POST GESTALT FICTIONS (9)

 THE CHINAMAN’S CHAGRIN

“I can’t imagine it bland,” said embattled and embittered Mabel, as she squinted hard at a brightly coloured teapot from the Orient, demonstrating that she was hard of seeing, as well as hearing. Time ticked by, indeed, time ticked by twice.

Getting on in years meant not succeeding to make sufficient buffers against the onset of age, but succumbing to its baffling watersheds slowly, while retaining many of the prejudicial aspects of her generation that called Chinamen Chinamen. Her wrinkled face was one constant gurning of strained attempts to stay sharp-witted and clear-sighted, with her sense of hearing honed to its optimum without any intervening by the tiny filter-baffles (in her actual ear-holes) that she often called steering aids.

She knew not to whom she had spoken about the relative features of the teapot’s decorations, whether bland or not, but they did, to her eyes, seem to depict one such individual — whom she had earlier defined but now forgotten exactly how — grinning from ear to ear. She gazed up into the blur of the shape that was her husband, a man who was laconic at best. Sardonic, most Saturdays, when his duties doubled at the local bookies where he worked. He never held his horses once, but he sure knew how they’d run to a convincing short nose between. Today a sideways bet on a filly at Doncaster, odds on, and a near walkover for an outsider called Scarface, as owned by a rock band called The Machine Stops after a story by E.M. Forster. 

Mabel was gagging for a cuppa, and hoped he’d soon fetch her an infusion of one, but today was just such a busy Saturday for him elsewhere, and the blur was not her husband at all, who was, at this very moment, hedging his bets by having told her — knowing she would forget — that he’d be late home due to an overlap of overtime with real-time.  The blur itself, meantime, was slashed  with a ‘slit’ for a mouth, as she called it, and two more for its  eyes, and with wiry spokes wavering on  each side of its head like wireless antennae, and its eyebrows archingwith chagrin. Eyelids flickering open. Maybe Mabel felt unable to label her innermost affairs, to tell facts from fiction, and which of these two rivals in the race of all races would pass the finishing post first by having gained a headstart in a head she had been given as hers, especially when at near sight of such a slinky silhouette of a foreign frown, she felt teased by the arrival, upon the shoulders of shadows, of an ominously ticking teaset of finest china that contained an over-brewed brand of confusions. A Deus ex Machina. 

***

THE PLAYFUL OCTET

Whether it be most famously by Schubert or Mendelssohn, or even Berio, Gubaidulina, Reich &c., the Octet was simply meant to be playful, a sense of a game of Catch in an antique school playground, a divertissement of enchantments that would be paradoxically reduced when increased by one to a Nonet, or tainted by lack of a quorum in Septet terms, never as serious or emotional  as a String Quartet or Piano Quintet. Well, there are exceptions to these rules, when you consider Brahms’ two priceless Sextets, that perhaps combine a strength of playfulness as well as melancholy.  The most playful Octet ever, however, turned out to be a near orchestral-ensemble sound that Martin once heard, without switching anything on or going anywhere else but his bedroom; it had never been composed, let alone performed in anyone’s hearing, except in Martin’s head, if hearing it inside a head can be called hearing something at all. He became simply all brain with its moving parts, a perfect octagon, yet hung impossibly with someone else’s installations, a would-be octahedron, perhaps, of inner cathedral acoustic sound without the assistance of either tiny bluetooth airbuds or clunky pads with head brace of any size. No excuse for thinking it was music. It simply was what it was, an Octet. A lemniscate of eternity.

Martin knew nothing about the mechanics behind music, and failed to comprehend what staves were except they looked like tramcar tracks to him, and  a crotchet was what he once called his Ma in the old days. Even key signatures had escaped the head that contained them, never to be found again. He looked on the carpet for them, before climbing the dark steps to assist his old Ma’s ablutions. Sadness was as prolific as the dust under his feet, each stairrod a discarded conductor’s baton, one or two once used for vast Bruckner symphonies. It was said that some of the latter’s symphonies could actually conduct themselves, given the vehicle of an accomplished orchestra. Martin’s own head now ached like an over-used Albert Hall auditorium, filled to the rafters just to hear a Trio by Beethoven.

On the landing, he energetically jigged a little catchy Foxtrot without an evident dance partner in his guiding arms, well, except for the ghost that had earlier hung its installations upon his OctaHeadron Collider. He moved on sluggishly, as if the aborted dance had made him a devilfish out of water, and tried to spread what now felt like his eight limbs in quicker step  after hearing a single plaintive syllable from on high, a  sense of playacting if not placatable into playfulness — a syllable as a single black note portending a voice of muted anguish from the attic room to which he was still heading to help his Ma. The sideways ghost now hummed a Brahms lullaby behind him on the stairs. A mixed-up Martin somehow turned in his tracks by escaping their laterally liminal constraint, but he discerned nothing there.

***

THE RAUCOUS NUN

The Sacred Nun they called it, not a normal signboard for any pub, but as it was well hidden in a fold of scenic hills in Cowdenbeath, nobody seemed to care, taking it for granted, as long as one’s pint was painstakingly topped up in a cold dimpled glass, preferably without a handle. A straight glass, not a jug, as they differentiate them down south. How Steven, in deepest Essex, even knew about this pub or where Cowdenbeath actually was, took hold of his doubts when beneath the local pier, as the beach gurgled in his ears like the sound of beer pumps being pulled and white suds smoothed off. He imagined he had imagined such a tipping-point pub, one that would be Heaven for him. One needs to keep all such hostelries in business by patronising — if not condescending to — their respective level bests, beyond the old joke about bottles of Blue Nun wine that preceded the 1970s. Laughably, such a label represented the only posh vintage in town, in those days. He determined to travel to the site of these vaguely absurd meanderings to test the verity of what pumped them to the surface of his mind. And indeed whether there were any scenic hills in an otherwise fictitious Cowdenbeath.

Even Steven broke even, before others had begun to make their even bets. He now climbed the wooden hills to Bedfordshire, on returning from his photographic expedition under the pier, collating what ghosts he had upturned today, shapes and blurs that only chance snapshots could attain through spontaneity as well as the instinctively deliberate pointing of a camera. Of course, he simply knew he would never attempt to find the Sacred Nun tavern in a cavernous part of Scotland’s hilly mountains. He sensed, by what means is unsure, that the tavern’s name was not quite right; it was just a grab in the dark, as dark as the darkroom that was still developing as his bedroom. The wooden stairs seemed endless, and the noise he heard of screaming dodgems he assumed were above not in his head, not even captured on his camera, if sounds, against all bets, could be photographed at all. Raucous screams, trying to tell him something that he could not quite decipher in a visible way, well, not until he — as scared as scared could be — carefully placed the visualised screams of blue murder into the ever developing solution that he even tried to store in driptrays beneath disused taps. So ends this downbeat anecdote.

***

THE LEVITATING TURNTABLE

Francis’s favourite Biggles book as a child reader in the 1950s was, ironically, “Biggles Takes a Holiday”, where the title of Chapter IX in some editions is Biggles Turns The Table, not the Tide. He vaguely remembered this as he thought what had been given above as trigger was  ‘hesitating’ not ‘levitating’, but then Francis realised it was probably intended that both words’ meanings were soon to emerge as a merged meaning. Often, too often, perhaps, he would question the triggers that were given to him for the peripheral miniatures of a much bigger day — indeed, each day was, as Francis once expressed, part of ‘you live a day a day to put life in.’ Each trigger, as title, seemed bigger than what it ignited, but, in turn, the miniatures were metaphorically meatier and, dare one say,  neater, too, than what the trigger tended to portend & what it tended to intend for Francis’s mind before he commenced filling the blank space that it invited should thus be filled by Francis, and then filed as another day done.

Francis sat in his back garden, faced, frankly, with the most literal demolishment by words of emptiness. It was as if he methodically expressed — by meticulous miniaturisation into words — what was actually unfolding as he expressed it, until something happened that never happened at all, a fact which somehow turned this, in turn, from fact into fiction. He was, in fact, approached by a goggled ghost mouthing matters of a ‘big change’ happening, a much vaster maw of a morning to fill than the simple emptiness that faced Francis, in this shape of a childhood version of a fairy story, not a ghost story at all, as he soon realised, even while events were still being unfolded, upon this particular contemplative day, in fact unfolded by something bigger expressing a narrative about him, rather than Francis alone doing this about himself. Were such meditatively holy days holidays, too? Gaps between for refreshment or spiritual restitution, not hesitations at all?

Francis used paragraph breaks as a tidal rhythm to conceal or, on some days, even reveal a sense of a self-confessed hesitation, as he watched the now elf-like ghost slowly levitate as a holy blooming of self or soul to fill the holistic hole that Francis felt the morning had become within him. His own whole train of thought had turned the tables upon himself, as in many an adventure yarn of good versus bad when it comprised childhood fiction’s expression of situations in which good alone always won. 

He would always be unsure if this always always applied. To live a day a day seemed never enough.

***

THE BANDSAW LEGACY

With two pulleys, a driver and an idler, Gordon’s bandsaw was his prize possession in a shedful of tools, plus smaller items like washers, nails and screws compartmentalised in a flat rusty tin with a lid that showed signs of having once been painted red. The bandsaw was plainly more important than his lathe. Back gardens of terraced properties in the 1950s ever boasted such shedfuls, but Gordon’s was the only one with a working bandsaw, one that was so much better than its kindred jigsaw type of device that seemed to have the sole benefit of merely giving its name to what it could produce as patient pastimes for otherwise impatient children to put pictures back together again. A bandsaw was, in short, what the word looked like it meant. A happy commune of tasks, a ‘bandsaw legacy’ just by adeptly cutting up its own lettered label of durable posterity , e.g. in making gnawable cableways, swayable alcayades*, analysed laneways, scalawag bandages, balanced bendways, and much more. 

Gordon soon realised there were missaws in some of the derived words, having first been given this indication by the mysteriously asterisked ‘alcayades’ that later turned out to be a typo the correction of which was beyond the reach of even Gordon’s finely-tuned bandsaw legacy, i.e. the correct word, in hindsight, being ‘alcayatas’, that are L shaped screws, also known as elbow screws. 

Much could be gathered in putting the results of a bandsaw together, unlike the child who often remained temperamentally jiggered to pieces, never getting beyond the straight pieces! It takes much compartmental strength to complete intricate miniatures of ‘repair shop’ skilfulness, a legacy left to Gordon’s otherwise idler of a son who happens to be myself as still driven to succeed simply by compiling yet another bandsaw puzzle such as this miniature that needs to be read, not simply looked at as a rusty memento. 

* ‘alcayades’, or governors of provinces, about him, standing barefoot, trembling, bowing to the earth, and, at every word he spoke, breaking out into passionate exclamations of praise, as, great is “the wisdom of our lord the king;…” [from the internet]

***

GRAPPLING WITH ZERO

She was a mathematician, she wasn’t the cat’s mother. Her two catchphrases were “hold your horses!” and “you haven’t even got beyond the straight pieces.” Whether the slowest kid in the class kept the others down to its level, she wondered, as she looked into its defiantly scarred face. Since the Big Change, she had all manner of curricula to teach them, only to receive a one word assessment of her maths teaching skills, especially as she had to mix part of her days with instruction on emotional health. And the tiny kid with scars most of all.

She had sat the slowest kid beside the fastest. This seemed awfully traditional, but why not double-down upon her role as someone they called Miss Crosspatch. Her first catchphrase — now forgotten as it was in the finite oblong of the previous paragraph —  meant ‘don’t rush your simultaneous equations!’ or some such, and the second catchphrase never had any meaning at all because nobody could catch the core of it. It was as if some middle was missing that mathematics knew and literature didn’t. Not an absolute zero exactly, but an approximation to zero as an irrational number of ideas teeming. The last word would complete the picture no doubt, as yet another oblong slipped away.

Some of the kids even grew up to remember Miss Crosspatch as someone they had fought against but now loved, in hindsight, for her wisdom. But where was she now, so that they could thank her? Such is life, it has to be said. Somewhere there is a teacher’s frown saying ‘don’t rush it!’ But the words keep coming, nevertheless, teeming out of nowhere into nowhere. Each word a piece of the bandsaw legacy of picture puzzles, and a negative number compared to which zero was huge. All hung overlong through the obtusely blurred memory of a tiny face too scared to face the world. And, thus, we ever reach the last word but one.

***

THE CROW’S CHRONICLE

A world without passwords would be heaven indeed, if that was not a non sequitur in the making. Indeed, Aver was not a bird watcher, never a twitcher between friends, and, laughably, he did not know the meaning of orthography or even how to spell it. Indeed, the society in which Aver lived boasted no sanctioned vocabulary at all, let alone the means to differentiate between a crow, a raven, a rook, a castle or any other breed of corvid. Magpies, corvids by nature, were snatchers of words to eat whilst jays, perhaps  corvids themselves, were feeders of such words to make them bigger, but even a word like ‘passeriforme’ could never, in itself, recreate a blackbird to pass as a corvid at all.

The crow called itself a black bird, though, with the important space between the two words. Aver knew this as he had the skill to talk with crows, albeit crows alone. No other ‘bird’ would do. Crow as the verb to boast, crow as the forename of a special form of nest, and, most important of all, crow, when in its past tense, as the word for sailors on a ship. Aver spoke into the depths of a nest upon one such ship, in the hope to attract attention of the crow within it, as his legs wrapped around the top of the mast so that he could more easily leer dizzily into the woven abyss of twigs and grass blades that bound these twigs amidst the dried mud. He needed to elicit from the crow the chronicle of the day, the log, as it were, of the ship’s onward journey. The crew stood below gazing up at their captain whom they knew under a different name to Aver. Or was it a different name than?

If the cabin boy and the chief mate were ever at loggerheads, Aver never discovered, other than the fact that tears in the white rigging made things sadder than they actually were, as the ship eventually foundered in Newfoundland, a part that was deserted, as predicted by the crow’s chronicle. To fulfil destiny was easier than charting a voyage that contravened it, as the crow would have attested to those who could understand crow lingo, after Aver had drowned, a ‘dying fall’ while there fleeted, across his mind, a whole world of words teeming from a series of abandoned vocabularies. And now the rest of the crew wailed in despair as they realised they had been logged out, without one possible password to get back in. The default password of Raven2 had been changed, it seemed. Even oddly angled chess moves or random picks of upper or lower case and number failed to make even a single  encryption twitch. And, however strong the repeated creations were, such nonsenses failed to move our story on. 

***

FLAT-LINING TARA

 After landing successfully in a derelict aerodrome without the barest sign of even one residual runway, Tara’s piloting skills were justly praised by the reporters present at the event. Flashbulbs popped, champagne corks, too. The suspicion that her forced return to the ground had been pre-planned — even rehearsed while wearing a  long dress more suitable for a cocktail party of filtrated and inflated chatter — failed to take away from her razzamatazz of glory. 

Everything is staged to some extent, even accidents.

The land around the aerodrome that soon vanished further into the undergrowth infiltrating around it was continuously inflated within the annals of history as a land called Tara, as named after the pilot who had made it famous. A land that was the only permanent point amid ferocious love between each and every pair of people as well as the strange embracing of wars among plural peoples.

Everybody thrives on conflict and the communal battles to survive. Empathy as a protective force.

Tara, in the branch of history that grew along the flat lines of a deforested alternation of time that paralleled nothing but itself. 

She gazed into the fruity complications of her spiky cocktail as she fended off small talk with an unanswerable phrase. Call it deadlining, call it whatever you like, this did not quell her interlocutor’s response. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a dambust.”  Would she tell of her famous landing upon her now even more famous land. The eponymous location that headlined what we knew of her, by the account above that came out of nothing, as it were, other than the incontrovertible fact she existed plain and simple before us in her scarlet frock similar to the aeronautic technology that also decked her trusty skycraft with the tented shapes of multiple rudder systems so as to optimise the thermals. Whatever Tara said in response to the man who had thus rudely flat-lined her at the party remains closeted in a different account to this one. Although, that fact remains unsure as the final crafted copy has not quite landed yet. Chockful of the chocky-blocky of clocktime.

After all, tomorrow is another day. It depends which one you choose.

Post-Gestalt Fiction Miniatures (8)

 ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE DREAM ARCHIPELAGO

“Nearly there,” said George defiantly, as they petulantly strained their muscles on each oar at a time. Timothy the dog barked in their ear, but never you mind, thought Julian who was often in complete telepathic harmony with Anne, beside him. He seemed to have no task in hand at all.  Dick was hanging over the side, meanwhile, using his fingers to trawl for sticklebacks.

The horizon was irregularly patched with the edges of Our Isles as they were called by the denizens of the latest small port the young ones had visited. Anne had thought Hour, George, a dialect pronunciation of Oar. Julian did not know why but he had a vision of an ancient pitcher, while Dick simply knew it was Our that was the word the previous islanders had said, as if visitors such as these youngsters were already part of the combined soul of the land masses in question — a distinct destination they had yet to reach, now readily approached, should the youngsters manage to negotiate the more boggy inlets that Dick still dredged.  Boggy, yet navigable, George was pleased to see, while we at last could discern that it was Julian at the tiller and not the unknown ghost we had at first assumed. Timmy’s tail wagged in relief that all remained well with his crew.

The sun now smeared itself further than the perfect red circle the mist had created  from its weakening power, as if this diminishing soul of once bright light were sharing itself more widely to the now perceivable clinging cliffs that had earlier been the unconnected patches of Our Isles. Joining  each to each as part of twilight. We had lost sight of the boat, but still could hear the irritating barks. At least they’d have to jettison one of themselves once they reached  the higher gravity sounds that made floating more difficult. We knew whom we hoped they’d choose. The ewer of fresh water would be our gift to them, had they the simple nous to ditch at least one of their crew. Them who had said most in our hearing or…

***

TRIGGER WARNING

The voice was in in the middle of the large parlour — not the metaphor of a near invisible elephant’s voice but that of its equivalent as a ‘horse in the room’, whereby all of us avoided looking at it, but simply, instead, to walk around it, not even whispering of its existence to selectively trusted ghosts of people whom we had once known in the room. However, when possible, without being noticed, we actually whispered into the horse’s raggedy-tag ears to keep it quietly tamed, joking about where it had lost its trunks if not its tusks. Of course, by trunks, we meant its swimming gear! 

The parlour was bigger than most and there was space enough for such an avoidable steed between the three piece suite and the old-fashioned television that we still attempted to watch. The fuzzy picture on the screen we blamed on the reception area where we lived not on the near invisibility of such an animal that acted as a translucent filter of ghosting for our viewing. Its snorts and hoof-fidgeting were disguised by the cowboy westerns that remained our main diet of entertainment, helped by plenty of gunshots, and, yes, other horses, some of which, sadly, were killed by the arrows of Red Indians.  A sad sight to see through our room’s ghost of a horse and, there you have it, that was the guilt that we all walked on eggshells to ignore, knowing that each of us knew about it but intent on never mentioning it out loud to the other.

Which brings us to where we started — the voice, the voice, the voice in the middle of the room that suddenly broke cover before we could break the horse whose voice it turned out to belong. To tame is to break is to quell is to quench is to cramp is to cow is to never recognise the guilt that we all felt as a veritable stampede, piercing through the raw hide of our skin to the souls within us. Each a horse called Trigger or Hi-Yo Silver.

Hold your horses, though, as the saying goes. I held your hands and, coincidentally, you held mine. It couldn’t be us that this is all about, surely. We never watched cowboy films, in any event, nor anything else, for that matter. After lockdown, our lower face masks had ineluctably and permanently slipped upwards, and so, without apertures for eyes, we wondered if trunks were needed at all. 

***

BELLIES UP

Every story, whatever it is about, belies its title, this being a universal truth such as mankind’s inevitable cruelty to mankind. Yesterday’s trigger warning has become today’s click and blast, as more words pour out upon the screen with a meaning that is more related to paradox than to logical connection. A meaning that exists within both these elements nevertheless. A mutual synergy of a pair of parts that belies its unnatural coupling. Whereby happy endings seem impossible in the darkening light of what was first raised above.

Jerry had spent most of his life kicking up. A small child ever predicts its larger version with grey hair. He judicially chose his optimal version on earth, so that we can, without impunity, refer to whatever he chose as the pronoun short for whatever entirety he was. This was convenient to those of us ourselves who were comfortable with thus being in the first person plural and wanted never to be forced to think about pronouns other than their surface obviousness. We are we, and ever shall be us.

We, of course, sympathised with whatever might lie within being whatever belied what lay without. Jerry told us one day that Jerry was short for Jeremiah, and if you don’t see the latter name spelt out like that and only heard it said, it might sound like a name in the same cohort of names as, say, Joanna and Jessica.

Which brings us to the core coincidence of what is spilt today as words upon our screen under the fingertips’ force of pressure that mobilises these very words, words upon words, until, the words, as ever, abruptly stop before you think the story is finished while the words of its title remain unexplained by our further wordy words beneath it. Yes, a coincidence that belies all else around it, for after Jerry married Jessica, Joanna was their first happy arrival, a happy kid that kicked up as much as Jerry — the happy beginnings of a happy ending. Words without end, for all of us.

***

It was not only the original Ada’s Byron-blood in her veins but also her early historic connections with mechanical computers that made Denzil’s version of Ada rather special. He thought about re-christening her Aida but that would have been too Verdi, too much verging on artifice than creation. Ada would have to do, especially without an Adam for her vestiges of Eve.

 Such an entity as her would ever be incomplete, and Denzil needed a balance between perfection and settling for whatever she was or had turned out to be, as was his first intention. For example, he had omitted to optimise her mathematical faculties, whilst concentrating too much on her poetic ones, a fact to which he failed to give even a second thought. She became, eventually, a rummage sale of a ‘person’, but, on and on, he still could not help testing out, within her ‘body’, brand new components that often counteracted each other, until he wished he had left well alone. This wasn’t a Mary Shelley process; it was more a slow motion metamorphosis that Kafka might have invented as fiction, had he not been too busy admiring the slopes in locations he visited. Little is known about Kafka’s slope obsession, because he generally kept it quiet. And Denzil, too, had secret preoccupations of his own that featured elbow shapes and ‘dog paths’ as well as steampunk constructions that were both old-fashioned and ground-breaking. Ada was, if anything, neither old-fashioned or ground-breaking but was simply, most of the time, quite lovely in his eyes, dressed in lace and mouthing romantic sonnets as well as algebraic equations. But the doubts still amassed on a gradual gradient.

I first met Denzil when I was researching the old customs of bazaars, jumbles and rummages as a means of raising money for religious organisations as well for charities of a more acceptable value to the sick and poor in society.  He told me about Ada, and I gathered slowly that he had got very frustrated with correcting her imperfections for them only to reveal, as a result, different imperfections. He had, in desperation, thus donated her to an organisation who happened, that very weekend, to be holding a secondhand sale in the local Hillcrest Hall. I could see the tears in his eyes for what they were, and I promised myself to visit the pick through and pick up scrimmage to see if I could salvage her and include her in my thesis for the university as well as return her later to Denzil. Imagine my consternation, when I found a far more milling crowd than I had feared; it hustled round the hall turning over discarded clothing, partially trying it on for size — and a flurry of barging folk who angled, each with sharp elbows, after choice items on the knickknack and gadget tables. But I could not mistake Ada sitting there on her own fold-up trestle, awaiting her fate, because she seemed, by her look, to trust in serendipity and eventually in a good owner.

Her smile was wry as well as sweet, as she spotted her handsome idealised Adam defiantly heading towards her through the thralls of crowd and the hubbub of near operatic solos all part of the mix of noise and background music. He turned out to be the man who I once thought was me. Neither ever gave Denzil a second thought thereafter.

 Life is an otherwise invisible series of zig-zag slopes, never too steep except in your wildest worries, but you still need perseverance to scale them.

***

A MANATEE’S MATINÉE

In the very old days, when Desmond was young, they had continuous performances of films in the smoky auditoria of cinemas, whereby, if he arrived at his tip-up seat in the middle of a film, he’d watch it from middle to middle, and still be satisfied with the plot. In older age, when ‘separate performances’, matinée and evening, came into vogue, it wouldn’t have seemed to matter, anyway how, because, by then, his mind had lost most of the plots he once pretended he had once grasped!

Thinking back into his past, now, was his habit and also his method of inhabiting the present tense.  Today, even suspense films had become artificial and staged in flashy flashbacks sometimes with blasts from some old cannon or modernistic ray gun. Drawing-room dramas with subtle innuendo and once matinée idols were far and few between, but imagine his anticipation of tantalising promise when tipped off about a film he actually might appreciate, in his twilight years, a film called ‘Man At Ease’. He never went out in the evening, so he booked the afternoon performance and duly arrived with a stub of a ticket grasped in his hand — a fact that should have given rise to suspicion, because tickets these days did not exist as they had been taken over by people scanning bar codes from a tiny screen in their hand. 

An usherette accompanied him to his seat by means of her torch. He could not see if he was in an empty or crowded auditorium, but the fact there was no smoke might have given him a clue. He was, however, bemused that the usherette had stayed with him and sat in the adjoining tip-up seat. 

The curtains swept aside from the screen, and he was worried it might be a hologram of Clark Gable that walked forth, heading his way into a barroom painting by Edward Hopper, one with a code device on its door to be swiped, but Desmond turned his attention to the now naked screen where the projector picked out shifting shapes with flippers emerging from a white backdrop, this being a liminal space now made darker by what was beamed into it, with stubby grey heads of some proportion and slowly gaping and shutting mouths, their outlines swimming as if in thick treacly smog. 

Luckily, he had come in at the end, not the middle, with flashbacks forbidden.

***

SPLINTERING HARMONIES

A haar is a sea fret, a method that mist uses so that it cannot be missed, thus eventually becoming an impediment of sight of such a threatened degree that it has to ignore the often obsolete foghorn warnings about it — by swaddling these horns or pretending they are new harmonies in an unknown work by Edgar Varèse. 

Various craft, fresh from a new historical Dunkirk, gathered in the estuary, sheltering not from a storm but by the biggest fret of all, a mass of whirling ghosts that did not need wind to summon them. The doldrums of calm were their engine of deployment in this newly imagined Sea of Sargasso spores.

Sagacious captains, each often a sole crew member upon a singular vessel, took off their heavy boots at terror of later drowning, and then tried to establish wireless connection with each other to suss out to where the customary points of the compass had drifted. To be off piste in a a widening channel without horizons was a fear more awful than simple anxiety, on the brink of terror itself. 

But ‘terror has no diary’, as the Gothic novelists once said, and silent hearsay now held full sway amid the splintering harmonies and spare parts — and within the vascular vessels of mankind, prone to bursting when a foghorn did at last find its voice close to one captain’s ear, as it happened. A siren site unmapped by any sane geography of the severing soul.

His name was Captain Saverio, degraded by the veils and floaters across his eyes as he issued his very last SOS, only to find everything was down, with no means of rebooting. The seaweed seemed not only to be tangling the rudder but climbing slowly aboard with clearer eyes than his.

Save Our Saviours, I say. A story surely cannot be a story at all, where its central protagonist is only introduced at the very finish of it, a spearcarrier to boot. 

***

THE SEMAPHORE GAMES

“Hold your horses!” broke in Arnold with complete disregard for the equestrian dressage event happening in ‘stiff upper lip’ style, shouting, as he did, from the corner of the show area where he sat in the shade of a giant brolly. He must have known a shout like that might spook any stallion worth its salt, and indeed he knew it shook his wife’s colt to its bottom belly — and he simply chuckled to himself.

With his ever being dressed in a choker of white silk at his neck, leather patches gathered in wrinkles on his elbows, over-blown pantaloons decking his otherwise scrawny hams and white-spotted spats just below his calves, Arnold had, in his fading mind, concocted a whole series of Semaphore Games where there were opening and closing ceremonies, medals of gold, silver, but no bronze for a horse’s mere brazen braying. It had to show its mettle. And medals of any colour had to be earned with whole panoplies of silent-film and slow-motion manoeuvres strictly within an enclosure as exact as a mathematical rectangle. 

Contestants had to be adept at signing for the hard of hearing, too. No loud jokes about jodhpurs. But, mischievous as Arnold was, he decided that he would  test whether they had any spine worth a stallion’s aforementioned salt by his sporadic shouting as disturbances from the sidelines. An umpire, as he considered himself to be, cheating at his own imagined rules of semaphore was one game too far, though. Even the speeches by sports dignitaries had to be done in silent mime. Only Arnold had permission to speak or even shout aloud. Hamstrung by misapplied attempts at ham acting via the fickle fetlocks of broken sanity. But even he, in old age, had to bear the consequences.

“Hold your horses!” he shouted even louder, as it occurred to him nobody had taken a blind bit of notice of his first shout. Even his wife had humoured him with a passing nod as she now cantered by on a gelding with her own back as straight as a set square and her eyes fixed like half-moon protractors. He somehow now knew that the  compass points within the rectangle were sharper than geometry allowed, and he vigorously signalled his dumb panic with the waving of previously paralysed arms. His cohort of comrades from the peninsular war ever said he was jolly well overdressed for his age. Arnold’s old spine now stiffer than his wife’s side saddle. Even the show jumping of his heart was now merely hopping to a drum without sticks to bang it. A bronze medal for a life lived, never likely to have been just a head short of beaten gold.  

***

PANDEMONIUM AT THE VICARAGE

Although most in the village had long known it as the Rectory, or dubbed the Clergy House by a rare few others, but from where that ‘although’ followed was the first mystery, remaining a conundrum more devious than a deliberately devised whodunnit, hence this full stop.  

Shaking off any booby-trap endings, this narration persisted with references to a priest or vicar, also known as the Reverend Thomas Apse, but the same narration had a tiny few of the villagers calling him Father Tom when shouting across the street, the latter name being a more famous name in annals other than this one. Names were either names or not names, however many times one used the word name.

A stranger in a bobble hat was a visitor to the village, eager for shelter, and also seeking a friendly church deacon or sexton to chat to about ghosts and gravestones, so that he could feel cosy and swaddled safe, with no danger from mysteries other than traditional ones of tales told around a cheery fireside.  Flaming logs or coals preferred, but even a single-bar electric heater would suffice.  The stranger sighed with relief, as he saw a friendly cleric emerge from what appeared to be the only church, but then there came another with a broad beam of a smile, well, two was perhaps even better than one such cleric. However, when a smiling, often grinning, series of clerics, some with dog collars, others with white dangly bows, began to troop out to welcome him, the stranger shivered, then shuddered with a frisson of warm fires lost and darknesses of inchoate mystery inherited. Too much of a good thing… as the misrembered saying started. He made up the rest of it.

Father Tom, the friendliest of all the holy hosts who had welcomed our stranger, relaxed back in the firelight, after an untold period of upheaval in events, sitting beside his verger as a misnomer for villager or sexton, while rocking a bobble-hatted baby in a prêt à manger. …makes an upper case God lower. The most mysterious of all mystery plays, empty stop.

***

THE SCARRED FACE

C.S. Lewis rhymes with D.F. Lewis, exactly letter by letter. And one of them wrote of Ardua who was her own worst enemy. Dressed in finery fit for a different century, she peered at her face in the mirror, a face that showed a thousand stories, a mirror that contained many more. If she had been a soldier in the peninsular war at the cusp of the Big Change, she could not have had so many scars that were more permanent than the tattoos on the rest of her body, and she thought deeply, too deeply, some say.

These were not exactly memories but conceits that created a person she had never been. However, they were her memories, too, some she shared with others in the recent trials and tribulations of border skirmishes. Faces passed intermittently  before her in the mirror, a few even without scars, yet you could tell that all had travelled through adversity to the stars. Through adversity to the stars. As above, so below. Just the tip of the glacier that was her. The wardrobe of roles-to-play-act-or-to-placate that made up the whole of Ardua. The same wardrobe upon the front of which the mirror into which she peered was fixed.

But not fixed well enough. If the ice cap fits, wear it, she thought, as she clambered into the relatively tight-fitting  wardrobe, as cramped itself as any costume she could make herself flaunt; she heard the mirror crack like ice with an unholy screech that felt like a slow unfrozen calving from the Arctic wastes of Anarchia, yes, as if the mirror outside the wardrobe door that she had shut too quickly and firmly behind her had now found its final faultline. Only vampires could screech that loudly at seeing no reflection from the mirror into which they peered, one by one, each giving an eventual sigh of sorrow and a shake of the head in resignation, in the end, mutual worst enemies to that very end. From blue tattoos to varicose flues as synonyms for limbs, from ingested bloods to congested cuds for calves as halves of what they once were as an intrinsic herd, indeed, from the very scars down below to the very stars up above, per Ardua had in fact climbed aboard a craft called Narnia. The latter pair of proper nouns, though, merely a loose assonance of names, not a rhyme at all, until realising her actual proper name in Narnia was Tania, her very best friend as exact end-echo of end.

POST-GESTALT DFL FICTIONS (7)

 CHANCERY AVENUE

A man who could only count to twelve and blew kisses with a ‘have on you’ outburst of spittle, passed by but not before ushering in the story of George in an ill-go-rhythm of words. 

Indeed, for this George, ‘chancery’ was an expression he used to describe life itself, life being a phenomenon that was never subject to any conceivable law, but simply a rash of randomnesses, yes, a chancery of mazy mischances! A happenstance of devils and gods masquerading as rulers under their own laws, but really they were agents of enforced angles for angels that did not exist. George’s own spiritual geometry was certainly not a whimsical set of conspiracy theories, but his sense of chancery was paradoxically steeped in a yearning for such certainty —  that an after life was already waiting for him. Death was one further shake of the dice for his counter to be moved to a different board of ruled-out squares. George mischievously sniffed at the fate he set himself to follow while all along believing in it faithfully. Snakes and ladders made a ludo of everyone, once upon a time. Geology a loess of nous or gneiss.

But how can such ‘certainty’ of a yearned-for after life be reconciled with any sense of chancery in the terms that George had prescribed it? A lawless law that filled every court of the land now prevailed and, as some may say, had been increasingly demonstrated towards where such a loss happened for real today. Judges in wigs who were just as fallible as George sat in benches of illogical infallibility disguised as the ultimate logic of logic itself. Teachers for third-formers in schools had set squares that bent and wavered with every quirk of character and opposing personality. The only real certainty, George finally realised, was the art of mathematics. This ‘art’, like other arts, was, however, just another moving feast of interpretation about uncertainty leading to an aesthetic pleasure at such crafted designs of beauty or constructive distastes for dystopia. His template of contemplation, meantime, became as abstract or amorphous as what made him have the thoughts that are adumbrated here in his name by the imprecision of words. The empirical rigour of experimental rules that now told his story by a snort of disdain from a passing stranger instead of by an intoning of evidence gathered for scrutiny.

George sat in his wig, presiding over the guilt or innocence of every jury member that had been brought in before him, gathered off the street by chance choice in such a grouping of twelve, each of them staring up at him with passive eyes. No single person among them to be tried, except all or none of them. A few jurors he seemed to know, the others not, or forgotten. They spoke, by a unison voice, their vows of ‘nothing but the truth’ to an intrusive usher with a bible. Witnesses were called, but none of them come to this façade of something deeper than what is plainly told. 

“Nothing but the truth,” George echoed in a ritual refrain, again and again. And he muttered to himself of irrational numbers and the value of nothing in the quadratic avenues of algorithms disguised as school algebra. Were there candelabra in heaven? Fiery torches in hell? Protractors within the otherwise empty clockcases of time? Even a sad judge like George had a speck of Judas in his soul, as he placed a pitch black cloth on his head, and sneezed into the open courtroom of twelve jurors without intervention of hands or hankie. The latter was already aloft on his wig. The formers’ fingers making signs of blessing.

***

THE BRICKLAYER’S DILEMMA

Or 

The Disconnecteed Diptych

(i)

They carefully laid the vinyl recording of ‘Suite Italienne’ on the gramophone turntable. The hole in the middle of the dog and horn label neatly fitted the short spindle, after a judicious wiggling of it into place. No autochange device for them as that might have damaged the vulnerable grooves. 

In those old days, one did not need to specify the ‘vinyl’ epithet to disconnect it from the more compact version that eventually — we now know — followed it. And ‘one’ was an even more fitting  pronoun than ‘you’ to distinguish ‘them’ from me.

As the sapphire needle hit the grooves running, they awaited the seemingly untypical Stravinsky sounds to delight them, having forgotten that the suite’s actual ‘tunes’ derived from the more familiar name of Pulcinella. 

The day-job on the site had taken a lot out of them, and now was the time to relax with music. A hod full of back-breaking bricks on their back had to be managed skilfully so that the unbroken bricks stayed unbroken. Their own back, too. An occupation of two distinct disciplines: the first of loads and balances in a heavy-lifting exercise of utter strength and the second of Dick Whittington marching off to London with his small bag of belongings as ballast to the shoulder stick he forgot was resting in his hand, the downward pressure of which was, as if by magic, a counterweight to what belonged to him, then the skilful yet disciplined laying of bricks into set patterns of formulaic stability — the cement between being the story material that held all these disconnected building blocks of plot and character together. 

(ii)

In the old days, just after the cusp of heavy-lifted 78s became lighter-weight 45s, there were songs about seeing an alligator later, about purple people-eaters. Johnny with his hurricanes. Charlie Gracie’s butterfly. Duane’s bass guitar. Buddy’s pointy leaves. And a not so familiar name these days, thus forgotten, who had a one-hit wonder with The Song of Builder Matilda. You could hear all such songs – even Builder Matilda – on mighty wurlitzers of the musical spirit called Juke Boxes each with a tentacular arm taking its pick from the shuttling whorl of black discs and slapping it down … the disc’s middle missing: punched out – and, indeed, in those days, one never heard a single middle, but just the beginnings and ends. Like the whole of life, with things going blurred with strangeness in one’s twenties and thirties — and since dying in one’s fifties those fuzzy years became your lost middle. The middle that was punched out to make a bigger empty hole … so that the brimming music could be threaded by the chunky central spindle as it dropped with a plop upon a round rubber mat that all those Juke Boxes had at their spinning heart. Where the revolutions per minute were, should they be counted. Where the grooving was. Where the friction was. Where the needle was. Where the needle sometimes got stuck, hanging from your pick-up like a huge foreign insect with a tubular torso. 

Yes, that was their lost middle. Once upon a time, though, they woke up to find themselves barely forty-five, let alone fifty, however much judicious wiggling they did to make themselves even younger at thirty-three! They looked downhill in both directions of coming and going. Yearning for the spires of an imaginary Heaven, not London Town. Finally, they even hoped to meet their God and Maker, their own Builder Matilda in the skies. A ‘continuous performance’ of old cinema days.

You’d forgotten your name. But it came back to you briefly when you reached the magical age of seventy-eight  – before you forgot your name or its replacement code yet again: this time forgotten forever. ‘Forever’ here is doing a lot of heavy-lifting for just one word’s meaning, I guess.  A back with countless backs to carry.

***

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUSTBIN

There was no mishap for it, Brad thought.  The lady, blousey and boozy Louise, was not his girl friend simply because his ex had dumped him for another dude, but good old Louise was someone he would have dated anyway, even if his latest ex had never been his ex in the first place or now remained a prospect who he hoped one day would become an ex ex. 

He really must put that particular ex in the final exit of his mind, and to concentrate on Lady Louise, or Big L as he thought of her, a woman with an even bigger heart, and to settle down for a while, when such whiles, these days, could last for a lifetime or at least for a hop, skip and jump of time which would seem like a lifetime.

Brad had done Big L a big injustice; she was never boozy at all. He just liked the word that seemed to go with ‘blousey’, the latter epithet only being true in plainly objective terms by dint of the fact that she often wore a floral one — with a skirt to nearly match it and with far more make-up than his previous ex would ever have considered for temporary  use on her face let alone as permanent tattoos on her legs and arms. The nose rings were common to both ladies, it had to be said. All such marks and trinkets, meantime, told their own backstories, which he needed to ‘read’ as far as possible before even contemplating linking up with their fronts. No, if the real truth were told, it was Brad who was the boozy one. Lazy, too, unlike either lady. 

He tried to scribble all this down before he became a self-induced write-off and to get his thoughts as straight as the lines of the eventual printed version, while casting himself in the third person singular. Nothing could be made up, and with no false appendages, but merely to set out the unvarnished truth. But he needed sustenance to get the awkward text skimmed off to reveal a more unpretentious clarity. The beery belly was his downfall, though, in his room empty of any ladies, let alone invented ones! Shortlisted for the slush pile with one mishop of love’s rebound into his own softening footprints behind him. A surly lady with earrings on a stool had raised a red flag, anyway. He should dust himself off before he became the has-been he had always been.

At least, with regard to the beer, that was his measure beyond which he never went, so thankfully he had never resorted to anything harder. This was difficult enough.

***

THE ALEXANDER QUADRANGLE

Alexander once loved Hannah, until the palindromic novelty of her name wore off. Which is hardly the correct context for later when he coincidentally — because of his own name — encountered the ‘The Alexander Quadrangle’ terminology in textbook of medical exercises, and he immediately thought of some painful sessions in the wrangling out of already existing pains by a mathematical theory involving four sided shapes, that inevitably meant four different angles of manipulative traction. The mediaeval rack was not even close. The impending incentive of a morning star that would kiss his brows if he did not comply was only at the back of the mind, if a consideration at all.

No, none of these things, and Alexander soon gathered the terminology related to a place that really existed. A geometric area of walkway between the buildings of a college that the students called a quad. There had been some demonstrations, with flags, about it not being called Alexandra, but such demands soon died a death after the Big Change. One little old lady with a red flag stating ‘We want DER not DRA’, however, did remain upon sit-in but she ended up being a diaphanous bag-lady whom everyone turned a blind eye to. She probably was never there at all. Often, later  she returned as a real ghost present at one angle of the rhombus shape that was between the science block and the English literature one, the library at another angle, and shoppery in yet another, and she was known as the ‘earring lady’ because she often rang each one in front of the student accommodation that towered at the end of the liminal space that she then occupied in the said quad. The hindsight fact, though, was that everyone wanted the DER alone and not the DRA, the latter to be airbrushed from history, even to the extent that nobody knew there once was a Princess Alexandra in England, a stately lady who gave out degree certificates without anyone blinking an eyelid. No connection with the so-called earring ghost, however.

Alexander sighed, just as he terminated his research there. He had not realised that tinnitus could be a terminal disease. The Belltower of Babel the climbing of which gave him vascular vertigo that no amount of misangled yoga could cure. A pain he could not bear, until he changed his name to Barbara.

***

CIRCULATING LIBRARY

The Babel Stockroom was the most useful part of the library with carrels galore to use for private study, as silent as the name wasn’t! I ways had to laugh at that. But even serious bibliophiles needed a sense of humour when wading through dusty coughs of tome after dusty tome each with hard covers, all spines embossed by letters of gold. Paradoxically, their dry contents often brought a smile to the ugly face, as I thought of my lead Professor who had set me the task of trawling such boarded-up texts for knowledge for which he would later take credit. His name was Asinine, or at least that was how it sounded when on the gleefully whispering lips of my fellow students ambitious for would-be degrees as Masters. Well, to be serious for a moment, Professor Asternine was a wise old soul but a bit set in his ways. Whatever we told him about the carrels from within which the library seemed more like a dizziness induced by a screen than a steady book in the hand, it was like water off his duck’s back. We called it the Great Giddiness, as the whole world, outside of the words we pored over, seemed to go round and round, while the studious carrel in which we sat remained as still and silent as a forgotten pin-cushion in these library galleries with meaning-opposite names. Imagine my consternation, when, one day, I heard the pad-pad of old Asinine’s slippers, evidently coming to check on my progress. I quickly took to studiously riffling the pages of the biggest book I could muster from the pile of volumes on my carrel desk. Only to find it wasn’t a book at all but a sort of ring-folder with foxed and crimped papers clamped in a dissorted pile within it. So not exactly a ring-folder but a box-file, this being a developing situation, as I turned my face up to give the new arrival a weak smile. It was a ring-folder, after all, as I heard the beginnings of why this was the Babel Stockroom, with a quasimodo of peals making iron echoes in the humid air around me. Volumes with volume. I clamped my hands to my ears, and closed my eyes. I always wondered why these relatively small carrels needed a revolving chair more fitting for an open-plan office rather than it being a static seat on firm wooden struts, an antique chair on four legs if possible, I now asked.  I felt a touch on my elbow as if to staunch the developing situation developing any further. At least this was sanctuary from the more inimical worlds outside, spinning uncontrolled beyond these relatively peaceful groves of learning inside the library. I had been steadied in my student anxieties by one single touch on the elbow, enabling me to ignore what went on below the plimsoll line of a typical student’s mental ill-health as caused by such a boarded-up lockdown. Even the pealing bells had been blocked. I started coughing again. To be serious for another moment, I had forgotten I had bluetooths hidden in my lugs. Oh, to be in one of the library’s Vertigo Rooms further up in the attic area. A mansion, if not a tower, without roof or chimneys. The air would be fresher, if colder, but with teetering views at which to scream! A sense of humour, remember.

***

PENITENTIAL PSALMS

Those designated as Penitential Psalms are numbered 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143. And when Danielle looked at these numbers, she was convinced she saw a mathematical sequence in them. She had originally been brought up in the religion for which these psalms were important. But today, in middle age, she was aggravated by such a religion, and scorned it as strongly as any lapsed member of it could possibly do. She had become more interested in numbers and their nature than in the ineffable or the numinous she had been taught as a child. This new interest was not a conspiracy-theory sort of numerology, but a genuine belief in the power of numbers being greater than words. Numbers themselves ordered with consecutive letters as Providential Psalms. Algebraic  psalms that had (a), (b), (c) &c. as their reference points. Her new boy friend — one in a long line of others — looked askance at her methods of self-worth, and he declared suddenly that he was an avid faith-healer, and before she could knock the relationship on the head at such an admission, he explained that he used the Penitential Psalms as an instrument in cleansing and thus healing his clients, and perhaps such a coincidence proved that they should stay together forever. She had struggled long with the aforementioned sequence of Psalm numbers in the Bible, and now she was shaken to the core, that her interest in numbers, in actual fact, could be fully in synergy with religion, however numinous the latter was. Danielle picked up the Bible she’d owned since the death of her parents and naturally started revisiting it via the Book of Numbers until … meaning, meaning, words written in a mysterious hand upon her bedroom wall, soon trickling off into meaningless numbers. Amen.

He got his coat. 

***

ALICE LEAVES HOME

“And what of the multitude who will believe anything if only the lie is big and noisy enough? Who cling to their leaders who prepared the evil, and saw the evil through, and made a worse evil to follow it, and are even now tired and helpless before an evil by the side of which the other would be good?” — Oliver Onions, from THE ROPE IN THE RAFTERS (1935)

Till now, of course.

And what of Alice? She never found her own wonderland wherein she could rule the roost over red-hearted queens and teflon pans. “Six sixes are thirty six,” she often intoned to herself, in a refrain that could last forever if she had enough breath to mutter it under. Afternoon teas spreading around her like nostalgia sweetened by angels. Beneath the tablecloth, just bare wood, stained with older meals when the noisy individuals were under her thumb, and public bars were crowded just for her flirting banter. An invisible smile upon her face disguised as a real one. She had their measure, these evil rulers of big cities where such tyrants sat in offices and counted as far as ten. They could not multiply, only divide by intent and arithmetical error. Till they zoomed off to goodness knows where, perhaps a raftered attic that became an open plan workplace, a virtual vista upon money-making without resort to the foul breath of other mortals. If Alice had lived long enough, she’d’ve never worn a light blue mask but welcomed everyone with a kind kiss or, at least a handshake still dirty from travelling. Elbow to elbow would never be a thing for her, had she lived long enough, I say, had she lived long enough, I say, her wayward grandson’s own repeated refrain.  

She once treadled the Singer machine with cigarette ash growing from the filter end lolling in her mouth.  She’d sometimes laugh and do a defiant jig, and then left home for her own open plan vista, a reality far below of small houses and trains, a place to which she hastened, before the tyrants learnt to lie through their teeth with the conviction of mad hatters. All became evil compared to her good. And there was another refrain forgotten even upon the point of remembering it. Alice did come home again, however, but to whose home? She now the queen of red hearts. And where is she now? Tatting and tutting, no doubt. Playing in her post-advancement with the patience of biro wordgames, as was her regular wont down here. I do the same, sort of, in my miniature way, while still advancing, but just as wayward as her.

There’s always hope after the latest now. Not too small, not too big. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig

***

WHERE ZELENKA AND ZORN COME TOGETHER

Trigger warning: this Miniature of mine in several keys ends with a bathetic neologism. Jan Dismas Zelenka, the Baroque composer, somehow found himself listening to the Beatles. He had heard nothing like it since creating, painstakingly on handwritten staves, his own version of ‘Dixit Dominus’ but with a unique ‘Amen’ as imprimatur for posterity. He had studied all the Psalms, true, but why he chose no. 113 as his baseline remains a mystery, bearing in mind that those designated as Penitential Psalms had been numbered 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143. A magical sequence of mathematics to die for, give or take an occasional Visitor from Porlock — a tantalising run of numbers  that 113 could only occlude, scholars said. 

John Zorn — the avant garde jazz musician of much later in the essential sequence of words and numbers if not in the normal timelines upon our world — was also said, by scholars, to compose in the ‘classical’ idiom, thus straddling the styles as well as the chasms of history, whereby, quite unpremeditatedly, insects scaled up from between the symphonic staves of Kalevi Aho and, surely, given impossible hindsight, such crawling notations became the monsters that overtook a human dystopia that once had already claimed victory over the humans who had caused it in the first place. At source. Then as well as now. A palimpsest of Z with Z, and the rest of the alphabet cloaked in a defunct future of hopeless salvation.

Ah, men. Two dismal-looking old ones could be seen scrabbling in the wastebin at the park’s entrance near where I lived, struggling to seek I know not what. I peered through my watchful binoculars, through which I blamed many things that I saw, and chuckled when they voraciously tugged out piles of musical scores but nothing I assumed they could have wanted to find to eat. Ah ha, how wrong I was. I found myself, in fact, treated with a viable vision of visionary visible music as they took blowable and scrapeable and bangable implements from their pockets, therefrom to soar with the figurative angels into space, our only means of space-craft with the name Psalmation embossed on its side, as it turned out, to escape what we had irretrievably done to the world, i.e. that  perfect storm of synchrocities with consequent diaspora, all aligned with what had also crept upon us, almost unawares, from every point of the compass. Points that had become unaccountable numbers, not the usual letters of N, S, W, and E. Music in ricochet with music and a recurrent ‘big bang’ to hang onto until the closing Amen. The last chance Psalmoon.