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.
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