Earth Fire

 

When Bob Dylan sang about the tambourine man, I felt older than I do now. That’s probably because I thought I knew everything then and, of course, I knew nothing at all. And, other than this realisation in retrospect, I’ve learnt very little since. Or maybe the encroaching effect of premature senility is giving birth to my second childhood without my knowledge …who knows?

Listening to the jingle-jangle of life these days is like waking up gradually into a nightmare. The sleep in between is the bonfire smoke of death becoming whiter and whiter with the bones on which it feeds. Or something like that. The words flow in. My mind accepts thoughts too easily. That must signify the first dosage of dotage. And, again, the words flow in before I can stop them. Or am I giving birth to a different mind without my knowledge … who knows?

Somebody else’s mind? That’d account for the madness. In fact, it rather absolves me from all responsibility with regard to the flow of words spilling off the table onto the carpet — convenient, to say the least. But whose mind? Yours? I doubt it. Anybody with the sanity that you boast, surely, surely, wouldn’t have reached this far in my ramblings. So, I suppose, logically, it could be yours, then. But, pray, do not proceed any further. That way lies more madness than even you would credit. It can only get worse.

Our Planet Firehearth amazingly once gave off no heat, especially  when you approached it, seemingly heading, as you were, from all points of the known compass. The planet was invisible to the naked eye other than its disguise as a blotchy white moon. And you had been out of Earth’s gambit for some time, unsure whether you were still the subject of gambling dens in the Circles of Jove. You had tried, so far successfully, to avoid the enticements of crafty time-slots, knowing that the dark wheel still turned above, like Fate — making you think you had now fallen in a Black Well rather than a Black Hole; in any event, those in the real know probably deemed you little more than something soon to turn into a burnt cinder.

You had Welsh parentage with a hint of London Cockney. Your hands — having lost the use of their arms during a particularly violent elbow fight in some alien’s cock-pit — grew straight from the shoulders like stunted wings. Your face was as round as the old Earth moon, a moon you hardly remembered, towards a replica of which moon you were now gliding, moons reflecting each other like ingredients in an ancient computer game which only lunatics could play.

You sighed, for you felt Fate was still out of your hands. Pumping on the pedals, your craft widened its trajectory for Our Planet Firehearth, which was now indeed giving off a faint white heat. But, in accordance, you thought, with quasi-Einsteinian physics, the heat was coming in the opposite direction to its source. A real Johari’s Window through which even Schrodinger’s Cat wouldn’t dive, albeit chased by Pavlov’s Dog.

You felt hungry: no one had thought to feed you, mainly because the lights in the years had flickered past, out of control, like the cranking pictures of an end-of-the-pier peep-show. But, now, the years were slowing, crystallising … and making you think about your belly as being kept in a jug of pickling plankton by your side.

A belly like that was all very well, but not very satisfying; you would like to feed it a tranche of beef, before long, followed by your latest obsession, pickled onion and cheesecake. But then the Mad Cow in the Moon would make your innards erupt like meat comets.

They often seem to play pop records at funerals these days. Suppose it’s a sign of the times — that people are dying younger or should I say being killed younger by the Firehearth earth. Ought to make me feel sick, but it doesn’t. Almost as if I’ve been desensitised, overdosed on violence and expendability. Everybody’s tainted by international conflicts and civil wars, some of which have created situations which I once believed could never happen.

OK, OK, some leaders from wartime to Trumptime did their damnedest to be damned. But when you get three-cornered disputes so bitter that each side fights tooth and nail to defeat the other two, whatever the cost in human suffering, uniquely without the apparent need for treaties or side-agreements between any two against the other (which would have been more in tune with hunan nature), well, I’m speechless with despair. Gives me nightmares. Yet again, I shrug it off, shocked only by my ability to shrug it off.

In many ways, I’m the greatest villain of all, by the very act of not caring. Or do I care? If I didn’t care, would I be chewing my nails like this? Wouldn’t I just let sleeping dogs lie or, rather, let them spit and scratch each other to a death worse than Hell itself.

All this talk of the way things are today leads me naturally to my reason for writing to you. I know we’ve not met since those heady days at University all those years ago, but I remember you as someone with a real heart. You cared deeply — not for a feeling of self-satisfaction nor for any hope of deferred divine reward — you cared selflessly, straightforwardly, even gratuitously.

In retrospect, that business of intentional fallacy, verbal icons, and evaluating a poem as if it were a sculpture rather than putting it in historical/biographical context — all hogwash! Poems are written by people. People live, breathe, think about their environment. They don’t write words, as if they’re insulated by the bizarre theories of semantics. Words are not pure artefacts. They are steeped in our heritage and, dare I say, the Collective Unconscious. When words are used, then all of us use them.

Everybody should have the credit — or the blame. Likewise, the events and emotions that the words describe should be part and parcel of each human being’s karmic baggage.

Even the most instinctive native in a South American jungle has to bear his own particular share of the world’s collectivity. Don’t you think I’m right? Isn’t what I’m saying here the road to caring, to that form of caring which you knew was the only way to care, those very many years ago?

I’m sorry for being so verbose. I wouldn’t blame you if you screwed this up and filed it in some area of the past that has gone bad like an old meat. Yet, rest assured, my writing to you like this has allowed me to see more clearly. I’ve removed a few misunderstandings. Clarified a complex or two. Removed my neck from the ultimate hang-up. Incidentally, I got your address from a mutual friend. Do be forgiving, should you ever discover who it was. What are friends for if not to betray other friends for each friendship? And so on forever, until we are all friends. The whole world a chain-letter of love and forgiveness. So, I hope you’ll write to someone else we knew at University in the same vein. So that he or she can do the same. Until the Ying, Yang and the universal You are fighting only for the right to be the first to forgive.

A little boy in a Victorian nursery sometimes stared into the spluttering Firehearth newly ignited this crisp winter morning by his Nanny. He watched the coal-sparks scale the back towards the gaping chasm of the chimney, as they marched in glorious sacrifice to their cause — some of which sparks, he guessed, would still be alive after they left the jurisdiction of the house and sprayed into the moonlit sky. Wars were often being conducted up the little boy’s chimney; he could hear them popping in the night, before the ashes crumbled into Earth’s hearth with several sighs, like a tooth fairy dying. That would be the token for sleepy-byes but, even then, there was no respite from dreams.

Meanwhile, you disembarked above Our Planet Firehearth. On waddling out of the hatch, you farted, a gentle, unimposing breaking of wind, but one that nevertheless floated you towards Planet Firehearth at the bottom of the Black Well, as pale and round as your own face. You were in free-climb and nothing could now be done and, odds were even, you would reach Nirvana before breakfast time.

I heard from you that you’ve written a crazy letter to him. Now I’m really annoyed. How dare you? I should never have allowed you to convince me that you wanted his address to invite him to a University reunion do. And all those other addresses I gave you — have they all received a dose of your idiotic ramblings in a letter? I hope not. I shall be persona non grata, if so. Assuming your letter to him was similar to the one you sent me, I’m not surprised he was so upset. Yes, you put the fear of God in him. Me, too.

Don’t you realise it’s dangerous to play with people’s minds? Who knows what repercussions you’ve already put in motion. Sick, I call it. All that talk of funerals and pop records. Whatever was your purpose? It certainly wasn’t world harmony, as you seemed to imply. Those evil leaders thought they were doing right. But that didn’t make it right, did it? I suppose you’ll maintain that we’re merely bandying words and words simply mean what we want them to mean in the context. It’s like saying if I call a lion a fox, and then someone else does, and then someone else, and so forth, the meaning of the word will eventually become its use, and a lion will always be known as a fox. Believe me, things don’t work like that. People are straightforward and don’t like their cherished logic being undermined. Quit while you can. Lay off.

Nanny lullabyed the little boy, while the moon cast one of its freak shafts through the nursery window (divided into varying silver bars of visionary effulgence) and spotlit his ludo board and purple shaker and mutilfaceted dice and counters … all scattered carelessly by a tired boy before preparing for bed. As myriads of burnt cinders milled amid the heavenly beams, the boy felt disturbed by the idea of breathing them in, as he inevitably must. No fault of his own. Like all markets, entropy could not be bucked. But, then, the moon must have suddenly gone behind a cloud for the cinders had thankfully vanished.

And you uttered a polite swear word in a language not dissimilar to Welsh. Your hands flapped powerlessly at your shoulder blades, your chest was burning tight and you cursed as your blow-empty belly dropped like a stone towards what you now knew to be the real Fire-Earth at the bottom of a real Black Hole. You tried to guess how long the belly would take before it hit the moving orange waves below … but, before it imploded like a divine burp and became just one more gunshot in an endless war between future and past, the last spark in your soul expired with a sigh of fading flame. And the little boy in the roofless mansion wiped a single shiny tiddly-wink of a tear from his eye. Nanny, with an induced twinkle in hers, lent him a lace-trimmed hankie. She dreaded it might be a foreign body in the boy’s eye, some smouldering cinder at this very moment inveigling a way towards his heart via the optic fuse, a cinder that was probably the germ of a Victorian ghost intent on incubating in the boy’s spermbank of a belly. Perhaps, even dead aliens had volition.

I’ve heard from him again. I think whatever you wrote to him has done a lot of good. He apologised for an earlier letter and said that we need not worry as we were the only ones who received such a letter from him. It looks as if he was a shadowy third trying to create some triangular trouble between us – and I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t been stewing over both of us all these years, wondering which of us he fancied most. Or he’s got a screw loose. I hardly knew him at University. How about you?

It’s rather like being haunted by the ghost of a nobody. Just a blur from the corner of my eyes in TS Eliot lectures, now forced into focus as a real person twenty years later. Incredible.

Thinking about it, perhaps I should write my next novel about him. In fact, he might have quite inadvertently done me a good turn with his idiotic epistle! My last blockbuster sort of flunked, didn’t it? Maybe, he will be the spur for me to get back into the swing of writing.  I badly need a bestseller again. All this just might be the catalyst. An ill wind. Which brings me to suggesting that we two get together again for a bit, since we are in the mood of reprieves! I’m sorry we ended in tears last time. Maybe, it’s time I peeled off another layer, eh? My old nickname did signify something at University, but blowed if I can remember who at University coined it or why. Perhaps I made people cry. Who knows? Look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks for your letter. I’ve written again to him to apologise for my first letter. Later, I intend to write a third one to apologise for my second, thus neutralising the first apology. That way, I have the best of both worlds. And I have the exquisite pleasure of apologising twice to him. But to you, of course, no apologies at all. I merely acknowledge you have an equal right to be a character in my fifth novel as I do. “Ghost of nobody” was an expression he used in a letter to you. But, as such, we’re better than most people who are proper nobodies without the ghost of a chance of even becoming icons. So, I’ll see you in Chapter 4 where we were foreordained to meet for the first time and where we’ll collude in rivalry. My fingernails have been filed into claws, ready for the Pinteresque fray. Similes ought to be full-blooded metaphors, don’ t you think? Or perhaps you don’t have the same generous share of God’s omniscience as I do. Pity He’s always burnt everything He writes.

I wandered the circle of sands, digging fitfully with a child’s spade, to see what had been buried at a random spot. The sea’s tinnitus surged in my ears. There was a little boy with his Nanny playing pies and castles by the edge of the waves. In bathing trunks. Studious.

Upon the distant horizon, there was a three-funnelled steamship. Instinctively, I knew someone I loved was on board, canoodling with every sailor they  could lay their hands on, shirt or blouse undone to the navel. I waved … knowing that I was too far way to be seen, even if I could see the steamship. The boy waved too, although he didn’t know why. That’s the charm of childhood. You still know nothing, but believe there is something waiting in the wings to be known, something special, something for you to discover when your boot-heels are set to wander … something somewere.

You munch quickly on the beefburger so you don’t have to taste it. You wipe the ketchup that has fallen on your army uniform. You try to write a tear-stained letter on a serviette. There’s a familiar song on the jukebox which you try to mime (rather unsuccessfully). And a ghostly waitress who doesn’t seem able to stop smiling at you. Perhaps is a big word. But, perhaps, love is better than I remember it. You look through the salt-stained window and see that the boy has disappeared. His pies and castles, too. And, no doubt, the slots your heels made in the sand. The moon shines down a tunnel of now ashy cinders. There’s a bonfire on the horizon.

Factotum

 

A bijou house to facilitate the residing of human beings within an abode scaled-down from a sprawling stately mansion in appearance. The gardens, secret as well as open, were equally scaled down to become flower beds and plots of easy maintenance, including a tiny rockery made from beach pebbles. And a maze topiary seeming to make a toylike pattern that needed no mechanical airborne drone to fathom, merely any strollers around it. Those who lived there were not Lilliputians, but a similar size to you and me, and when we were invited to inspect, we only bent our heads at the neck very slightly to enter through the door, although its knocker seemed no bigger than my thumb.  The servants who would open the door en masse  gave the vague impression that they felt themselves psychologically to be midgets, but  they did come up to our chins, and we soon sensed a friendship developing before we were taken deeper into not exactly a Tardis that might have shocked even Whovians, but, nevertheless, the establishment certainly felt bigger inside than we had expected from its outside. Only a slight adjustment on our part needed to be made, and when we were introduced to the so-called owner of the deceptively miniaturised mansion, they

hardly gave us the time of day, nor could we tell, as with the servants earlier, what sort of person we were actually dealing with. Apparently, we had been called out to deal with some plumbing issue or was it electrical?  It was hard to judge because we advertised ourselves as tackling any job in a rôle of factotum. Did we need to stay for more than a day? We had the foresight to bring an overnight case, just in case.

 Later, we were indeed shown to a small room, tucked into the corner of the roof, where we unpacked our things, soon discovering we had many more necessaries than we had remembered needing to pack. It was almost as if we performed a magic trick with this suitcase. It eventually turned out that we stayed a whole fortnight with all manner of odd jobs, most of which concerned mending various hinges with which the place abounded, such as cupboard doors, loft ladders, inanimate elbows and one huge hinge of which I could not be sure as to its purpose, other than the fact that it existed down the corner of one room, extending through the ceiling and floor into the room above and beyond. We had never considered ourselves to be hinge menders, but during those two weeks we garnered much experience in the art of the ad hoc, as well as in the creativity of lateral thinking. Like the thought that at at least parts of us are still on site, ever improvising and blue-sky thinking. By the way, after the first day, we never got to see the owner again and only the hindsight signs of the servants servicing us. At night, those of us left did take our bended knees and prayed. At least for me, there is a mot juste to describe my consequent condition, but it has escaped me.

A Long Silence

Scene a room; which room the director of the performance must decide.

A man and a woman, Don and Rebecca, are seated in whatever is provided from the props department for them to sit. Dressed in whatever the costumiers can provide. Don rises and moves slowly to the window. Yes, there is a window. A mock window or a real window, it is impossible to see from the audience area. It may be a rose window or a bay window or a sash window or a leaded window or a louvred window – with or without Venetian blinds. (No, on second thoughts, it must have Venetian blinds with what they call a Juliet Balcony outside just visible.) With or without light coming in or going out, dependent on the time of day chosen by those in charge of this performance.

There are long silences involved in the following speech-rhythms… and the characters’ meaningful glances at irrelevant props specially chosen to be irrelevantly relevant in this way.

DON: Have you ever taught one’s lungs to breathe in such a way that they continue breathing after you are dead. Shakespeare did it apparently. And I guess he breathes on, still, with the speech-rhythms of his groundbreaking wordplay.

REBECCA: How can you tell you have been successful in having trained your lungs in this way, after you are dead? And also, in a coffin, is there air to breathe?

DON: We breathe easily in this room 

REBECCA: From the window?

DON: Yes, but not only from the window.

REBECCA: You mean if you go outside you can’t see it?

DON: (longer silence than ever at this apparent non-sequitur)

REBECCA: The rose garden is only there if you see it through the window?

(Enter another man, Steven, breathing heavily, indeterminately older than Don).

STEVEN: I really feel tired today. (He sits under a standard lamp) The bedroom is too noisy and I’m worried about too many things.

REBECCA: What you worried about?

STEVEN: Well, about you two for a start? Then there’s the pigeon loft. Nobody’s been there for ages. Not to speak of the way we’re all treated here. What a performance! Nothing is definite. Nothing is settled. We have to keep making decisions. We didn’t come here to make decisions. We came here to enjoy ourselves. That was the only decision.

DON: Rebecca and I needed a break. We were getting stale.

REBECCA: Come away from the window, Don. You never know who may be out there… By the way, Steven, why are you worried about us two?

STEVEN: I don’t like to see two friends like you so, how shall I put it, so unfriendly.

DON: Husbands and wives are not meant to be friendly.

STEVEN: No, I meant unfriendly to me. You both brought me along, as your guest, like … a family friend, but then you treat me as if I am a stranger.

DON: That was your decision.

STEVEN: My decision?

DON: Yes, it was you who wanted to keep at arm’s length. Separate tables and all that.

STEVEN: Only to give you two some … space … some area for you to lock horns …(laughing) and then kiss. Some air for you both to breathe, before you went on stage as Romeo and Juliet.

DON: You said you preferred to be on your own for meals. No mention of giving us space for learning our lines. Didn’t he say that, Rebecca? It was Steven who wanted to act the stranger. 

REBECCA: Don’t bring me into this. I don’t know what a stranger is. Nobody is a stranger. The world is full of people, but none of them are strangers … in the true sense. Aliens from another planet. They’d be proper strangers. I saw them on the balcony that the backstage boys have built, 

STEVEN: Yes, I know they are proper strangers. What are you looking at, Don?

DON: I’m looking through the window.

STEVEN: Yes, I know but what are you looking at through the window?

DON: The rose garden.

STEVEN: Can you see it?

(Enter another woman, Paula, indeterminately older than Rebecca)

PAULA: I was just outside and I couldn’t see it.

DON: You couldn’t see it?

PAULA: No. But you know me … I often don’t notice things. I wasn’t even looking for it.

STEVEN: Paula, can I introduce you to Don and Rebecca, old friends of mine.

DON: Not so much of the old!

STEVEN: You know what I mean. Paula is visiting me for the day. She is a friend but she is also from one of the authorities.

REBECCA: Which authority?

PAULA: Don’t worry, I don’t think it’s important. I just make visits to see if my customers … friends, are doing OK. 

STEVEN: Paula is a friend and someone who is visiting here to make out a report. She needs to check on my progress. She kills two birds with one stone. She is my friend, and is the person who reports on me.

PAULA: Not so much reports on you, Steven, more a way of caring for you. But I didn’t see the rose garden, getting back to what you were talking about. It would be good to help your breathing if there was truly a rose garden out there.

DON: I can’t see it today, but I can only see it from the window, when I do see it.

(Don tugs the slats of the Venetian blind together and walks to stand by Rebecca. There is an outside balcony just beyond the glass.)

REBECCA: Paula, I don’t think we need humouring about the rose garden, you know.

PAULA: I wasn’t humouring you. If I were humouring you, I would have told you that I did see the rose garden when I was just outside. It’s getting dark, anyway.

STEVEN: Dusk. The best time of day. Not one thing or another. By the way, Paula — Don and Rebecca have been friends of mine for years. But they are not visiting me here. They are staying here, too. Just in case you were under any misapprehension.

PAULA: Staying here or visiting here, it’s all the same to me. I’ll probably stay tonight, myself. I’ve arranged a room here … above the restaurant. It’s getting too dark to travel back tonight. The fog in the lanes and even in the hard shoulder… not a breath of wind to speak of.

DON: No lights on your car?

PAULA: Well, err, I don’t like night driving at the best of times or, rather, my eyes don’t like night driving.

REBECCA: Does the room they’ve given you overlook … the rose garden?

PAULA: I’m not sure. But I’m sure they’ve given me a room with some sort of view, as I am from the … authorities, as you say. But I don’t like to pull rank to get a good room. A view of the backyard would be Ok, especially as it’s getting too dark to see anything at all. But it would be nice to know that my window looks out on the rose garden even when it’s too dark to look at anything at all through the window. A view is always a view, even at night, when you can’t see it. Gives a sense of space and I can’t stand being closed in.

REBECCA: Our room doesn’t have a view at all.

PAULA: Doesn’t have a view?

REBECCA: No, doesn’t have a view at all.

PAULA: No window, then?

REBECCA: Yes, it has a window.

PAULA: Must be some sort of view, then?

DON: What Rebecca means, Paula, is that the view from our window is not worth talking about.

STEVEN: Not worth writing home about. You know, my view from the room they gave me isn’t much to write home about, either. Makes me cry. I sit up in bed, looking towards the window, imagining a clifftop and waves crashing on rocks and seagulls and a sun that plays hide and seek with the clouds off the Atlantic. Makes me cry. I’m nearly crying now thinking about it.

PAULA: Why does no view make you cry, Steven?

STEVEN: Nobody can account for tears. I think of my Rachel. She died you know. Jumped off such a cliffview. Said she had gone for just a bit of air.

PAULA: Your wife? How long ago?

STEVEN: She jumped, yes, she jumped, I think she suddenly stopped breathing … I think it was about ten years ago, dashed herself on to the rocks…

PAULA: So why does no view make you cry?

STEVEN: No view … well, I love views. And I loved that clifftop view, until… that day ten years ago.

(Don and Rebecca point to the outside through the window and silently leave the room together. The room is somehow bigger and airier without them. This is difficult, but each performance management must decide how to accomplish this special effect.)

STEVEN: Good night.

PAULA: They can’t hear. They’ve gone. Surprised they left without…

STEVEN: It’s like that here. Come and go, without bye or leave. They’ve got lines to learn. The theatre world is much harder during this period of ventilators and lockdowns, indeed much harder than when we played in Macbeth in those days before it all happened.

PAULA: Where they’ve gone? To learn their lines?

STEVEN: This time of day, you probably find them wandering around outside.

PAULA: In the rose garden?

STEVEN: Well, if this were a dream or a story, instead of real life, the answer would be clear. They’d find the rose garden and enjoy the folded-up petals. Blooms in dusk are at their best. Gives a dark edge to their beauty, whilst retaining a rosy tinge at their hearts.

PAULA: Nice words. If you had words to express about Rachel and her accidental fall from the cliff, what words would they be? Words give perspective … and, eventually, comfort.

STEVEN: Does coming here authorise you to counsel me, Paula? It sounds so official, drawing me out like this, as if you want me to treat you like a – what shall we call it? – a shrink. 

PAULA: I’m a friend, Stephen, not a counsellor, but if I can help like a counsellor, where’s the harm in that? One does not exclude the other.

STEVEN: I can’t think of the right words to talk about Rachel’s accident.

PAULA: Perhaps you should look out of the window, open the blinds again, whilst you think. You might be able to see Don and Rebecca in the … in their rose garden.

STEVEN: Humouring again? You’re full of tricks, Paula. Word games. It’s too dark even for dusk to call itself by that name. Words are just names for things. I used Rachel as my word for something so intangible. Not even a memory. It’s more a yearning for something I never had. Like Heaven. Not God in Highest Heaven, but God in Highest Rachel. With her mild eyes.

PAULA: Keep talking. Disentangling the past is like trawling for a catch in the clarified sea of the future. The future is always clearer than the past. The past represents the uncharted waters. The future is mapped out for navigation.

STEVEN: The future is always clearer than the past, true, but only from the perspective of now. More wishful thinking than that undoubted reality which is the future. 

OFFSTAGE ASIDES…

DON: Those two talk out of their arses!

REBECCA: The masks on their mouths don’t help, I guess. They make for a lot of long silences with nonsense between.

(Whilst talking, Steven has walked over to the window and opened the blinds. Unseen, Don and Rebecca re-emerge from a different door to the one from which they originally exited. Unseen, in the sense that the audience are unable to see them, but Paula is aware of their return. Steven still stares through the window, his back to the proceedings. Paula beckons to Don and Rebecca to come further on-stage…)

PAULA: Come on, you two. You must be cold. Come closer to the roaring fire, Rebecca. And Don.

STEVEN: Who you talking to? Our friends have found their rose garden, I see. The darkness is tinged with pink and red and white smoke, as if the flowers themselves are smouldering, I imagine. Being awake makes dreams more real, makes them more – what’s the word? – decisive.… I see their two shadows moving together, lips joining … merging in passionate embrace. Smouldering, a lovely word, that, for the colour of roses at dusk. I am sure you are my Rachel in an invented mask disguise. Let’s stand on the very last balcony together.

(Curtain falls on this last History Play. Audience applause sounding like aliens stifling in Earth’s air. A lung silence.)

Too Many Miniatures

 The word-keeper as pen-sharpener looked askance at his creations laid end to end on his work table. He had carved so many words they had spilled and spelled onto the floor, and some were still spilling and spelling, then making a flattened tower of babble with once meaningful sounds. A surface of sharpened words. Yet, the words he had left to him to create on the work table were in relentless supply, and he employed the time remaining to form them into a new pattern of kept words, hand-shuffled from the edge of the work table before there was another sudden rush for a floor covering centred around a carpet. So, he maintained a targeted rescuing of ‘carpet’, time and time again, as it was honed and bored from his pen-keeping. He knew no word creation, especially a very short one, however many miniatures he managed in a lifetime, could possibly start with a carpet — even Henry James would find that difficult whatever words this writer stuffed into lengthier lengths of paragraphing. Meanwhile, our pen-keeper or word-sharpener figured he knew of one such work, still residing on his shelves, safe from spillage to the floor’s latest spell of magic, and he picked it carefully from between two other books and started reading it as inspiration, and was shocked to find it did not in fact start with a carpet, but with a prelude that pre-empted any mention of the carpet, a prelude he had quite forgotten having created and now it was becoming a potential epilogue to his life, so he went straight back to the very start of this current active word preservation and inserted it thus above as the actual title, even if the context could not possibly be co-opted to support its anticipated thematic usage at that point. Then he noticed he’d colloquially left his slippers upstairs and had walked here in bare feet, and was thus marooned forever at his work table and he set about deleting ‘carpet’ from wherever it appeared in this latest creation, starting at its beginning.

The games that children play …

 …are darker and deeper than they seem on the surface, outdoing even the politics of modern Britain, by pitching rabbit-hole conspiracies against hypotheses of honest spirit, and vice versa, polarities with children not unlike William Brown, Jane Turpin and other literary ‘gangsters’, although the modern children in question might claim never to have heard of those forgotten forebears upon whom angels once feared they may have trodden. The leader of this modern gang was destined to become prime minister should his or her eventual destiny remain undiverted from its assumed certainty of direction. They had played in the woods on the outskirts of a town called Colchester so perhaps you can judge for yourself the background of these child characters. I suggest they have a singular embryo of catchment area whatever future backstories were later due to be shown in Wikipedia. Plots were plotted and certain personality rôles were established and a pecking-order agreed between them. Just because they went to the same Comprehensive school did not prevent them comprehensibly masking each individual’s different routes from roots elsewhere in Britain and indeed in the whole wide world of different colours. A conspiracy of rabbit-holes that led to their own envisaged Wonderland at the incorruptible core of the Earth, a place they believed to be more of an outer space than outer space itself. How do I know? I was — am — one of them. And I write these words as a fanciful diversion from truth, that nobody could possibly believe. The most central truth of all alternate facts is a belief in disbelief as something incontrovertible. All lies within the fiction that made you credit it as truth in the first place, but then you publicly decried it as nonsense or shrugged it off as hidden in the plain sight of an obscure fiction author’s website, a tempting trap sprung in such a way as to have already snapped back upon you.

The Gazing Stacks

 An area of high land called the Gazing Stacks where one could chew the fat of the view. The prime spot for spotting an unexpected UFO or the sudden onset of World’s End. A situation and atmosphere inclined towards the sight of strange events, even if no strange events eventually arose. There were always expectations that the unexpected would happen … heard from there … seen from there … felt from there… standing upon and gazing outwards from the Gazing Stacks. Purpose-built for seeing.

Except when I went up there, with any old excuse for short-stay gazing, I stayed for much longer, with the longest sight that my straining eyes could then manage towards the long empty horizon.

Behind me sat the castellated town, behind and below, where the townsfolk could themselves gaze up at any gazers like me upon the high land where I now stood: high land constituted by stack-pillars set conveniently side by side from a previous chance cataclysm that had engulfed the gazers as well as most everybody else.

Any ends of our world affected all of us, gazers and non-gazers alike, with chance cataclysms that often gave dress rehearsals of apocalypse as borne by a neat land-mass as well as a potentially confused rubble. But today I was determined to sit it out and watch the tectonic plates shift into whatever chance relationships they slid into … to sit out even my own death when the unexpected came as I fully expected it to do … today.

Nothing happened at all, of course. Just the usual waiting for nothing to happen. Not a single UFO, not a single earthquake, not even a darkening of the sky with ominous clouds. I mused the time away composing this meditation. I often turned round and gazed down at people in the streets gazing up at me standing, sitting, me standing again, sitting again on the Stacks as if they were saying: “There he is gazing into nothing and when you gaze into nothing with what do you expect to be repaid: naturally nothing.”

Then came somebody to sit beside me. A lady gazer. She and I sat together, without even a shy word to say to each other. The Gazing Stacks are not a place for talk; it’s a place for thought, composing oneself, composing the day, composing the future as one’s eye travels along the never-ending horizon of confused hope or fear.

“It’s cold; it doesn’t look cold.” I was shocked. She had spoken. To herself? To me? I knew not what she meant, until I saw the town’s view of the sun was suddenly overshadowed by the Stacks on the top of which we still sat in sunlight. I turned to gaze at her face. A lovely face. She smiled. I yearned to reply. But then she was disguised, in retrospect, behind the first onset of foolishly unexpected shadows. And I wept. The town’s rubber-neckers had probably vanished into their houses, too. Everything was still, steady as a rock. Soon it will be dark. “Move on. Nothing to hear here.” Nothing to see, too.

Dog Inches

 Writing with a borrowed pen is one thing but when watched by its beady owner to ensure you’d not run out with it, then the panic sets in. The man was one such pen-owner who thought a cheap chewed biro was worth preserving even at the cost of a potential friendship.

“What you writing?” he posed on the long end of silence.

I stared at his drooling features; he couldn’t help the way he looked but – “goddam it – there are such things as hankies,” I said to him, before answering his question: “Well, if you must know, I’m writing about you.”

“Me?”

“Better than coffins and creams,” I laughed. That was an odd expression which I often used when filling in the embarrassing gaps of otherwise already embarrassing muti-tiered sandwiches of words that some claim as conversation. “Oodles of pancakes laced with molasses,” I added, trying to freshen up the old usages.

The man, obviously, looked half-quizzical. His dog was inches away, tethered by a paw to his toe. The dog was salivating over a chewed bone, waiting for a proper titbit of dinner. It’d get none from me. 

“Pen OK?” he queried. The man, not the dog

“A bit blotchy.”

The dog stirred as it decided snoozing was better than snivelling. I sensed its dream.

There was a moonlit graveyard and the tombstones were inching from the ground as creatures came up through the corpses then through the upper rind of grassy ground. I snuffled in a nearby tussock hoping for a titbit from the dead. Better than chicken runs even when the moon had gone and wind-driven rain replaced it — and widespread yellow light turned to soaking spray. I tried to tug a morsel of blind member, only to find it riddled with whatever had claimed it from beneath. I spat out ribbons of what looked like drivel … or drizzle.

Woke from the dog’s dream. Too much wordplay there for a dog to wield, no doubt, upon surveying the scribble still dribbling from the nib. It spluttered onto the page in great black blots of India ink, rather as a fountain pen would perform rather than a ballpoint. A false filling to make the stale words palatable.

The dog stared at me dolefully from the floor. He’d always wondered how pens worked in automatic writing. Each wag a word. Must be haunted. The pen a worried bone. The false nib tentatively nibbled, then eschewed. You see, the canine’s teeth had long since eaten the whole of the empty-headed man, in preference to any part of me, in case it accidentally swallowed the brain, thus ending a dog’s life too soon.

Untoward

 There was no way she could fathom the lock, either to open or to secure the door. She had possession of a key, true, but the key looked gangly and gauche as far as keys were keys in earlier remembered days, at a time when there was no available electronic intervention to help with the physical acts of an exit or entrance from one place to another within a building or into or out of the building per se, as part of one’s initial rapprochement with the duties of the day.

The key itself had appendages that seemed easily bendable by even her slim fingers, and somehow it could only be used by the left hand whether she was left-handed or not. The lock itself was an open heart-shape, the wood around it so splintered she wondered if there was any point in using the key at all but instead merely forcing the lock out with her fingers of her right hand. She supposed there must be legal reasons why the latter course of action would be inadvisable. They would come down on her like a ton of bricks for breaking and entry which, these days, was a capital offence, more serious than helping the clearance of hospital logjams with perfect murders.

So, all in all, she had no option but to address the lock in a lateral way – and she placed the strange key she had been handed by others back into her handbag, while retrieving from it the all-purpose card such agents as herself had also been given, and she waved it in front of the flimsily distended lock with a confident flourish. She heard the tumblers satisfyingly fall one by one, one by one, and, delighted with her own guile, she turned the old-fashioned doorknob beside the now empty lock with some trepidation, but she must’ve used the wrong hand to turn the knob — with the most sinister of repercussions beyond even the simple collateral of terror. You can fill in the gap yourself.

The Mansioning

 

THE MANSIONING — a theme and variations in 2023 

Posted on October 1, 2023

…upon a tract written in 1989 when sitting on Dunwich beach, Suffolk, and published by AKLO in 1991: THE MENTIONING by D.F. Lewis

He had turned right at Yoxford and then driven along a road of lesser standing which eventually wound between purple gorse. The village he sought was said to have been hidden by the sea centuries before. Now, sand cliffs, riddled with the cheeseholing of birds, still threatened any unsuspecting beachcomber with their incontinent crumbling.

Could anywhere be so far from the beaten track, he had mused, as he followed the sign to the beach. He had been here on holiday; I know that incontestably as it was plainly recorded in his journal – my father’s journal. A journal that also confirmed his view that living in a then Colchester town’s terraced house, as he did, was demeaning, which in turn meant he imagined it to be a mansion.

He does not manage to convey the mystery of either place, the terraced house or the open Suffolk seas. In fact, my father complained bitterly, in as many words of one syllable as he could employ (for he had no respect for the reading ability of future generations, including that of his own son), about ill-assorted tourists, accidentally or even by deliberation, finding themselves in Dunwich, unless it were, like him, to explore the sunken mysteries of these seas, as counterbalance to claustrophobia elsewhere.

I could tell he was disappointed, for his words followed in close logical order, simply constituting a straightforward, albeit unblinkered, account of his visit. The mystery, for which he had yearned, was not to be found. Or, at best, the mystery was so fearful, even my father turned a blind eye, submerging it beyond the tidal reaches of his subconscious. He even yearned to return home to the steep stairs and the strait-jacket of his boyhood bedroom. Even its tin bath and outside lavatory that belied even the tiniest inland sea imaginable.

He did, however, sit for some time on the pebbly beach at the foot of the cliffs, staring out at the open sea. Having visited the local museum, an unambitious affair too close to the Ship Inn for comfort, he had gathered – assuming no tabloid hoaxes to spice the interest for tourists were involved – that it was not a village at all that had once had the curtains of the sea drawn across its serried steeples and gambrel roofs, but a veritable city; once a mighty flourishing sea-port, now merely a legend, where, it was said – perhaps again with tongue in cheek – that, on certain days of the year, the engulfed Dunwich cathedral’s bells could be heard pealing across the restless waves. 

My father, in his brusque, monosyllabic style, only hinted at what I believe he wanted to say outright. I imagined him squatting, notepad on knee, beneath the wheeling seabirds as they overflowed from the labyrinthine nests of the uncertain cliffs behind him. I guess they were his own rogue thoughts, circling with the auras of his muse, threatening to soar out across the sea … towards that insistent tinnitus, throbbing just below the threshold of his own ears’ cavernous resonance. Thus, to maintain body and soul as a singularity, he really had to maintain his prose on a straight and narrow keel of plain and simple reality. Only by the mere mentioning could importance otherwise be construed.

I was too young to know my Dad. The journal was all I had to go on. Stretching my wings of expression, I followed his footsteps to some degree, explored the places he had recorded with such simplicity. And the one place I determined to visit was that clutch of fishing-huts by the crumbling cliffs. The map was difficult enough to follow but, by midday, I reached the scene with hopes high – eager to discover some clue as to the nature of my father’s soul.

The yellowing of the ill-carved cliffs was extraordinary, in sheer contrast to the city by-ways that I usually frequented. They would have been truly extraordinary, though, if they had merely been ordinary. Yet, the birds were insignificant creatures whose wings were too small to take them from their vertical sand-burrows. I wondered if indeed the no-nonsense riddling of the cliffs could have been instigated at all by such tiny feathered wavelings. Surely, scaling creatures, great cousins of that scourge of ancient wood, had bored those holes. No cheese-parers they.

Something had slithered from the sea at dead of night … since the pebbles were left slightly trenched by the receding waves: the tactile slaver there shed was thicker (and perhaps sweeter) than the salt spume of wholesome resorts.

How and where my father had eventually died was a greater mystery than his life. His journal had passed through diverse hands, but none had ever claimed to possess direct knowledge. My mother had survived him by several years, so I had been able to question her – even when she kept in the barred cot to which she had been consigned by overweening medics – about the nature of my father. She told me about their mutual mansion. Need I vary such a theme any further, other than merely mentioning that fact?

“He loved the sea. He perhaps walked out further than he could swim,” she eventually said, with some difficulty. I had nodded, humouring one who was my last, if weak, link with the past.

So, in the fullness of time, I sat here beneath the cliffs where perhaps he once sat, building up ideas that are much like a child’s daylong labour at sandcastling. I watched also the peppering of idle tourists as they, too, stared out to sea, more in forgetting than remembering. Their antique forebears, whether within the tiny craniums of the seabirds or in the weltering sumps of unseen lurking ocean-creatures, had decided merely to observe and, at most, adjudicate without interfering. I, also, could never hope to escape mentioning  my own modernity.

Salt tears streamed down the runnels of my face as I finally sensed the slightest tones of a domed cathedral  tolling from beneath the churning waves, like the sibilant sound of flushing away ablutions of some sort. I knew that the reality of any audibility was assured by innuendo; whilst inarguable evidence of violent ringing would only have proved itself an illusion to hide the suspicion of a cheap doorbell. I thus prayed with increasing conviction that my father reached a second peaceful death beyond his body’s drowning.

You see, I yearned to live up to his simple ways rather than digging down to reveal nothing but confusing truths. At the far end of the strand, where no tourist could be bothered to dare wander, I watched the bent figure of a beachcomber with a brood of stub-winged gulls hovering above, each one disturbingly large. I turned away, surrendering any further hopes of becoming my father, and threw pebbles at the waves. I even began to doubt whether the journal had been his at all.

The map of the world was so much simpler than that of a single soul, I considered, as I made my way back beneath the tenuous mansions of the moon toward light pollution elsewhere.

“Truth is not in philosophy, but merely in the mentioning.”

Memoirs of a Miniature

 

The only way Tony could remember something specific was to remember everything as a list that excluded the one thing he wanted to remember, thus remembering the thing omitted rather than the rest of the list, however long the list happened to be. Today the word he wanted to remember was the name of the young woman who had befriended him as a child, and stayed his friend through thick and thin in whatever the cost of living crisis brought them both, including the fact that Tony never grew beyond what Walter de la Mare called a midget although today I would eschew such a word for you to use, and so I try to remember all the other words I want you to forget, like dwarf or gnome or whatever Gulliver called the people of Lilliput that I have forgotten. Meanwhile, the woman, later that same day, when he couldn’t find her in their roofless mansion at a crucial time he needed her most, it was her name he sought instead, a name that so easily slipped his mind, especially when in the darkest of places in which he often found himself, and he so desperately needed to call for her help today but merely mewed out meaningless bleats interspersed with other names in his lengthening list of choices that he knew she wasn’t called in the systematic hope he would have to eventually hit on the right one, because every list is finite, except every list isn’t finite, and Tony sits in a series of personal lockdowns, intoning name after name, continuing to know he was in love with an increasingly nameless woman, and strangely, he knew, even more, that she loved him, despite the fact she called the tiny man whom I at least know as Tony in tones of derision by quite another name, without her needing a list available for redaction bit by bit till she reached his real name, as she must. But one comfort prevailed for him whatever she happened to call him and that was the knowledge that his sweet Cruella truly loved the nameless Tony as the bravest Teeny Weeny in the world.