. As her own eyes fastened on his, she loudly hissed his forgotten name.
(First published 'Peeping Tom' 1990)
=================
comments (1)
1. Paul Dracon left...
Thursday, 4 August 2005 6:52 pm
I encounter an "overblown halo" from time to time! Excellent piece.
Melding
Melding
posted Monday, 26 May 2008
Written today and first published here
To count up the total score in your hand of cards is called melding. It somehow relates to life itself. But the choice of the precise time of melding is all important. Life has many potential melding-points, but not having before established the availability of melding-points at all, I can now locate one at this moment with a vengeance. The very act of writing about it has brought this opportunity to my attention for the very first time. So, now seems the optimum choice for a melding-point because of any new score earned from the very fact of knowingly laying my cards on the table to be counted. It is also important to do so quickly, at this first opportunity, because Death may intervene before I am able to take this melding-point reading today. Death itself will probably be the next optimum melding-point but God doesn’t count.
comments (4)
1. Weirdmonger left...
Monday, 26 May 2008 9:58 pm
doesn't count? or can't?
2. Weirdmonger left...
Tuesday, 27 May 2008 9:23 am
CODA to Melding post
'The Workshop of Filthy Creations' - encountered by me (for the first conscious time) on the Vault website. I've not known this expression before nor known, until the last few weeks, that it is a quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It now makes me think of the context of the 'Weirdmonger' book. I find myself able to do this with a certain objectivity granted both by the passing of time and by my 'crazy' belief in Nemonymity (a mutant form of the high-faluting Aesthetic theory of the Intentional Fallacy)! The book is ragbag of some of my mildly 'filthier' pieces as well as pieces I now actively detest (as well as some that remain good ones in my eyes!). It is almost as if it compiled itself. It has become a sort of Frankenstein monster. I never saw myself as Weirdmonger. This was surely a word for a fiction character. But I find myself being subsumed by it. It is a Horror film being played out on the internet, with a motley (often disinterested, sometimes engaged) audience *very sparsely* scattered in the cinema stalls.
4. Weirdmonger left...
Wednesday, 28 May 2008 5:35 pm
2nd comment above sounds a bit like Gerald Ratner!
posted Monday, 26 May 2008
Written today and first published here
To count up the total score in your hand of cards is called melding. It somehow relates to life itself. But the choice of the precise time of melding is all important. Life has many potential melding-points, but not having before established the availability of melding-points at all, I can now locate one at this moment with a vengeance. The very act of writing about it has brought this opportunity to my attention for the very first time. So, now seems the optimum choice for a melding-point because of any new score earned from the very fact of knowingly laying my cards on the table to be counted. It is also important to do so quickly, at this first opportunity, because Death may intervene before I am able to take this melding-point reading today. Death itself will probably be the next optimum melding-point but God doesn’t count.
comments (4)
1. Weirdmonger left...
Monday, 26 May 2008 9:58 pm
doesn't count? or can't?
2. Weirdmonger left...
Tuesday, 27 May 2008 9:23 am
CODA to Melding post
'The Workshop of Filthy Creations' - encountered by me (for the first conscious time) on the Vault website. I've not known this expression before nor known, until the last few weeks, that it is a quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It now makes me think of the context of the 'Weirdmonger' book. I find myself able to do this with a certain objectivity granted both by the passing of time and by my 'crazy' belief in Nemonymity (a mutant form of the high-faluting Aesthetic theory of the Intentional Fallacy)! The book is ragbag of some of my mildly 'filthier' pieces as well as pieces I now actively detest (as well as some that remain good ones in my eyes!). It is almost as if it compiled itself. It has become a sort of Frankenstein monster. I never saw myself as Weirdmonger. This was surely a word for a fiction character. But I find myself being subsumed by it. It is a Horror film being played out on the internet, with a motley (often disinterested, sometimes engaged) audience *very sparsely* scattered in the cinema stalls.
4. Weirdmonger left...
Wednesday, 28 May 2008 5:35 pm
2nd comment above sounds a bit like Gerald Ratner!
Cigarettes and Dandelions
Cigarettes and Dandelions
posted Wednesday, 20 October 2004
He had not seen the town before. It lay off a rarely used motorway in rural Warwickshire. He wasn’t sure he was meant to be here at all. He took up his notebook to see if he had followed the directions properly - yes, this must be the correct place for the encounter.
He left his car in a side turning, wondering whether it would he safe there, especially as it seemed to be dustcart day in the area. He looked back wistfully at the white Cavalier car, as he turned the corner into the town square, heading for the church tower he had been instructed to find.
It was a really beautiful day in early May and all seemed right with the world, as if he had just come out of darkness. The graveyard was welcoming with its relative peace, the birdsong acting as backdrop along with the faint screech of brakes from the town area.
He sat down on a wooden bench. It had been set against a gravemarker, which was like a stone laundry basket. The person he was to meet here could not fail to find him: there were only a few other benches, none leaning against a tomb like this one.
He lit a cigarette, vaguely wondering whether it was sacrilegious to do so in this particular spot. He must be careful to clear up his leavings afterwards. The first few drags made him feel light-headed and, unaccountably, he thought he could hear scratching coming from within the grave behind him.
The church bell marked the quarter of an hour with two simple strokes. The tower, which he had to turn his head to see, had peculiar battlements around the top as if it had been transported here from a castle. The whole building seemed disused. But, being a Thursday morning, he put that down to the time of the week. Obviously, on Sundays , the place would come alive, as townspeople gathered for morning service. Christianity would not be dead hereabouts, he was sure. Superstition thrived in such places, unlike the tawdry area of South London from where he’d just driven that morning along the near empty motorway (left unhauntcd even by the disfigured ghosts of pile-ups). It was difficult to be mystical when overtaking a brewery lorry at a speed man was never meant to emulate.
Abruptly, he was disrupted from his musings by the approach of an old lady carrying an empty wicker basket like a see-through skull.
“You came then?” Her voice croaked, as if she’d been on the fag all night.
He was tempted to deny his presence there. “It was easy.” He said it without even trying.
“I didn’t think you’d come.” She coughed, removing something she seemed to be sucking mid-throat.
The birdsong had ceased, without him even noticing. He offered her a cigarette from his pack of ten Woodbines, but she declined with a brusque shake of the head.
“I wanted to see you”, she said, “though I know it’s not the done thing.”
“All mothers want to see their children. It’s only natural.” They seemed to be the only words to say. He felt it would be cruel to ask the obvious question, although its answer was the only reason he’d come: to discover why a mother would rid herself of her own body as it were (since what are one’s children but living extensions of oneself with sufficient integrity to appear Separate?). Perhaps it had been the war or the lack of a husband to share the burden or just sheer fright at the prospect of bringing up a kid in an unwanted world or a combination of all these reasons.
“Have you always known you were adopted?”
“They told me when I was twelve.”
She nodded.
He tried to look at her more closely, without making it too obvious, desperately searching for some hint of himself amongst the crows’ feet. Not that he expected his own signature to be writ large. But being more than just a phantom birth, he wanted to find his mark at least somewhere upon her.
She returned the gaze, as she looked for a dab hankie to deal with the disowned tears.
“You’ve got your father in you.”
“I’ve never seen....
‘‘Nor had you seen me until today.’
‘‘Is he alive?”
“Maybe.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. He drank too much.”
He lit another cigarette, not that he wanted one, but the action served to paper over the travelling cracks in the conversation. The back scratching inside the tomb… He shook his head to clear it of unbidden noises.
“Was I your only child.”
“I think so.”
The strange answer somehow seemed less strange than if they’d met in South London.
“Do you want to know anything about me?”
He wondered what he had meant by that question, for one could know everything about a person by just looking.
“I’m only too pleased you’ve grown into a man.
“Do you live in this town.”
“Yes... but I’m moving on soon, before it’s too late.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know.”
The conversation seemed to continue, but the words meant next to nothing: two strangers talking in an empty churchyard.
She got up to go. “It was nice of you to come. At least we’ll recognize each other when we need to.” She picked a few dandelions from around the bench and put them in her basket, as if they were to be the only keepsakes of the occasion. He fumbled in his pocket for the snapshot. But it had gone without trace - left in the glove compartment of the Cavalier. In any event, it would only have served for a moment, since faces change quite rapidly. When looking in a mirror, one no longer sees the face that was reflected in that stickleback pond of youth.
He glimpsed a dark shape humping behind another tombstone. She saw it, too, he thought, but neither remarked on it: the dead only rise at night, not on glorious Thursday mornings. But imagination had a few tricks up its sleeve....
She was walking away towards the south of the town area, the basket swinging on her arm. She turned once and waved. He nodded, took the hipflask from his pocket. unscrewed the top slowly... but it fell to the ground unseen, where his feet had been.
Ghosts live within their own heads. He scratched at the insides of bone, but could only find many blocked exits.
The old lady suddenly remembered something and bustled back to the bench of old brown slats she likened to disused ribs. She picked up two cigarette ends and placed them in the basket along with the dandelions.
***
The Cavalier had faded into the sunlight before she turned the corner into the side turning where she lived.
A dustcart was trundling around another corner in the distance, as the church bell faintly marked the hour.
(published ‘Fantasy Macabre’ 1995)
comments (1)
1. Paul Dracon left...
Wednesday, 3 August 2005 3:46 pm
The journey doesn't matter. The destination doesn't matter.
What matters is how many cigarettes you smoke.
(This is the idea I glean from the story-- although perhaps that's not the intention of the story!)
posted Wednesday, 20 October 2004
He had not seen the town before. It lay off a rarely used motorway in rural Warwickshire. He wasn’t sure he was meant to be here at all. He took up his notebook to see if he had followed the directions properly - yes, this must be the correct place for the encounter.
He left his car in a side turning, wondering whether it would he safe there, especially as it seemed to be dustcart day in the area. He looked back wistfully at the white Cavalier car, as he turned the corner into the town square, heading for the church tower he had been instructed to find.
It was a really beautiful day in early May and all seemed right with the world, as if he had just come out of darkness. The graveyard was welcoming with its relative peace, the birdsong acting as backdrop along with the faint screech of brakes from the town area.
He sat down on a wooden bench. It had been set against a gravemarker, which was like a stone laundry basket. The person he was to meet here could not fail to find him: there were only a few other benches, none leaning against a tomb like this one.
He lit a cigarette, vaguely wondering whether it was sacrilegious to do so in this particular spot. He must be careful to clear up his leavings afterwards. The first few drags made him feel light-headed and, unaccountably, he thought he could hear scratching coming from within the grave behind him.
The church bell marked the quarter of an hour with two simple strokes. The tower, which he had to turn his head to see, had peculiar battlements around the top as if it had been transported here from a castle. The whole building seemed disused. But, being a Thursday morning, he put that down to the time of the week. Obviously, on Sundays , the place would come alive, as townspeople gathered for morning service. Christianity would not be dead hereabouts, he was sure. Superstition thrived in such places, unlike the tawdry area of South London from where he’d just driven that morning along the near empty motorway (left unhauntcd even by the disfigured ghosts of pile-ups). It was difficult to be mystical when overtaking a brewery lorry at a speed man was never meant to emulate.
Abruptly, he was disrupted from his musings by the approach of an old lady carrying an empty wicker basket like a see-through skull.
“You came then?” Her voice croaked, as if she’d been on the fag all night.
He was tempted to deny his presence there. “It was easy.” He said it without even trying.
“I didn’t think you’d come.” She coughed, removing something she seemed to be sucking mid-throat.
The birdsong had ceased, without him even noticing. He offered her a cigarette from his pack of ten Woodbines, but she declined with a brusque shake of the head.
“I wanted to see you”, she said, “though I know it’s not the done thing.”
“All mothers want to see their children. It’s only natural.” They seemed to be the only words to say. He felt it would be cruel to ask the obvious question, although its answer was the only reason he’d come: to discover why a mother would rid herself of her own body as it were (since what are one’s children but living extensions of oneself with sufficient integrity to appear Separate?). Perhaps it had been the war or the lack of a husband to share the burden or just sheer fright at the prospect of bringing up a kid in an unwanted world or a combination of all these reasons.
“Have you always known you were adopted?”
“They told me when I was twelve.”
She nodded.
He tried to look at her more closely, without making it too obvious, desperately searching for some hint of himself amongst the crows’ feet. Not that he expected his own signature to be writ large. But being more than just a phantom birth, he wanted to find his mark at least somewhere upon her.
She returned the gaze, as she looked for a dab hankie to deal with the disowned tears.
“You’ve got your father in you.”
“I’ve never seen....
‘‘Nor had you seen me until today.’
‘‘Is he alive?”
“Maybe.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. He drank too much.”
He lit another cigarette, not that he wanted one, but the action served to paper over the travelling cracks in the conversation. The back scratching inside the tomb… He shook his head to clear it of unbidden noises.
“Was I your only child.”
“I think so.”
The strange answer somehow seemed less strange than if they’d met in South London.
“Do you want to know anything about me?”
He wondered what he had meant by that question, for one could know everything about a person by just looking.
“I’m only too pleased you’ve grown into a man.
“Do you live in this town.”
“Yes... but I’m moving on soon, before it’s too late.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know.”
The conversation seemed to continue, but the words meant next to nothing: two strangers talking in an empty churchyard.
She got up to go. “It was nice of you to come. At least we’ll recognize each other when we need to.” She picked a few dandelions from around the bench and put them in her basket, as if they were to be the only keepsakes of the occasion. He fumbled in his pocket for the snapshot. But it had gone without trace - left in the glove compartment of the Cavalier. In any event, it would only have served for a moment, since faces change quite rapidly. When looking in a mirror, one no longer sees the face that was reflected in that stickleback pond of youth.
He glimpsed a dark shape humping behind another tombstone. She saw it, too, he thought, but neither remarked on it: the dead only rise at night, not on glorious Thursday mornings. But imagination had a few tricks up its sleeve....
She was walking away towards the south of the town area, the basket swinging on her arm. She turned once and waved. He nodded, took the hipflask from his pocket. unscrewed the top slowly... but it fell to the ground unseen, where his feet had been.
Ghosts live within their own heads. He scratched at the insides of bone, but could only find many blocked exits.
The old lady suddenly remembered something and bustled back to the bench of old brown slats she likened to disused ribs. She picked up two cigarette ends and placed them in the basket along with the dandelions.
***
The Cavalier had faded into the sunlight before she turned the corner into the side turning where she lived.
A dustcart was trundling around another corner in the distance, as the church bell faintly marked the hour.
(published ‘Fantasy Macabre’ 1995)
comments (1)
1. Paul Dracon left...
Wednesday, 3 August 2005 3:46 pm
The journey doesn't matter. The destination doesn't matter.
What matters is how many cigarettes you smoke.
(This is the idea I glean from the story-- although perhaps that's not the intention of the story!)
The Lurk Descending
The Lurk Descending
posted Tuesday, 12 October 2004
I was sure my teacher’s name was Miss Crossbrow but I could have been wrong. Memories are slippery creatures, and they sometimes escape into realms beyond the mental trawling-arc of the people who originally owned them. Once, I followed a squirrel of a memory into a region where, if I was still not mistaken, I always wandered. It concerned the nature of that very schoolmistress, who was the first one. Most people, if they failed to remember other teachers too clearly, often retain a strong impression of the original one who loomed up amid the smells and colours of the first day at school: plasticene, accidents of the bodily process, chalk-dust, stale ink-wells, over-ripening school-dinners, premature confusions and automatic tears. Her face was pointed and, if she had borne whiskers, I would not have blinked an eyelid. And in an interconnected wordless fashion, I thought the school blinds were tiered eyelids. Her plain pleated skirt stretched several feet to the rear. I imagined this was to encompass the extended parts of her body.
“Welcome,” she said to me, “just tear yourself away from your mother now and sit at this desk.”
I gazed up at my mother and saw her head nodding, making attempts at smiling. I cast a wary glance at the desk, scored over with grooves in the wood which previous children had spent lifetimes filling with crayon colours. The contents of the ink-well were topped with a substance that looked like the skin of an old rice pudding. And I thought of something coiled up inside it. I was big for my age and I found it difficult to squeeze into the tiny desk-frame. Once seated, however, I felt it growing even tinier. I did not notice my mother leaving. Nothing in the desk but the crumbled remains of a blue rubber and a smell, a bit like disinfectant or Germolene, tinged with an aura which I was to associate in later life with Indian restaurants.
There were several other children, all glassily staring towards the chalkboard. Miss Crossbrow stood at the front with folded arms upon the bed of her chest which, if she was bare, I was sure would be covered in a vixen pelt. “Children, we do not play with toys any more, now we are at Big School - we shall learn how to add one word to another, and perhaps even another, and perhaps yet one other and what do we end up with?” She abruptly turned, as if on a weathervane, towards me.
And that was when I entered the black realm for the first time. I met people who said they were my friends, only to double-cross me for just one cracker trinket. I ate unfit food, full of fat and blood-clots, steeped in spice. My mother became somebody who had no sympathy for me as a human being and disguised herself as a man to avoid trouble with what she called “the authorities.” The school cupboards in the classroom were full of half-dissected rats, in the cause of science, they said. Some I recognized much later in life disguised as dark-red insect-bled tandoori chicken. The canteen trestles were layered an inch thick with a hardened, half-digested substance, a cross between custard and brown sauce. And Miss Crossbrow often sat in a cupboard with half-alive rats, especially during Morning Prayers.
The blackest moments were freighted with frights that were easier to bear than the reality. I quickly toppled into sleep at the slightest opportunity, to view Things descending from the impenetrable night-sky of that very sleep. The biggest I called a LURK, for that name was given it by the sleep-master, he who controlled the content of my dreams. The LURK’s head was modelled upon the shape of Miss Crossbrow’s skull, with a clayey appearance, perpetrated by a blind sculptor god. It had no mouth to open, so its eyes spoke, with hair-lashes on their thin lips. It complained of having only a head and no body and would I help create one for it? All I needed was straight graphics, it somehow said.
“Perhaps your body’s in the nature-study cupboard,” I suggested.
The LURK had floated downwards before it heard me and, upon returning to the classroom from a dream within a dream, I woke up with my head inside the desk. Everybody had decamped to the canteen and I was afraid of all the turning faces if I should go in there late. There would only be stale vindaloo stuck to an impossible plate. So I spent dinner-time seeing what I could prise out of the ink-well.
“What are you doing here?” A voice came from the back of the classroom. A LURK-ON-LEGS stood there, having just clambered from the cupboard. It came tripping over and whispered in my ear: “I’m you when you’re not you.” It clambered through the lidded blinds into the noisy hellish playground. And then time passed in year amounts, until my next mind-stopping memory, which was meeting a certain man, just one of those ordinary workers who plugged on through life, doing an honest day’s work for a dishonest day’s pay and generally minding his own business. That was before I really got to know him. Always to be found in the dark chimney-corner of the public house, he was a regular institution, one upon whom you could depend for a chat, if there was no one else in the bar. A good listener, there was no doubt, but he only implied feedback by a subtle nod of the head or a knowing rattle of his tiny demon-wing eyelids or a combing through of his grey tussocky beard with a hand of fingers. Then, one day, I think it was late last Fall, he suddenly started answering back.
“When I was younger, I had dreams you wouldn’t credit.”
I couldn’t credit that he had spoken at all. Some members of the professional class frequented that bar just to show off their fat wads in front of others whom they considered to be on a lower rung of life’s descending ladder. They turned on their bar-stools and stared at us. My companion had said something! But now he was slowly sipping his beer, as if nothing had happened. I was in the midst of one of my interminable diatribes on the poverty of latter day morals. I had always been a stickler for standards, ever since Miss Crossbrow had instilled them in me. I did not only want hooligans hung. I wanted them slowly hung.
“Did you say something?” I asked at a point halfway through my next sentence. He looked up from the bubbling world of his drink, stared at me oddly and then visibly relaxed when he saw that I meant no offence.
“Yes, I did say something. But now I wish I had never said it.”
So be it, I thought, and went on with my own weighty preoccupations. I could see, however, that his eyes had mirrored over. He was not listening to a blind bit of what I was saying about morals - perhaps he had never listened. He was obviously retracking his youthful dreams, perhaps reliving or even redying. I suddenly realized that there was a gentle hiss of whisper at his lips, more visible than audible, as if he were speaking with his spittle rather than the vocal cords. I put my ear closer and caught the drift.
“I had waking dreams,” he said. “You know, when you lie awake as a child in the early summer evenings. Put too soon to bed. I had not been able to use up my energy because I was kept inside the house, dithering and moithering. I had no friends. I suspected often that I did not exist at all. My mother coddled me. The birds twittered long into my dozing, and guns pocked on the distant army range, like the Earth breaking open the buttons of its waistcoat...”
My neck ached from craning over to hear his mannered ramblings, so I pulled back, but missed a whole section. He did not seem to care whether I listened or not. In fact, I had probably ceased to exist for him at all. I came back in closer.
“A vast tower in the waste ground behind our terraced house,” he continued. “A mechanical wonder of the world, in my charge as caretaker. I wandered its labyrinth of horizontal and vertical corridors of pressed steel, inspecting the dials, throwing a switch here and there for good measure. I was viewing the world from the perspective of the watch-hatch at the top, announcing in to the global tannoy about the next disc on the turntable, for it was surely a radio station. Or was it a factory for children’s stick-together toy models where large angular machines fed each other with cardboard, papier mache and bone-glue, as I sat in one of the contraption’s pods mastering the crazy robotics? But the crucial weakness of the tower was a hub-point, like a car’s petrol tank, under the pavement outside our house in the Street. I simply knew it was there. The dial on its breeder-hatch was the dial which controlled the whole thing. One turn out of turn and the mighty tower would be driven into the ground. Thousands of mortals worked in the tower, under my jurisdiction, but none knew about the hub-point, that stop-cock in the street - with no hydrapoint marker. My mother did not know about the tower. She never looked out of the back window. She did not know how important her son was - thought he was playing with marbles or lying in his bed, waiting patiently for sleep.”
“Is the tower still there?” I bit my tongue nigh in half. I was playing into his hands.
“No - for, one night, I crept out into the street soon after the birds had gone, and I decided to push the plunger on the hub-point. But I couldn’t lift the pavement slab. It had taken on the weight of the world, it seemed. Then, out of the darkness at the end of the street where it dipped down to make room for a hill, I saw a nightmare which I was not due to suffer until I was much older. The shimmering presence of my Unguarded Angel, with black corrugated wings blacker than the sticky pitch of the night, flapping like vast paper kites which ripped piecemeal as it progressed towards me with the noises of a tree-stumper. Crudely emasculated, it wore a shorn stump of engorged blood-vessels, an inch long but a foot wide. Its one eye watch-hatch shrivelled everything in its path with beam of visible willpower - a headlight of the brain…and when it had gone so had the tower with it.”
As his sibilance continued, I found myself drawing nearer and nearer to his mouth, for the words added to each other with a drooling, a drawling, a sucking even more. I could smell his bad breath, like a drug. I thought him to be a dosser whose cardboard bedding formed wings instead of makeshift blankets. I laughed, but the professionals at the bar looked askance, for they must have thought we were becoming far too affectionate with each other. We were bearing out what they thought working people always did like animals. However, he seemed to have finished, at last. He gazed up again into my eyes at the most two inches from his. So, close, I could not see which of us was crying. He started whispering one sentence, again and again, like a deep inescapable record groove with an enormous crack, as if it were a continuous loop of existence, as word ate word: “I can never bear to hear - HIC! - paper blinds a-rattling in the wind.” Again and again, forever and ever. And I shuddered too, as I heard paper being endlessly unrolled in the nearby gents. The professionals had disappeared in there to unravel their innards, no doubt.
I laughed again. “Never mind, have another drink,” I said, disentangling myself from his desperate embrace. But life is full of false promises. Without even bothering to get him the drink, I left - into the night where the pub was hemmed in by those tower blocks which had been built with such hope and destiny by LURKs. And, as years turned shorter, one day I sat outside a newsagent shop on a pavement bench, idling the time by watching people going in and out - until I realized that the people going in were always different from those coming out. After quite a long while, I went in to investigate and discovered there was another entrance round the corner. On coming out, I wondered who that LURK was sitting on the bench, staring at me so strangely. I had probably met it once in a dream. I once dreamed of being a helper in a school canteen, watching all of the items on the trays passing before me. Yes, I had the shapeless overall and wicked gossiping tongue. The boobs felt funny hanging on my chest like polythene bags full of plum-pudding. But there were stranger things, for the food-bearing trays gradually turned nastier, piecemeal. At first, I thought the meat-loaves were getting rarer and rarer but they were, I guessed, thinly disguised bits of raw human bodies. The new child who came last had what looked like a grown-up penis coiled upon a bed of pilau rice, garnished such that it almost looked tasty. I woke with a start, sweating like a pig on heat. I fumbled for what I thought would be proof of my manhood and was devastated to find that the dream was too close to home for my liking. No wonder that LURK coming out of the newsagent ogled me as I sat cross-legged and crossbrowed upon the bench. He sat down next to me and whispered through a slime-ball of saliva that he would like it “off the bone.” Forgetting my concern, I smiled knowingly, as dinner-ladies sometimes did, without really appreciating that the LURK wanted off the bone. And as each year becomes a mere pinprick of existence, the window blind rattled into life. I gradually awoke as I was brought down gently into my own body by the sleep-master. I heard the LURKs outside, no doubt blackening the already meagre daylight with their descending canopy-wings. One of them managed to fumble at my high-rise window - romantically, if dolefully, believing me to be another of its kind. Thankfully, my real soul had already flown, tantamount to a Lark Ascending, leaving something behind still calling itself “me”, something that was crude enough for death.
(published 'Thin Ice' 1993)
comments (1)
1. Paul Dracon left...
Wednesday, 3 August 2005 3:35 pm
This guy's lucky. When I went to school the lunches weren't so ripe! Fine story. Reminds me of being a kid and having adults tell me all about 'the real world.'
posted Tuesday, 12 October 2004
I was sure my teacher’s name was Miss Crossbrow but I could have been wrong. Memories are slippery creatures, and they sometimes escape into realms beyond the mental trawling-arc of the people who originally owned them. Once, I followed a squirrel of a memory into a region where, if I was still not mistaken, I always wandered. It concerned the nature of that very schoolmistress, who was the first one. Most people, if they failed to remember other teachers too clearly, often retain a strong impression of the original one who loomed up amid the smells and colours of the first day at school: plasticene, accidents of the bodily process, chalk-dust, stale ink-wells, over-ripening school-dinners, premature confusions and automatic tears. Her face was pointed and, if she had borne whiskers, I would not have blinked an eyelid. And in an interconnected wordless fashion, I thought the school blinds were tiered eyelids. Her plain pleated skirt stretched several feet to the rear. I imagined this was to encompass the extended parts of her body.
“Welcome,” she said to me, “just tear yourself away from your mother now and sit at this desk.”
I gazed up at my mother and saw her head nodding, making attempts at smiling. I cast a wary glance at the desk, scored over with grooves in the wood which previous children had spent lifetimes filling with crayon colours. The contents of the ink-well were topped with a substance that looked like the skin of an old rice pudding. And I thought of something coiled up inside it. I was big for my age and I found it difficult to squeeze into the tiny desk-frame. Once seated, however, I felt it growing even tinier. I did not notice my mother leaving. Nothing in the desk but the crumbled remains of a blue rubber and a smell, a bit like disinfectant or Germolene, tinged with an aura which I was to associate in later life with Indian restaurants.
There were several other children, all glassily staring towards the chalkboard. Miss Crossbrow stood at the front with folded arms upon the bed of her chest which, if she was bare, I was sure would be covered in a vixen pelt. “Children, we do not play with toys any more, now we are at Big School - we shall learn how to add one word to another, and perhaps even another, and perhaps yet one other and what do we end up with?” She abruptly turned, as if on a weathervane, towards me.
And that was when I entered the black realm for the first time. I met people who said they were my friends, only to double-cross me for just one cracker trinket. I ate unfit food, full of fat and blood-clots, steeped in spice. My mother became somebody who had no sympathy for me as a human being and disguised herself as a man to avoid trouble with what she called “the authorities.” The school cupboards in the classroom were full of half-dissected rats, in the cause of science, they said. Some I recognized much later in life disguised as dark-red insect-bled tandoori chicken. The canteen trestles were layered an inch thick with a hardened, half-digested substance, a cross between custard and brown sauce. And Miss Crossbrow often sat in a cupboard with half-alive rats, especially during Morning Prayers.
The blackest moments were freighted with frights that were easier to bear than the reality. I quickly toppled into sleep at the slightest opportunity, to view Things descending from the impenetrable night-sky of that very sleep. The biggest I called a LURK, for that name was given it by the sleep-master, he who controlled the content of my dreams. The LURK’s head was modelled upon the shape of Miss Crossbrow’s skull, with a clayey appearance, perpetrated by a blind sculptor god. It had no mouth to open, so its eyes spoke, with hair-lashes on their thin lips. It complained of having only a head and no body and would I help create one for it? All I needed was straight graphics, it somehow said.
“Perhaps your body’s in the nature-study cupboard,” I suggested.
The LURK had floated downwards before it heard me and, upon returning to the classroom from a dream within a dream, I woke up with my head inside the desk. Everybody had decamped to the canteen and I was afraid of all the turning faces if I should go in there late. There would only be stale vindaloo stuck to an impossible plate. So I spent dinner-time seeing what I could prise out of the ink-well.
“What are you doing here?” A voice came from the back of the classroom. A LURK-ON-LEGS stood there, having just clambered from the cupboard. It came tripping over and whispered in my ear: “I’m you when you’re not you.” It clambered through the lidded blinds into the noisy hellish playground. And then time passed in year amounts, until my next mind-stopping memory, which was meeting a certain man, just one of those ordinary workers who plugged on through life, doing an honest day’s work for a dishonest day’s pay and generally minding his own business. That was before I really got to know him. Always to be found in the dark chimney-corner of the public house, he was a regular institution, one upon whom you could depend for a chat, if there was no one else in the bar. A good listener, there was no doubt, but he only implied feedback by a subtle nod of the head or a knowing rattle of his tiny demon-wing eyelids or a combing through of his grey tussocky beard with a hand of fingers. Then, one day, I think it was late last Fall, he suddenly started answering back.
“When I was younger, I had dreams you wouldn’t credit.”
I couldn’t credit that he had spoken at all. Some members of the professional class frequented that bar just to show off their fat wads in front of others whom they considered to be on a lower rung of life’s descending ladder. They turned on their bar-stools and stared at us. My companion had said something! But now he was slowly sipping his beer, as if nothing had happened. I was in the midst of one of my interminable diatribes on the poverty of latter day morals. I had always been a stickler for standards, ever since Miss Crossbrow had instilled them in me. I did not only want hooligans hung. I wanted them slowly hung.
“Did you say something?” I asked at a point halfway through my next sentence. He looked up from the bubbling world of his drink, stared at me oddly and then visibly relaxed when he saw that I meant no offence.
“Yes, I did say something. But now I wish I had never said it.”
So be it, I thought, and went on with my own weighty preoccupations. I could see, however, that his eyes had mirrored over. He was not listening to a blind bit of what I was saying about morals - perhaps he had never listened. He was obviously retracking his youthful dreams, perhaps reliving or even redying. I suddenly realized that there was a gentle hiss of whisper at his lips, more visible than audible, as if he were speaking with his spittle rather than the vocal cords. I put my ear closer and caught the drift.
“I had waking dreams,” he said. “You know, when you lie awake as a child in the early summer evenings. Put too soon to bed. I had not been able to use up my energy because I was kept inside the house, dithering and moithering. I had no friends. I suspected often that I did not exist at all. My mother coddled me. The birds twittered long into my dozing, and guns pocked on the distant army range, like the Earth breaking open the buttons of its waistcoat...”
My neck ached from craning over to hear his mannered ramblings, so I pulled back, but missed a whole section. He did not seem to care whether I listened or not. In fact, I had probably ceased to exist for him at all. I came back in closer.
“A vast tower in the waste ground behind our terraced house,” he continued. “A mechanical wonder of the world, in my charge as caretaker. I wandered its labyrinth of horizontal and vertical corridors of pressed steel, inspecting the dials, throwing a switch here and there for good measure. I was viewing the world from the perspective of the watch-hatch at the top, announcing in to the global tannoy about the next disc on the turntable, for it was surely a radio station. Or was it a factory for children’s stick-together toy models where large angular machines fed each other with cardboard, papier mache and bone-glue, as I sat in one of the contraption’s pods mastering the crazy robotics? But the crucial weakness of the tower was a hub-point, like a car’s petrol tank, under the pavement outside our house in the Street. I simply knew it was there. The dial on its breeder-hatch was the dial which controlled the whole thing. One turn out of turn and the mighty tower would be driven into the ground. Thousands of mortals worked in the tower, under my jurisdiction, but none knew about the hub-point, that stop-cock in the street - with no hydrapoint marker. My mother did not know about the tower. She never looked out of the back window. She did not know how important her son was - thought he was playing with marbles or lying in his bed, waiting patiently for sleep.”
“Is the tower still there?” I bit my tongue nigh in half. I was playing into his hands.
“No - for, one night, I crept out into the street soon after the birds had gone, and I decided to push the plunger on the hub-point. But I couldn’t lift the pavement slab. It had taken on the weight of the world, it seemed. Then, out of the darkness at the end of the street where it dipped down to make room for a hill, I saw a nightmare which I was not due to suffer until I was much older. The shimmering presence of my Unguarded Angel, with black corrugated wings blacker than the sticky pitch of the night, flapping like vast paper kites which ripped piecemeal as it progressed towards me with the noises of a tree-stumper. Crudely emasculated, it wore a shorn stump of engorged blood-vessels, an inch long but a foot wide. Its one eye watch-hatch shrivelled everything in its path with beam of visible willpower - a headlight of the brain…and when it had gone so had the tower with it.”
As his sibilance continued, I found myself drawing nearer and nearer to his mouth, for the words added to each other with a drooling, a drawling, a sucking even more. I could smell his bad breath, like a drug. I thought him to be a dosser whose cardboard bedding formed wings instead of makeshift blankets. I laughed, but the professionals at the bar looked askance, for they must have thought we were becoming far too affectionate with each other. We were bearing out what they thought working people always did like animals. However, he seemed to have finished, at last. He gazed up again into my eyes at the most two inches from his. So, close, I could not see which of us was crying. He started whispering one sentence, again and again, like a deep inescapable record groove with an enormous crack, as if it were a continuous loop of existence, as word ate word: “I can never bear to hear - HIC! - paper blinds a-rattling in the wind.” Again and again, forever and ever. And I shuddered too, as I heard paper being endlessly unrolled in the nearby gents. The professionals had disappeared in there to unravel their innards, no doubt.
I laughed again. “Never mind, have another drink,” I said, disentangling myself from his desperate embrace. But life is full of false promises. Without even bothering to get him the drink, I left - into the night where the pub was hemmed in by those tower blocks which had been built with such hope and destiny by LURKs. And, as years turned shorter, one day I sat outside a newsagent shop on a pavement bench, idling the time by watching people going in and out - until I realized that the people going in were always different from those coming out. After quite a long while, I went in to investigate and discovered there was another entrance round the corner. On coming out, I wondered who that LURK was sitting on the bench, staring at me so strangely. I had probably met it once in a dream. I once dreamed of being a helper in a school canteen, watching all of the items on the trays passing before me. Yes, I had the shapeless overall and wicked gossiping tongue. The boobs felt funny hanging on my chest like polythene bags full of plum-pudding. But there were stranger things, for the food-bearing trays gradually turned nastier, piecemeal. At first, I thought the meat-loaves were getting rarer and rarer but they were, I guessed, thinly disguised bits of raw human bodies. The new child who came last had what looked like a grown-up penis coiled upon a bed of pilau rice, garnished such that it almost looked tasty. I woke with a start, sweating like a pig on heat. I fumbled for what I thought would be proof of my manhood and was devastated to find that the dream was too close to home for my liking. No wonder that LURK coming out of the newsagent ogled me as I sat cross-legged and crossbrowed upon the bench. He sat down next to me and whispered through a slime-ball of saliva that he would like it “off the bone.” Forgetting my concern, I smiled knowingly, as dinner-ladies sometimes did, without really appreciating that the LURK wanted off the bone. And as each year becomes a mere pinprick of existence, the window blind rattled into life. I gradually awoke as I was brought down gently into my own body by the sleep-master. I heard the LURKs outside, no doubt blackening the already meagre daylight with their descending canopy-wings. One of them managed to fumble at my high-rise window - romantically, if dolefully, believing me to be another of its kind. Thankfully, my real soul had already flown, tantamount to a Lark Ascending, leaving something behind still calling itself “me”, something that was crude enough for death.
(published 'Thin Ice' 1993)
comments (1)
1. Paul Dracon left...
Wednesday, 3 August 2005 3:35 pm
This guy's lucky. When I went to school the lunches weren't so ripe! Fine story. Reminds me of being a kid and having adults tell me all about 'the real world.'
A Mouseful of Pins
A Mouseful Of Pins
posted Friday, 1 October 2004
The parlour was as quiet as a mouseful of pins. In the depleting light, a pair of armchairs seemed peopled with stares. There had already been words of ghosts and frights, but neither set of eyes had flinched. The fire had dyed itself black, in recognition of the coal that had given it birth. A knock on the door or an unseen hand brushing against the shoulder might have startled their revery. Yet the simple scrabbling of a pointed creature in the wainscot was hardly worth the mention, let alone the pricking of ears - until one of them took up a second spate of speaking:-
“I travelled in a train - an ordinary day - except I listened to a number of ladies from behind me in the neighbouring part of the carriage. I couldn’t see them, but I guessed they were middle-aged or above. They had spent the whole journey so far chortling, gossipping, prattling of - wait for it - knitting! The train juddered northward uncaring, it seemed, of signals and stations - an express in every sense. Their banter ranged from treatises on back-stitches to belly-laughs on chain ones - every combination and convolution of the art of clicking needles together, weaving a web of action or reaction, of colour’s shade or husband’s size, stitches loose or tight, grip or wield, cast on or off. What a nice gathering - how very civilised in this day and age, I felt, listening to a knitting group on an outing. I’d never overheard such laughter and jollity surrounding doubts regarding brown against orange in a knitting pattern - something about tail-end wool. Then, as I heard the chunky clunk-click of large stitches being made, I wondered if they knew about the two main varieties of wool: shorling or morling. It hadn’t arisen in their conversation - which was a surprise, since everything else plain and purl had been chewed over and skittishly aired. Well, let me tell you...”
One nodded in the full-shrunken light of the parlour, as the other continued to speak:-
“...shorling is wool sheared off live sheep, morling that off those already dead. There is, believe it or not, a difference in feel. One is more suitable for men, the other women, but not necessarily for all men or all women. Well, I peered round the back of my train seat whence I heard the ladies’ ribbing, so as to tickle their fancy with my teaser. There, with long tapering bones clasped in their hands, were several large grizzled brutes of men with falsetto voices. One turned and gapped a smile. Another waved a criss-cross weave of vessels that would have looked better on the inside of a body than the out.”
The parlour wore an air of indifference, until the one who had been listening, assumed responsibility for manipulation of the meandering conversation:-
“I myself was also on a train once - the only time, in fact. Being an agoraphobic, I found it hard to travel. As the oil seed rape glanced by and further yellowed the sunshine, I speculated on my own loneliness in the world. Yes, alone in the whole wide world. For many years, people have believed that several dread diseases only needed a merest flesh-to-flesh contact to flourish. So, today, as we reach the end of the Millennium, there are no handshakes, no fleeting kisses, no rubbing together of shoulders, nothing like this can possibly be countenanced, not even the slightest brush of skin on skin - even with clothes between. Hence train seats have become single ones. This has led me to wonder whether all people other than myself are a dream. I have no means to prove otherwise, as you can appreciate. The simple act of dialogue has never been able to disprove this dream theory of mine. So, that day on the train, I was beset, as ever, with an attenuation of reality. No prestidigitation of philosophy could fully bolster the inferred substances of an otherwise rarified life, even when I took thoughts to the most dependable areas of logic. Simple touch between doubters would have been sufficient verification, but touch was simply out of the question. Yet, as the benighted city landscape made cruel overtures to the yellow meadows, I felt a caressing hand upon my padded shoulder ... but it was sheer imagination, a touch of Harry in the night…”
The first speaker had tried to interrupt. Yet nothing came from the mouth, as if it were full of tangled choking wool.
A snouty thing skittered across the carpet and plummetted up the cold parlour chimney towards the cloudless, yet starless, night sky. The agoraphobic, more startled than a rabbit in a sudden beam of light, abruptly realised that the state of death had indeed no more open space than its prior life. There was a sigh of relief as the parlour slowed beyond its way-station with a mouse-like squeak of brakes and anaemic hiss of steam. Both parties were glad that their thick-knitted mitten-ended twinset cardigans swaddled the whole skin’s map of surface needle-bones. Yet two loving vein-knotted touches crossed swords.
“Most memories are false, but when I am faced with the only true memory, which is death, I have then no need for it.” (From Rachel Mildeyes’ AUTOBIOGRAPHY, posthumously published on 31 December 1999 as revised and completed by Allen Ashley and HP Lovecraft)
(Published 'Roadworks' 1999)
comments (1)
1. Paul Dracon left...
Wednesday, 3 August 2005 2:56 pm
This question comes to mind: is a society that fosters isolation necessarily worse?
Hmmm...
posted Friday, 1 October 2004
The parlour was as quiet as a mouseful of pins. In the depleting light, a pair of armchairs seemed peopled with stares. There had already been words of ghosts and frights, but neither set of eyes had flinched. The fire had dyed itself black, in recognition of the coal that had given it birth. A knock on the door or an unseen hand brushing against the shoulder might have startled their revery. Yet the simple scrabbling of a pointed creature in the wainscot was hardly worth the mention, let alone the pricking of ears - until one of them took up a second spate of speaking:-
“I travelled in a train - an ordinary day - except I listened to a number of ladies from behind me in the neighbouring part of the carriage. I couldn’t see them, but I guessed they were middle-aged or above. They had spent the whole journey so far chortling, gossipping, prattling of - wait for it - knitting! The train juddered northward uncaring, it seemed, of signals and stations - an express in every sense. Their banter ranged from treatises on back-stitches to belly-laughs on chain ones - every combination and convolution of the art of clicking needles together, weaving a web of action or reaction, of colour’s shade or husband’s size, stitches loose or tight, grip or wield, cast on or off. What a nice gathering - how very civilised in this day and age, I felt, listening to a knitting group on an outing. I’d never overheard such laughter and jollity surrounding doubts regarding brown against orange in a knitting pattern - something about tail-end wool. Then, as I heard the chunky clunk-click of large stitches being made, I wondered if they knew about the two main varieties of wool: shorling or morling. It hadn’t arisen in their conversation - which was a surprise, since everything else plain and purl had been chewed over and skittishly aired. Well, let me tell you...”
One nodded in the full-shrunken light of the parlour, as the other continued to speak:-
“...shorling is wool sheared off live sheep, morling that off those already dead. There is, believe it or not, a difference in feel. One is more suitable for men, the other women, but not necessarily for all men or all women. Well, I peered round the back of my train seat whence I heard the ladies’ ribbing, so as to tickle their fancy with my teaser. There, with long tapering bones clasped in their hands, were several large grizzled brutes of men with falsetto voices. One turned and gapped a smile. Another waved a criss-cross weave of vessels that would have looked better on the inside of a body than the out.”
The parlour wore an air of indifference, until the one who had been listening, assumed responsibility for manipulation of the meandering conversation:-
“I myself was also on a train once - the only time, in fact. Being an agoraphobic, I found it hard to travel. As the oil seed rape glanced by and further yellowed the sunshine, I speculated on my own loneliness in the world. Yes, alone in the whole wide world. For many years, people have believed that several dread diseases only needed a merest flesh-to-flesh contact to flourish. So, today, as we reach the end of the Millennium, there are no handshakes, no fleeting kisses, no rubbing together of shoulders, nothing like this can possibly be countenanced, not even the slightest brush of skin on skin - even with clothes between. Hence train seats have become single ones. This has led me to wonder whether all people other than myself are a dream. I have no means to prove otherwise, as you can appreciate. The simple act of dialogue has never been able to disprove this dream theory of mine. So, that day on the train, I was beset, as ever, with an attenuation of reality. No prestidigitation of philosophy could fully bolster the inferred substances of an otherwise rarified life, even when I took thoughts to the most dependable areas of logic. Simple touch between doubters would have been sufficient verification, but touch was simply out of the question. Yet, as the benighted city landscape made cruel overtures to the yellow meadows, I felt a caressing hand upon my padded shoulder ... but it was sheer imagination, a touch of Harry in the night…”
The first speaker had tried to interrupt. Yet nothing came from the mouth, as if it were full of tangled choking wool.
A snouty thing skittered across the carpet and plummetted up the cold parlour chimney towards the cloudless, yet starless, night sky. The agoraphobic, more startled than a rabbit in a sudden beam of light, abruptly realised that the state of death had indeed no more open space than its prior life. There was a sigh of relief as the parlour slowed beyond its way-station with a mouse-like squeak of brakes and anaemic hiss of steam. Both parties were glad that their thick-knitted mitten-ended twinset cardigans swaddled the whole skin’s map of surface needle-bones. Yet two loving vein-knotted touches crossed swords.
“Most memories are false, but when I am faced with the only true memory, which is death, I have then no need for it.” (From Rachel Mildeyes’ AUTOBIOGRAPHY, posthumously published on 31 December 1999 as revised and completed by Allen Ashley and HP Lovecraft)
(Published 'Roadworks' 1999)
comments (1)
1. Paul Dracon left...
Wednesday, 3 August 2005 2:56 pm
This question comes to mind: is a society that fosters isolation necessarily worse?
Hmmm...
Proust's Bergotte
Proust's Bergotte
« H E » email
posted Tuesday, 13 May 2008
TWO PASSAGES FROM PROUST'S 'REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST' ABOUT BERGOTTE AND THE YELLOW PATCH ON THE WALL:
I learned that a death had occurred that day which distressed me greatly -- that of Bergotte. It was known that he had been ill for a long time past. Not, of course, with the illness from which he had suffered originally and which was natural. Nature scarcely seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has developed the art of prolonging them. Remedies, the respite that they procure, the relapses that a temporary cessation of them provokes, produce a simulacrum of illness to which the patient grows so accustomed that he ends by stabilising it, stylising it, just as children have regular fits of coughing long after they have been cured of the whooping cough. Then the remedies begin to have less effect, the doses are increased, they cease to do any good, but they have begun to do harm thanks to this lasting indisposition. Nature would not have offered them so long a tenure. It is a great wonder that medicine can almost rival nature in forcing a man to remain in bed, to continue taking some drug on pain of death. From then on, the artificially grafted illness has taken root, has become a secondary but a genuine illness, with this difference only, that natural illnesses are cured, but never those which medicine creates, for it does not know the secret of their cure.
For years past Bergotte had ceased to go out of doors. In any case he had never cared for society, or had cared for it for a day only, to despise it as he despised everything else, and in the same fashion, which was his own, namely to despise a thing not because it was beyond his reach but as soon as he had attained it. He lived so simply that nobody suspected how rich he was, and anyone who had known would still have been mistaken, having thought him a miser whereas no one was ever more generous. He was generous above all towards women -- girls, one ought rather to say -- who were ashamed to receive so much in return for so little. He excused himself in his own eyes because he knew that he could never produce such good work as in an atmosphere of amorous feelings. Love is too strong a word, but pleasure that is at all rooted in the flesh is helpful to literary work because it cancels all other pleasures, for instance the pleasures of society, those which are the same for everyone. And even if this love leads to disillusionment, it does at least stir, even by so doing, the surface of the soul which otherwise would be in danger of becoming stagnant. Desire is therefore not without its value to the writer in detaching him first of all from his fellow men and from conforming to their standards, and afterwards in restoring some degree of movement to a spiritual machine which, after a certain age, tends to come to a standstill. We do not achieve happiness but we gain some insights into the reasons which prevent us from being happy and which would have remained invisible to us but for these sudden revelations of disappointment. Dreams, we know, are not realisable; we might not form any, perhaps, were it not for desire, and it is useful to us to form them in order to see them fail and to learn from their failure. And so Bergotte said to himself: “I spend more than a multimillionaire on girls, but the pleasures or disappointments that they give me make me write a book which brings me in money.” Economically, this argument was absurd, but no doubt he found some charm in thus transmuting gold into caresses and caresses into gold. We saw, at the time of my grandmother’s death, how a weary old age loves repose. Now in society there is nothing but conversation. Vapid though it is, it has the capacity to eliminate women, who become nothing more than questions and answers. Removed from society, women become once more what is so reposeful to a weary old man, an object of contemplation. In any case, now there was no longer any question of all this. I have said that Bergotte never went out of doors, and when he got out of bed for an hour in his room, he would be smothered in shawls, rugs, all the things with which a person covers himself before exposing himself to intense cold or going on a railway journey. He would apologise for them to the few friends whom he allowed to penetrate to his sanctuary; pointing to his tartan plaids, his travelling-rugs, he would say merrily: “After all, my dear fellow, life, as Anaxagoras has said, is a journey.” Thus he went on growing steadily colder, a tiny planet offering a prophetic image of the greater, when gradually heat will withdraw from the earth, then life itself. Then the resurrection will have come to an end, for, however far forward into future generations the works of men may shine, there must none the less be men. If certain species hold out longer against the invading cold, when there are no longer any men, and if we suppose Bergotte’s fame to have lasted until then, suddenly it will be extinguished for all time. It will not be the last animals that will read him, for it is scarcely probable that, like the Apostles at Pentecost, they will be able to understand the speech of the various races of mankind without having learned it.
In the months that preceded his death, Bergotte suffered from insomnia, and what was worse, whenever he did fall asleep, from nightmares which, if he awoke, made him reluctant to go to sleep again. He had long been a lover of dreams, even bad dreams, because thanks to them, thanks to the contradiction they present to the reality which we have before us in our waking state, they give us, at the moment of waking if not before, the profound sensation of having slept. But Bergotte’s nightmares were not like that. When he spoke of nightmares, he used in the past to mean unpleasant things that happened in his brain. Latterly, it was as though from somewhere outside himself that he would see a hand armed with a damp cloth which, rubbed over his face by an evil woman, kept trying to wake him; or an intolerable itching in his thighs; or the rage -- because Bergotte had murmured in his sleep that he was driving badly -- of a raving lunatic of a cabman who flung himself upon the writer, biting and gnawing his fingers. Finally, as soon as it had grown sufficiently dark in his sleep, nature would arrange a sort of undress rehearsal of the apoplectic stroke that was to carry him off. Bergotte would arrive in a carriage beneath the porch of Swann’s new house, and would try to get out. A shattering attack of dizziness would pin him to his seat; the concierge would try to help him out; he would remain seated, unable to lift himself up or straighten his legs. He would cling to the stone pillar in front of him, but could not find sufficient support to enable him to stand.
I just gave you a quotation from Proust about Bergotte the author. A few pages later comes the account of his death. It is probably the most beautiful passage I have ever read. May I share it with you below?
The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft’ (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness. He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. “That’s how I ought to have written,” he said. “My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. “All the same,” he said to himself, “I shouldn’t like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers.”
He repeated to himself: “Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he sank down on to a circular settee; whereupon he suddenly ceased to think that his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: “It’s nothing, merely a touch of indigestion from those potatoes, which were undercooked.” A fresh attack struck him down; he rolled from the settee to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there – those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only – if then! – to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable.
They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.
Of course that last bit is no consolation in view of this passage earlier: "If certain species hold out longer against the invading cold, when there are no longer any men, and if we suppose Bergotte’s fame to have lasted until then, suddenly it will be extinguished for all time. It will not be the last animals that will read him, for it is scarcely probable that, like the Apostles at Pentecost, they will be able to understand the speech of the various races of mankind without having learned it."
des
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posted Tuesday, 13 May 2008
TWO PASSAGES FROM PROUST'S 'REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST' ABOUT BERGOTTE AND THE YELLOW PATCH ON THE WALL:
I learned that a death had occurred that day which distressed me greatly -- that of Bergotte. It was known that he had been ill for a long time past. Not, of course, with the illness from which he had suffered originally and which was natural. Nature scarcely seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has developed the art of prolonging them. Remedies, the respite that they procure, the relapses that a temporary cessation of them provokes, produce a simulacrum of illness to which the patient grows so accustomed that he ends by stabilising it, stylising it, just as children have regular fits of coughing long after they have been cured of the whooping cough. Then the remedies begin to have less effect, the doses are increased, they cease to do any good, but they have begun to do harm thanks to this lasting indisposition. Nature would not have offered them so long a tenure. It is a great wonder that medicine can almost rival nature in forcing a man to remain in bed, to continue taking some drug on pain of death. From then on, the artificially grafted illness has taken root, has become a secondary but a genuine illness, with this difference only, that natural illnesses are cured, but never those which medicine creates, for it does not know the secret of their cure.
For years past Bergotte had ceased to go out of doors. In any case he had never cared for society, or had cared for it for a day only, to despise it as he despised everything else, and in the same fashion, which was his own, namely to despise a thing not because it was beyond his reach but as soon as he had attained it. He lived so simply that nobody suspected how rich he was, and anyone who had known would still have been mistaken, having thought him a miser whereas no one was ever more generous. He was generous above all towards women -- girls, one ought rather to say -- who were ashamed to receive so much in return for so little. He excused himself in his own eyes because he knew that he could never produce such good work as in an atmosphere of amorous feelings. Love is too strong a word, but pleasure that is at all rooted in the flesh is helpful to literary work because it cancels all other pleasures, for instance the pleasures of society, those which are the same for everyone. And even if this love leads to disillusionment, it does at least stir, even by so doing, the surface of the soul which otherwise would be in danger of becoming stagnant. Desire is therefore not without its value to the writer in detaching him first of all from his fellow men and from conforming to their standards, and afterwards in restoring some degree of movement to a spiritual machine which, after a certain age, tends to come to a standstill. We do not achieve happiness but we gain some insights into the reasons which prevent us from being happy and which would have remained invisible to us but for these sudden revelations of disappointment. Dreams, we know, are not realisable; we might not form any, perhaps, were it not for desire, and it is useful to us to form them in order to see them fail and to learn from their failure. And so Bergotte said to himself: “I spend more than a multimillionaire on girls, but the pleasures or disappointments that they give me make me write a book which brings me in money.” Economically, this argument was absurd, but no doubt he found some charm in thus transmuting gold into caresses and caresses into gold. We saw, at the time of my grandmother’s death, how a weary old age loves repose. Now in society there is nothing but conversation. Vapid though it is, it has the capacity to eliminate women, who become nothing more than questions and answers. Removed from society, women become once more what is so reposeful to a weary old man, an object of contemplation. In any case, now there was no longer any question of all this. I have said that Bergotte never went out of doors, and when he got out of bed for an hour in his room, he would be smothered in shawls, rugs, all the things with which a person covers himself before exposing himself to intense cold or going on a railway journey. He would apologise for them to the few friends whom he allowed to penetrate to his sanctuary; pointing to his tartan plaids, his travelling-rugs, he would say merrily: “After all, my dear fellow, life, as Anaxagoras has said, is a journey.” Thus he went on growing steadily colder, a tiny planet offering a prophetic image of the greater, when gradually heat will withdraw from the earth, then life itself. Then the resurrection will have come to an end, for, however far forward into future generations the works of men may shine, there must none the less be men. If certain species hold out longer against the invading cold, when there are no longer any men, and if we suppose Bergotte’s fame to have lasted until then, suddenly it will be extinguished for all time. It will not be the last animals that will read him, for it is scarcely probable that, like the Apostles at Pentecost, they will be able to understand the speech of the various races of mankind without having learned it.
In the months that preceded his death, Bergotte suffered from insomnia, and what was worse, whenever he did fall asleep, from nightmares which, if he awoke, made him reluctant to go to sleep again. He had long been a lover of dreams, even bad dreams, because thanks to them, thanks to the contradiction they present to the reality which we have before us in our waking state, they give us, at the moment of waking if not before, the profound sensation of having slept. But Bergotte’s nightmares were not like that. When he spoke of nightmares, he used in the past to mean unpleasant things that happened in his brain. Latterly, it was as though from somewhere outside himself that he would see a hand armed with a damp cloth which, rubbed over his face by an evil woman, kept trying to wake him; or an intolerable itching in his thighs; or the rage -- because Bergotte had murmured in his sleep that he was driving badly -- of a raving lunatic of a cabman who flung himself upon the writer, biting and gnawing his fingers. Finally, as soon as it had grown sufficiently dark in his sleep, nature would arrange a sort of undress rehearsal of the apoplectic stroke that was to carry him off. Bergotte would arrive in a carriage beneath the porch of Swann’s new house, and would try to get out. A shattering attack of dizziness would pin him to his seat; the concierge would try to help him out; he would remain seated, unable to lift himself up or straighten his legs. He would cling to the stone pillar in front of him, but could not find sufficient support to enable him to stand.
I just gave you a quotation from Proust about Bergotte the author. A few pages later comes the account of his death. It is probably the most beautiful passage I have ever read. May I share it with you below?
The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft’ (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness. He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. “That’s how I ought to have written,” he said. “My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. “All the same,” he said to himself, “I shouldn’t like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers.”
He repeated to himself: “Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he sank down on to a circular settee; whereupon he suddenly ceased to think that his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: “It’s nothing, merely a touch of indigestion from those potatoes, which were undercooked.” A fresh attack struck him down; he rolled from the settee to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there – those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only – if then! – to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable.
They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.
Of course that last bit is no consolation in view of this passage earlier: "If certain species hold out longer against the invading cold, when there are no longer any men, and if we suppose Bergotte’s fame to have lasted until then, suddenly it will be extinguished for all time. It will not be the last animals that will read him, for it is scarcely probable that, like the Apostles at Pentecost, they will be able to understand the speech of the various races of mankind without having learned it."
des
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
From here:
http://ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=9763
========================================
Cloaky places deserve applause.
+++
Johnny did not like rooms with mirrors. He had a superstition that any mirror somehow collected his image, later to be released forensically and used in evidence against him. Johnny was a burglar and his own evidence for such a superstition was the famous occasion when an actual burglar many decades before was found inside a burgled house’s mirror just as if he were Alice trying to escape back from her nightmare into the real world. To weigh two nightmares in the balance, as that famous burglar must surely have done, he needed to turn a blind eye towards the general rule that all nightmares were equal in nightmarishness. To him, there always seemed a lesser evil, as if evil were relative. That famous burglar soon learned the error of his ways because prison in his day and age was a dreadful experience from which many of the inmates could only escape by committing suicide.
So, Johnny, once he was inside any room that he was intent on burgling, did slide and sidle with his back to the wall and then turned any mirror to face in its opposite direction by stretching out his hand to the edge of the mirror-frame so as to twirl it surreptitiously before it could capture him as its own property. Johnny did not want to become a famous burglar.
One rare day, Johnny found himself in a room with ostensibly no mirrors. He looked warily from corner to corner. Then with growing confidence, he strode into the middle of the floor where he made a few outlandish signs of contempt for Fate, then bowed to an unseen audience. He may not want to be famous, but he was a born entertainer. Silent applause was however all he ever received. He soon concentrated on the business at hand. There was no money to be had from miming to nobody.
There were oil paintings, jewellery-strewn dressing-tables, and other items that set his mouth watering. He was greedy enough to carry away more than he could carry away. And he often wished he had more than one pair of arms.
+++
I was inside the wardrobe as Johnny rifled the room in which the wardrobe stood. The wardrobe, I knew, was the most valuable antique in the room, but being so large, he would probably miss seeing it. The door’s wood was randomly knotted with an image that if one imagined hard enough could be turned into a dark human shape. This shape went straight through to both sides of the door. I couldn’t see it, however, as it was too dark within the wardrobe where I was stationed trying hard not to breathe for fear of discovery. It was no wardrobe for any Alice or Lucy to explore as it literally led nowhere. Hard done-by children had often complained to Uncles and Aunts that this wardrobe was the most boring wardrobe they had ever encountered. Little did they know its value as an antique.
There were many cloaks and suits hanging up against me. I could sense them in the darkness. Mothballs, too, in all the various pockets. I went to hold my nose for fear of sneezing. But I could not find my nose. I could not even find things to use with which to find anything! If any sneeze could sound like ice shattering like glass, then I must have had the worst cold possible.
I heard Johnny stop in his tracks. He was evidently surrounded head and foot with undivided swag. A mound moving clumsily doorward, except it was the wrong door in his urgent haste.
+++
A child peered out from among the cloaks and coat-hangers - and applauded.
http://ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=9763
========================================
Cloaky places deserve applause.
+++
Johnny did not like rooms with mirrors. He had a superstition that any mirror somehow collected his image, later to be released forensically and used in evidence against him. Johnny was a burglar and his own evidence for such a superstition was the famous occasion when an actual burglar many decades before was found inside a burgled house’s mirror just as if he were Alice trying to escape back from her nightmare into the real world. To weigh two nightmares in the balance, as that famous burglar must surely have done, he needed to turn a blind eye towards the general rule that all nightmares were equal in nightmarishness. To him, there always seemed a lesser evil, as if evil were relative. That famous burglar soon learned the error of his ways because prison in his day and age was a dreadful experience from which many of the inmates could only escape by committing suicide.
So, Johnny, once he was inside any room that he was intent on burgling, did slide and sidle with his back to the wall and then turned any mirror to face in its opposite direction by stretching out his hand to the edge of the mirror-frame so as to twirl it surreptitiously before it could capture him as its own property. Johnny did not want to become a famous burglar.
One rare day, Johnny found himself in a room with ostensibly no mirrors. He looked warily from corner to corner. Then with growing confidence, he strode into the middle of the floor where he made a few outlandish signs of contempt for Fate, then bowed to an unseen audience. He may not want to be famous, but he was a born entertainer. Silent applause was however all he ever received. He soon concentrated on the business at hand. There was no money to be had from miming to nobody.
There were oil paintings, jewellery-strewn dressing-tables, and other items that set his mouth watering. He was greedy enough to carry away more than he could carry away. And he often wished he had more than one pair of arms.
+++
I was inside the wardrobe as Johnny rifled the room in which the wardrobe stood. The wardrobe, I knew, was the most valuable antique in the room, but being so large, he would probably miss seeing it. The door’s wood was randomly knotted with an image that if one imagined hard enough could be turned into a dark human shape. This shape went straight through to both sides of the door. I couldn’t see it, however, as it was too dark within the wardrobe where I was stationed trying hard not to breathe for fear of discovery. It was no wardrobe for any Alice or Lucy to explore as it literally led nowhere. Hard done-by children had often complained to Uncles and Aunts that this wardrobe was the most boring wardrobe they had ever encountered. Little did they know its value as an antique.
There were many cloaks and suits hanging up against me. I could sense them in the darkness. Mothballs, too, in all the various pockets. I went to hold my nose for fear of sneezing. But I could not find my nose. I could not even find things to use with which to find anything! If any sneeze could sound like ice shattering like glass, then I must have had the worst cold possible.
I heard Johnny stop in his tracks. He was evidently surrounded head and foot with undivided swag. A mound moving clumsily doorward, except it was the wrong door in his urgent haste.
+++
A child peered out from among the cloaks and coat-hangers - and applauded.
One Day At A Time
One Day At A Time
posted Friday, 18 April 2008
When you have a lot of worries, a useful piece of advice is to take one day at a time. I often think about this and do my best to take into account the implications of taking one day at a time. You see, I have a lot of worries and countless people who worry me with their own worries and sometimes a stray worry floats by and my brain picks the worry from the air like a magnet and makes it my own worry – a worry escaped from a stranger’s brain or a previously ownerless worry or a worry that is not a worry at all but something disguised as a worry. On bad days, worries swarm en masse rather than separately: not a spattering but a blizzard: the worries not only of people who are still alive but also the residual worries of those who have passed away. Recently, I picked up one of King Henry VIII’s worries. Well, I could go on. So I should ‘take one day at a time’, thus to capture each day’s worries within that day and then allow the whole day itself to pass away – a day of worries vanishing into a cone of nothingness. Each day packaged and signed off. But they do say when you die you re-live all your days again. I can’t believe this is true. But it certainly is a worry.
posted Friday, 18 April 2008
When you have a lot of worries, a useful piece of advice is to take one day at a time. I often think about this and do my best to take into account the implications of taking one day at a time. You see, I have a lot of worries and countless people who worry me with their own worries and sometimes a stray worry floats by and my brain picks the worry from the air like a magnet and makes it my own worry – a worry escaped from a stranger’s brain or a previously ownerless worry or a worry that is not a worry at all but something disguised as a worry. On bad days, worries swarm en masse rather than separately: not a spattering but a blizzard: the worries not only of people who are still alive but also the residual worries of those who have passed away. Recently, I picked up one of King Henry VIII’s worries. Well, I could go on. So I should ‘take one day at a time’, thus to capture each day’s worries within that day and then allow the whole day itself to pass away – a day of worries vanishing into a cone of nothingness. Each day packaged and signed off. But they do say when you die you re-live all your days again. I can’t believe this is true. But it certainly is a worry.
Can You Smell This?
Below is a representative passage from MARTIN PIPPIN IN THE APPLE-ORCHARD by Eleanor Farjeon (1921).
This is a magical book that I read many years ago and, having now rediscovered it, establishing that it is still magical!
Can you smell this passage below? I can.
==========================
He kicked at the dying log on the hearth, and sent a fountain of sparks up the chimney. The child threw a dry leaf and saw it shrivel, and Young Gerard stirred the white ash and blew up the embers, and held a fan of bracken to them, till the fire ran up its veins like life in the veins of a man, and the frond that had already lived and died became a gleaming spirit, and then it too fell in ashes among the ash. Then Young Gerard took a handful of twigs and branches, and began to build upon the ash a castle of many sorts of wood, and the child helped him, laying hazel on his beech and fir upon his oak; and often before their turret was quite reared a spark would catch at the dry fringes on the fir, or the brown oak-leaves, and one twig or another would vanish from the castle.
‘How quickly wood burns,' said the child.
'That's the lovely part of it,' said Young Gerard, 'the fire is always changing and doing different things with it.'
And they watched the fire together, and smelled its smoke, that had as many smells as there were sorts of wood. Sometimes it was like roast coffee, and sometimes like roast chestnuts, and sometimes like incense. And they saw the lichen on old stumps crinkle into golden ferns, or fire run up a dead tail of creeper in a red S, and vanish in mid-air like an Indian boy climbing a rope, or crawl right through the middle of a birch-twig, making hieroglyphics that glowed and faded between the gray scales of the bark. And then suddenly it caught the whole scaffolding of their castle, and blazed up through the fir and oak and spiny thorns and dead leaves, and the bits of old bark all over blue-gray-green rot, and the young sprigs almost budding, and hissing with sap. And for one moment they saw all the skeleton and soul of the castle without its body, before it fell in.
comments (1)
1. Weirdmonger left...
Tuesday, 22 April 2008 10:25 pm :: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_mir
Another passage from 'Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard' encountered today in my re-reading of this truly magical book:
"'Hush, hush, my dear. Dreams aren't empty. Dreams are as near the truth as we can come. What greater truth can you ever have than this? For as men and women dream, they drop one by one the veils between them and the mystery. But when they meet they are shrouded in the veils again, and though they long to strip them off, they cannot. And each sees of each but dimly the truth which in their dreams was as clear as light. Oh, child, it's not our dreams that are our illusions.'
'No,' she whispered. 'But still it is not enough. Not quite enough for the beloved that they shall dream apart and find their truths apart. In life too they must touch, and find the mystery together. Though it be only for one eternal instant. Touch me not only in my dreams, but in life. Turn life itself into the dream at last.'"
This is a magical book that I read many years ago and, having now rediscovered it, establishing that it is still magical!
Can you smell this passage below? I can.
==========================
He kicked at the dying log on the hearth, and sent a fountain of sparks up the chimney. The child threw a dry leaf and saw it shrivel, and Young Gerard stirred the white ash and blew up the embers, and held a fan of bracken to them, till the fire ran up its veins like life in the veins of a man, and the frond that had already lived and died became a gleaming spirit, and then it too fell in ashes among the ash. Then Young Gerard took a handful of twigs and branches, and began to build upon the ash a castle of many sorts of wood, and the child helped him, laying hazel on his beech and fir upon his oak; and often before their turret was quite reared a spark would catch at the dry fringes on the fir, or the brown oak-leaves, and one twig or another would vanish from the castle.
‘How quickly wood burns,' said the child.
'That's the lovely part of it,' said Young Gerard, 'the fire is always changing and doing different things with it.'
And they watched the fire together, and smelled its smoke, that had as many smells as there were sorts of wood. Sometimes it was like roast coffee, and sometimes like roast chestnuts, and sometimes like incense. And they saw the lichen on old stumps crinkle into golden ferns, or fire run up a dead tail of creeper in a red S, and vanish in mid-air like an Indian boy climbing a rope, or crawl right through the middle of a birch-twig, making hieroglyphics that glowed and faded between the gray scales of the bark. And then suddenly it caught the whole scaffolding of their castle, and blazed up through the fir and oak and spiny thorns and dead leaves, and the bits of old bark all over blue-gray-green rot, and the young sprigs almost budding, and hissing with sap. And for one moment they saw all the skeleton and soul of the castle without its body, before it fell in.
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1. Weirdmonger left...
Tuesday, 22 April 2008 10:25 pm :: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_mir
Another passage from 'Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard' encountered today in my re-reading of this truly magical book:
"'Hush, hush, my dear. Dreams aren't empty. Dreams are as near the truth as we can come. What greater truth can you ever have than this? For as men and women dream, they drop one by one the veils between them and the mystery. But when they meet they are shrouded in the veils again, and though they long to strip them off, they cannot. And each sees of each but dimly the truth which in their dreams was as clear as light. Oh, child, it's not our dreams that are our illusions.'
'No,' she whispered. 'But still it is not enough. Not quite enough for the beloved that they shall dream apart and find their truths apart. In life too they must touch, and find the mystery together. Though it be only for one eternal instant. Touch me not only in my dreams, but in life. Turn life itself into the dream at last.'"
Your favourite quotations?
Your favourite quotations?
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posted Monday, 26 November 2007
"Transfigurations never repeat themselves. One need not be frightened of growing old; to the last, there will always be something new." Elizabeth Bowen
"From the cosmic point of view, to have opinions or preferences at all is to be ill." Lawrence Durrell
Both these quotes derive from my own reading and I picked them out from the text, rather than found them as ready-made quotations (from quotation sites etc.)
In fact both quotations are entirely original to Google today through me quoting them on other sites in the last few days!
What are your own favourite quotes?
comments (2)
1. Weirdmonger left...
Tuesday, 27 November 2007 4:28 pm
Below are the quotations I chose to appear in print alongside the stories within various issues of 'Nemonymous':
NEMO ONE
“The oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and the unnameable.” – HP Lovecraft, ‘The Hound’.
“Names should be charms – I used to hope that, by saying some of them often enough, I might evoke reality.” – Patrick White, ‘Voss’.
“Writing will cease to be eventually. The future should found bureaus, where everyone at a certain age submits, anonymously, a truthful biography, it could become material for a real science of man, if such a thing should prove necessary.” – August Strindberg (specially chosen & translated for Nemo by Henrik Johnsson (where are you now, Henrik?)).
“He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare / At whatever time the deed took place – Macavity wasn’t there!” – TS Eliot.
“Whoever I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know…” – Samuel Beckett.
“In an instant I seemed to rise from the ground. But I had no bodily, no visible, audible or palpable presence.” – Edgar Allan Poe (Tale Of The Ragged Mountains).
“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.” – Philip Larkin.
“'It’s giving girls names like that,' said Buggins, ‘that 9 times out of 10 makes ‘em go wrong. It unsettles ‘em. If ever I was to have a girl, if I ever was to have a dozen girls, I’d call ‘em all Jane.” – HG Wells (Kipps)
“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” – Virginia Woolf (A Room Of One’s Own).
“Nobody ever tells me anything.” – John Galsworthy (The Forsyte Saga).
“Anyone who isn’t confused here doesn’t really understand what’s going on.” – Anonymous.
NEMO TWO
“…then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.” John Keats.
“I’ll be your mirror.” – Lou Reed.
“We burn daylight.” – William Shakespeare.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” – HP Lovecraft.
“One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.” – Elizabeth Bowen.
“…clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character…” – Louisa M Alcott.
“So, to that question: ‘Who has ever fathomed the depths of the abyss?’ two men, among all men, have the right to reply: Captain Nemo and I.” – Jules Verne.
NEMO FOUR
"The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it." -- John Fowles 1964 (from 'The Necessity of Nemo' in 'The Aristos')
"Glass Onion." – The Beatles.
NEMO FIVE
“'Secret Way!' said Anne, her eyes shining. ‘Oh, I hope it’s that! Secret Way! How exciting. What sort of secret way would it be, Julian?’ ‘How do I know, Anne, silly?’ said Julian. ‘I don’t even know that the words are meant to mean “Secret Way.” It’s really a guess on my part.’” -- Enid Blyton (Five Go Adventuring Again).
“There was a pleasant anonymity sitting down at a corner table alone in the little restaurant, ordering vitello alla Marsala and half a bottle of Merlot. He took his time, enjoying his food but eating in a kind of haze, a sense of unreality still with him, while the conversation of his nearest neighbours had the same soothing effect as background music.” -- Daphne du Maurier (Don’t Look Now), a quote chosen for Nemo by Margaret B Simon.
“Memo Nemo Omen” – the author of 4’33”
2. Weirdmonger left...
Saturday, 8 December 2007 6:08 pm
The Blond Actress, who felt so little sexual desire, inhabiting her voluptuous body like a child crammed into a mannequin, stared in wonderment at the Preseident ---From 'Blonde' by Joyce Carol Oates
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posted Monday, 26 November 2007
"Transfigurations never repeat themselves. One need not be frightened of growing old; to the last, there will always be something new." Elizabeth Bowen
"From the cosmic point of view, to have opinions or preferences at all is to be ill." Lawrence Durrell
Both these quotes derive from my own reading and I picked them out from the text, rather than found them as ready-made quotations (from quotation sites etc.)
In fact both quotations are entirely original to Google today through me quoting them on other sites in the last few days!
What are your own favourite quotes?
comments (2)
1. Weirdmonger left...
Tuesday, 27 November 2007 4:28 pm
Below are the quotations I chose to appear in print alongside the stories within various issues of 'Nemonymous':
NEMO ONE
“The oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and the unnameable.” – HP Lovecraft, ‘The Hound’.
“Names should be charms – I used to hope that, by saying some of them often enough, I might evoke reality.” – Patrick White, ‘Voss’.
“Writing will cease to be eventually. The future should found bureaus, where everyone at a certain age submits, anonymously, a truthful biography, it could become material for a real science of man, if such a thing should prove necessary.” – August Strindberg (specially chosen & translated for Nemo by Henrik Johnsson (where are you now, Henrik?)).
“He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare / At whatever time the deed took place – Macavity wasn’t there!” – TS Eliot.
“Whoever I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know…” – Samuel Beckett.
“In an instant I seemed to rise from the ground. But I had no bodily, no visible, audible or palpable presence.” – Edgar Allan Poe (Tale Of The Ragged Mountains).
“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.” – Philip Larkin.
“'It’s giving girls names like that,' said Buggins, ‘that 9 times out of 10 makes ‘em go wrong. It unsettles ‘em. If ever I was to have a girl, if I ever was to have a dozen girls, I’d call ‘em all Jane.” – HG Wells (Kipps)
“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” – Virginia Woolf (A Room Of One’s Own).
“Nobody ever tells me anything.” – John Galsworthy (The Forsyte Saga).
“Anyone who isn’t confused here doesn’t really understand what’s going on.” – Anonymous.
NEMO TWO
“…then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.” John Keats.
“I’ll be your mirror.” – Lou Reed.
“We burn daylight.” – William Shakespeare.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” – HP Lovecraft.
“One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.” – Elizabeth Bowen.
“…clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character…” – Louisa M Alcott.
“So, to that question: ‘Who has ever fathomed the depths of the abyss?’ two men, among all men, have the right to reply: Captain Nemo and I.” – Jules Verne.
NEMO FOUR
"The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it." -- John Fowles 1964 (from 'The Necessity of Nemo' in 'The Aristos')
"Glass Onion." – The Beatles.
NEMO FIVE
“'Secret Way!' said Anne, her eyes shining. ‘Oh, I hope it’s that! Secret Way! How exciting. What sort of secret way would it be, Julian?’ ‘How do I know, Anne, silly?’ said Julian. ‘I don’t even know that the words are meant to mean “Secret Way.” It’s really a guess on my part.’” -- Enid Blyton (Five Go Adventuring Again).
“There was a pleasant anonymity sitting down at a corner table alone in the little restaurant, ordering vitello alla Marsala and half a bottle of Merlot. He took his time, enjoying his food but eating in a kind of haze, a sense of unreality still with him, while the conversation of his nearest neighbours had the same soothing effect as background music.” -- Daphne du Maurier (Don’t Look Now), a quote chosen for Nemo by Margaret B Simon.
“Memo Nemo Omen” – the author of 4’33”
2. Weirdmonger left...
Saturday, 8 December 2007 6:08 pm
The Blond Actress, who felt so little sexual desire, inhabiting her voluptuous body like a child crammed into a mannequin, stared in wonderment at the Preseident ---From 'Blonde' by Joyce Carol Oates
Monday, August 09, 2010
An Anonymous Topic
An Anonymous Topic
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posted Friday, 26 October 2007
Is there a place for Anonymity (temporary or permanent) in fiction presentation?
For example, 'Nemonymous' serves to provide an unique opportunity in the world of short fiction literature (of all times) for an author's work to appear in an anthology that has all its story author by-lines non-embedded in the work itself.
Fiction (outside Nemonymous) is the only art form with such a high degree of artist-name embedding; ie often on the spine, on the top of every alternate page, in the contents list and as part of the story's own in-body heading, plus back cover story-identification blurb etc.
In music, art, sculpture, film, architecture etc. anonymity is often the initial clean-palate approach before establishing the artist's name.
« H E » email
posted Friday, 26 October 2007
Is there a place for Anonymity (temporary or permanent) in fiction presentation?
For example, 'Nemonymous' serves to provide an unique opportunity in the world of short fiction literature (of all times) for an author's work to appear in an anthology that has all its story author by-lines non-embedded in the work itself.
Fiction (outside Nemonymous) is the only art form with such a high degree of artist-name embedding; ie often on the spine, on the top of every alternate page, in the contents list and as part of the story's own in-body heading, plus back cover story-identification blurb etc.
In music, art, sculpture, film, architecture etc. anonymity is often the initial clean-palate approach before establishing the artist's name.
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