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Depression
Jan. 25th, 2010 01:11 am
Spem In Alium
Nov. 1st, 2009 02:32 pmSpem In Alium midi file rendered in color. Tone is note in octave, intensity is volume, left to right, bass at top, treble at bottom.
1570-2012: Detail (click for full image, will take a few seconds to load)
1570-2012: Detail (click for full image, will take a few seconds to load)
The Lanes confuse a tube map like oil confuses a rainbow. This is how I imagine them: as tunnels, as passages of coloured light which you travel along some distance and then, at certain interchanges, transfer to differently-coloured routes. All this I've gathered only from Harry's description of The Lanes: when I tried them myself I could only see a large screen filled with a tempest of images and sounds. Somewhere within those bizarre flashing images, he told me, were remarkable secrets, and I trusted him because he believed it so ardently.
About a year ago, I wrote the above in my journal and, on closing it, looked for the first time at the marbling on the inside cover. The journal is an old hard-backed ledger book, in pounds shillings and pence, from my Grandfather's time at the village social club. He'd only written a couple of pages in this last volume, accounting for the purchase of barrels of bitter and some packs of Benson and Hedges. After the last carefully-pencilled entry, ill health had forced him to resign as treasurer. Somehow in the confusion of the rapid closing down of his life, the book became mine.
It's now a year later, and Harry is spending longer every day in The Lanes, and he is thriving. Games, they're supposed to make you wan and dysfunctional, reclusive and withered, every day becoming less embodied and more ghostly. But The Lanes were never really a game in the old-fashioned sense: they've got more in common with programmes to organise your exercise regime and to train your mind.
To marble a book you take ink of some particular kind and drip it into a large basin of water. This ink doesn't dissolve uniformly, but unfolds in the eddies and currents of the water into flower-like sheets of colour. When you carefully rest a sheet of damp paper onto the surface of the water, it takes up the pattern of the ink at the surface.
Harry told me this, and I wrote it into my journal some time ago: the purpose of The Lanes is to alter his desires so that they most closely match those desires which he most craves to desire, and that they do this through the agency of images and sounds, as you progress along the coloured tangles of The Lanes.
Mother called today, to see how things were. She said that we'd not spoken in weeks.
I am, I admit, a little envious of his flourishing in a medium so separate from our lives, that he was unable, or unwilling, to find fulfillment through the agency of our married life. As I flick through the earliest pages of my journal, past my grandfather's neat pencilled tallies, the spine creaking as the pages turn, I reach sheets filled with photographs and glued in place, of Harry and me ten years ago, by the sea.
My envy is tempered by a refusal to give up on the whole idea of hope in the face of my utter personal failure.
Once, it seems like a different world, everyone who was prettier than me, more sparkling in conversation, more intoxicating and refined in agreeable company, they were all a threat, or else a potential conquest. I was ambitious and covetous, but it would be wrong to think that I have mellowed with age. Rather, I understand, as well as I ever will, the shape of the course of life and if there is hope, it is in others. And they must surpass me by so great a margin that all of my powers must be directed at their success. This altruism is a selfish act because the alternative is to abandon the idea of hope which would utterly gut me with fire.
So I was genuinely joyful today, when Harry told me over dinner that he had discovered the Inner Knot of the lanes. He had been searching for the inner knot for months. Few inhabitants of The Lanes believed that the Inner Knot even existed. The Inner Knot, he tells me, is a central confusion of lanes which contain within them a recapitulation of the whole layout and pattern of The Outer Lanes in a quite different form, capable of generating the whole system of lanes even if it is the element of the system to survive, and connected to the rest only through some special synaesthesia, as if each coloured outer lane is connected to an inner lane which is represented not by colour, but by a musical note. Inside the inner knot, the intersection of lanes becomes the harmony and discord of musical intervals. The inner lane is so precious, so fragile, so devoid of colour and ghostly in its flimsy spacial extent, and yet so vital that all crossings between the outer and inner lanes are guarded by fences and barbed wire that are patrolled guards with dogs.
I write the above description in this journal, and now carefully considered what I have written. It makes no sense at all. I am completely outside of whatever is described above, and yet the Inner Knot is completely compelling to Harry.
Does he love me any more? He does, he said at dinner, because he /wants/ to love me, and so he arranged that his desire for me lay amongst his route through The Lanes. Is that enough? Induced affection? It is authentic, I have no doubt of that. I can feel the unfakeable passion in his assertions. And how can it be wrong for someone to take such control of their being that their desire is entirely mastered by their will? Surely, the opposite, a wanton life controlled by unbreakable, completely overwhelming passions is surely a more terrifying, pitiable thing? So many people have told me that a relationship must be worked at to be a success, and surely that this is what Harry is doing? In his way he is exercising his emotional mind; merely developing and shaping it, as he shapes his body when he runs in the gym? But I am scared.
It is three months since I wrote this in my journal, and I am afraid that I am starting to lose him. Mother still complains that I don't talk to her. We sat in the park, yesterday, and fed the swans: we had such a beautiful time under a warm, clear sky. But later he left for The Lanes and spent longer than ever in the Inner Knot, perhaps three hours without leaving even for The Outer Lanes. When he returned, we made a meal together in the kitchen and I mentioned, in passing, our time in the park. He had absolutely no memory of the event. His mind still buzzed from the Inner Knot. He told me how he was close, so very close, to proving some remarkable theorem about human motivation, so incredibly elegant that it would result in a once-in-a-generation improvement in human consciousness. He had to smuggle some notion across the synaesthetic boundary and into the outer lanes, bypassing customs points on the way. Once embedded within The Outer Lanes it could truly flower within the population at large, and reach its potential.
Harry described in more detail the nature of his discovery, "through a glass darkly", he said. But each time he tried, he expressed it in so beautiful a way that he took my breath away. So I cannot even begin to record the nature of his discovery, beyond the above, as the thought of it so enraptures me that my pen is instantly stilled. I am so proud of his discovery. I wish that he had remembered yesterday's sky.
And so time moves on.
Harry can remember nothing between his trips to the Inner Knot, or rather he first assigns no importance to it, and then soon forgets it as a consequence. I am learning The Lanes myself, but they're not a natural environment for me, and Harry is so far ahead of me. Last week, I told him how I wish he would remember the things which we do together, so he arranged within The Lanes to want to remember. And when he returned he /did/ remember, and he /wanted/ to remember, he sincerely did. And yet, despite that sincerity, there was something hollow inside me. Something is withering. People like Harry will inherit the earth.
I wonder what's left of Harry now? In the two months since I wrote the above I have largely confined myself to my room. Each time that I see him, flourishing, between trips to The Lanes, is like an island, completely isolated from all others. Our relationship is like some kind of sparse Micronesian archipelago. Upon each each is some kind of interaction, but between visits to the Inner Knot it is as if he has been completely reset, remembering our love only robotically, by request, as if reciting praise from long-dead scripture.
Any intervention into the world of this new breed of human, seems likely to be counterproductive: he is compassionate and loving, and almost completely detached. The world will be a better place.
He is becoming beautiful.
Mother rang, I was too tired to answer the phone.
What horror has happened here today! I found some footage, today, on an old DVD, of the two of us walking together at a fair, me happily clinging to a silly green balloon, him at the very start of his journey to transcendence. The projector's light shaped the air's dust like the marbler's ink, or the ghost of a rose.
Harry returned from The Lanes as the film was finishing, and stood in the doorway observing, detachedly. His presence over my shoulder loomed heavier and heavier, until succumbed to an petulant impulse: I slapped him across the cheek. In an instant, the guilt shot through me like a lightning bolt, but Harry was the soul of compassion.
I have brought the old Primus up from the garage so that I can eat in my room without disturbing the house.
Harry has forgotten that I hit him yesterday. We had agreed that he would forget, and he arranged for it to be so. He is a changed man, someone truly fit for the future. I hope that in some way I helped create him, but what use can I possible be in the world we're creating? I could never once control myself, never once act so rationally he achieves moment after moment.
Mother called again.
For all his spiritual development, for all of his embodiment of the future of humanity, Harry is a weak man. No part of his body is immune to a nice bruise after a good thump: it helps me enormously, and he forgets each time he return to the Inner Knot.
Harry is also easily knocked unconscious: it's often easiest that way, I get a complete run of the house. I tried marbling, but bought the wrong kind of ink. The water stained red and brown and was useless. Paper looked like it had been dragged through mud. Sample attached. I must return mother's call. Harry is completely transformed.
Also easily drugged.
Am experimenting with knives, but they leave a mark: means things leak across trips to The Lanes. Partial success with marbling using oil-based inks. Not as crisp as in this ledger, but will attach sample nevertheless.
Such a beautiful body.
Returned mother's call.
She doesn't recognise her daughter.
Beautifully marbled sheet. Attached. Puts this journal to shame.
About a year ago, I wrote the above in my journal and, on closing it, looked for the first time at the marbling on the inside cover. The journal is an old hard-backed ledger book, in pounds shillings and pence, from my Grandfather's time at the village social club. He'd only written a couple of pages in this last volume, accounting for the purchase of barrels of bitter and some packs of Benson and Hedges. After the last carefully-pencilled entry, ill health had forced him to resign as treasurer. Somehow in the confusion of the rapid closing down of his life, the book became mine.
It's now a year later, and Harry is spending longer every day in The Lanes, and he is thriving. Games, they're supposed to make you wan and dysfunctional, reclusive and withered, every day becoming less embodied and more ghostly. But The Lanes were never really a game in the old-fashioned sense: they've got more in common with programmes to organise your exercise regime and to train your mind.
To marble a book you take ink of some particular kind and drip it into a large basin of water. This ink doesn't dissolve uniformly, but unfolds in the eddies and currents of the water into flower-like sheets of colour. When you carefully rest a sheet of damp paper onto the surface of the water, it takes up the pattern of the ink at the surface.
Harry told me this, and I wrote it into my journal some time ago: the purpose of The Lanes is to alter his desires so that they most closely match those desires which he most craves to desire, and that they do this through the agency of images and sounds, as you progress along the coloured tangles of The Lanes.
Mother called today, to see how things were. She said that we'd not spoken in weeks.
I am, I admit, a little envious of his flourishing in a medium so separate from our lives, that he was unable, or unwilling, to find fulfillment through the agency of our married life. As I flick through the earliest pages of my journal, past my grandfather's neat pencilled tallies, the spine creaking as the pages turn, I reach sheets filled with photographs and glued in place, of Harry and me ten years ago, by the sea.
My envy is tempered by a refusal to give up on the whole idea of hope in the face of my utter personal failure.
Once, it seems like a different world, everyone who was prettier than me, more sparkling in conversation, more intoxicating and refined in agreeable company, they were all a threat, or else a potential conquest. I was ambitious and covetous, but it would be wrong to think that I have mellowed with age. Rather, I understand, as well as I ever will, the shape of the course of life and if there is hope, it is in others. And they must surpass me by so great a margin that all of my powers must be directed at their success. This altruism is a selfish act because the alternative is to abandon the idea of hope which would utterly gut me with fire.
So I was genuinely joyful today, when Harry told me over dinner that he had discovered the Inner Knot of the lanes. He had been searching for the inner knot for months. Few inhabitants of The Lanes believed that the Inner Knot even existed. The Inner Knot, he tells me, is a central confusion of lanes which contain within them a recapitulation of the whole layout and pattern of The Outer Lanes in a quite different form, capable of generating the whole system of lanes even if it is the element of the system to survive, and connected to the rest only through some special synaesthesia, as if each coloured outer lane is connected to an inner lane which is represented not by colour, but by a musical note. Inside the inner knot, the intersection of lanes becomes the harmony and discord of musical intervals. The inner lane is so precious, so fragile, so devoid of colour and ghostly in its flimsy spacial extent, and yet so vital that all crossings between the outer and inner lanes are guarded by fences and barbed wire that are patrolled guards with dogs.
I write the above description in this journal, and now carefully considered what I have written. It makes no sense at all. I am completely outside of whatever is described above, and yet the Inner Knot is completely compelling to Harry.
Does he love me any more? He does, he said at dinner, because he /wants/ to love me, and so he arranged that his desire for me lay amongst his route through The Lanes. Is that enough? Induced affection? It is authentic, I have no doubt of that. I can feel the unfakeable passion in his assertions. And how can it be wrong for someone to take such control of their being that their desire is entirely mastered by their will? Surely, the opposite, a wanton life controlled by unbreakable, completely overwhelming passions is surely a more terrifying, pitiable thing? So many people have told me that a relationship must be worked at to be a success, and surely that this is what Harry is doing? In his way he is exercising his emotional mind; merely developing and shaping it, as he shapes his body when he runs in the gym? But I am scared.
It is three months since I wrote this in my journal, and I am afraid that I am starting to lose him. Mother still complains that I don't talk to her. We sat in the park, yesterday, and fed the swans: we had such a beautiful time under a warm, clear sky. But later he left for The Lanes and spent longer than ever in the Inner Knot, perhaps three hours without leaving even for The Outer Lanes. When he returned, we made a meal together in the kitchen and I mentioned, in passing, our time in the park. He had absolutely no memory of the event. His mind still buzzed from the Inner Knot. He told me how he was close, so very close, to proving some remarkable theorem about human motivation, so incredibly elegant that it would result in a once-in-a-generation improvement in human consciousness. He had to smuggle some notion across the synaesthetic boundary and into the outer lanes, bypassing customs points on the way. Once embedded within The Outer Lanes it could truly flower within the population at large, and reach its potential.
Harry described in more detail the nature of his discovery, "through a glass darkly", he said. But each time he tried, he expressed it in so beautiful a way that he took my breath away. So I cannot even begin to record the nature of his discovery, beyond the above, as the thought of it so enraptures me that my pen is instantly stilled. I am so proud of his discovery. I wish that he had remembered yesterday's sky.
And so time moves on.
Harry can remember nothing between his trips to the Inner Knot, or rather he first assigns no importance to it, and then soon forgets it as a consequence. I am learning The Lanes myself, but they're not a natural environment for me, and Harry is so far ahead of me. Last week, I told him how I wish he would remember the things which we do together, so he arranged within The Lanes to want to remember. And when he returned he /did/ remember, and he /wanted/ to remember, he sincerely did. And yet, despite that sincerity, there was something hollow inside me. Something is withering. People like Harry will inherit the earth.
I wonder what's left of Harry now? In the two months since I wrote the above I have largely confined myself to my room. Each time that I see him, flourishing, between trips to The Lanes, is like an island, completely isolated from all others. Our relationship is like some kind of sparse Micronesian archipelago. Upon each each is some kind of interaction, but between visits to the Inner Knot it is as if he has been completely reset, remembering our love only robotically, by request, as if reciting praise from long-dead scripture.
Any intervention into the world of this new breed of human, seems likely to be counterproductive: he is compassionate and loving, and almost completely detached. The world will be a better place.
He is becoming beautiful.
Mother rang, I was too tired to answer the phone.
What horror has happened here today! I found some footage, today, on an old DVD, of the two of us walking together at a fair, me happily clinging to a silly green balloon, him at the very start of his journey to transcendence. The projector's light shaped the air's dust like the marbler's ink, or the ghost of a rose.
Harry returned from The Lanes as the film was finishing, and stood in the doorway observing, detachedly. His presence over my shoulder loomed heavier and heavier, until succumbed to an petulant impulse: I slapped him across the cheek. In an instant, the guilt shot through me like a lightning bolt, but Harry was the soul of compassion.
I have brought the old Primus up from the garage so that I can eat in my room without disturbing the house.
Harry has forgotten that I hit him yesterday. We had agreed that he would forget, and he arranged for it to be so. He is a changed man, someone truly fit for the future. I hope that in some way I helped create him, but what use can I possible be in the world we're creating? I could never once control myself, never once act so rationally he achieves moment after moment.
Mother called again.
For all his spiritual development, for all of his embodiment of the future of humanity, Harry is a weak man. No part of his body is immune to a nice bruise after a good thump: it helps me enormously, and he forgets each time he return to the Inner Knot.
Harry is also easily knocked unconscious: it's often easiest that way, I get a complete run of the house. I tried marbling, but bought the wrong kind of ink. The water stained red and brown and was useless. Paper looked like it had been dragged through mud. Sample attached. I must return mother's call. Harry is completely transformed.
Also easily drugged.
Am experimenting with knives, but they leave a mark: means things leak across trips to The Lanes. Partial success with marbling using oil-based inks. Not as crisp as in this ledger, but will attach sample nevertheless.
Such a beautiful body.
Returned mother's call.
She doesn't recognise her daughter.
Beautifully marbled sheet. Attached. Puts this journal to shame.
5.
Grabs the kitchen knife from the dishwasher drawer; waves it forcefully illustratively vaguely in her direction. She takes a step backwards, watches the blade's lightrush mirror, concentrates deciphers records ten-fathom Scottish murmuring; others inch quietly away, back through the kitchen door. Leather jacket heavy on his lanky round shoulders, knuckle-whitened serrated grasping forward and ahead; she smiles, nods and inches.
"Like a fucking noddy doll, you are, Louise.", he says, "I've had, and you know I've had a shit load of speed, a whole European amphi-eat-amine mountain of the stuff, and so I've been talking, well, nothing but crap to you for just about forever" Sharp rhythm-baton knife jabs skin-crawl close. "And all you do is nod and smile. Like a fucking soviet priest, a bloody Gertrude Eisenstein October noddy priest. Forgive me father for I exist: some kind of statute-toppling marching war torn region of Ngorno Iraq; Viet Cong like some rubber Hoolywood villain; Steve fucking Jobs wipe-clean virgin no sharp-corners and up-your-arse syringe vibrate-mode iPod guitar-and-a-stool bed-pan Bulemic low-fat organic size zero carbon footprint crap?"
"Put the knife down Alex".
"Just as you pay me attention? Is that it? Fed up with me, are you?". More indistinct waving with OCD triplicate theatrical twists, beloved flourish, closer each time to Lousie's face, cheek, eye. "Though it does seem to have gone...", he turns red-cloaked pantomime villain to the empty kitchen, "PECULIARLY QUIET AROUND HERE." Tumbleweed. "Woosh. Woooooosh. Thirty six hours of continuous shift. I want to see how far I can go before I crack. Nobody notices: midnight milkos are already whacked and stoned. And then ... then a little new year's party, relaxation. That's all, THAT IS ALL, LOUISE. Pendulum wind-down like grand-daddy clock from eight wraps of the jumpy stuff, a fall down like a hypnotist's counting; each bong of big daddy ben". His free hand jitters, struggles to unscrew a hip-bottle of Stolly on the work-surface, swigs and sighs, groans, growls.
"Alex. Alex, why are you waving a knife at me? At Louise, Alex?. Put the knife down and we'll talk."
Paranoid distrustful pause. "'Put the knife down', and you'll bugger off."
"I won't, Alex. It's me, Alex. I don't leave you, do I? And until you put it down, Alex, I can't prove that to you. Let me prove it to you: dare me, Alex. We can go outside, cool down, and talk about stuff, whatever you want to talk about, talk about nothing, you know, in the dark: cool and open."
Knife challenge-slammed onto kitchen table, they, Louise and Alex, through the kitchen door, he goes screaming off into the darkness of the long-grassy garden, running in circles in the blackness like a four year-old, screaming at the moon, she leaning against the sand-sharp wall as he recedes into the distance.
"Are you okay, Louise?" asks the corner-head-poke magic host, made incarnate by the devil's recession.
"He's just a bit tired, David. He'll be okay." Screaming, swearing, collisions with undergrowth: sound-effects prompt-side (distant). "He'll calm down. He's just had a bad day. That's all."
"We were just thinking, this is all, that it might be best if you, you know, if you took him home: to relax, to sleep it off. Best for all of us, we think".
Looks him in the eye, Louise smiles disappointed, eaten, resigned. The heaven choir chorus-line mob in the distance, talking laughing listening; endless Sisters of Mercy pulsing in perfect hi-fi.
Midnight arguing the toss with the nightbus driver.
David returns the bread knife to the appropriate drawer and, with perfect timing, rolls it soft-close shut.
4.
A Triflic Acid protective-group GS-NMR chemist is sitting on a cute alchemist's lab bench, legs dangling over the floor, listening to him speak. Retorts, uncleansed of herbs, are strewn impurely in unquantified heaps; a crocodile hangs from the ceiling. Aqua regia noxiously fumes beneath a zombie-eyed window.
He strides, the alchemist, strides across the floor in his robes, all calomel, vitriol, and alkahest; all elements of houses; all planets and their empires. The chemist silently listens, hears, and drifts: the transmutations of antimony, the white and the red fuming waters, the heat and nausea of the tiny room, his drink which she drank, too strong, too bitter, now swimming in a cold dry sweat. The ebb and flo of his words on the knotted air of his mouth clutch-snap closes the space between them, and land-slips departures from reason.
He thinks her expert in his craft, but the chemist's back is against the laboratory wall. She thins herself against solid brickwork, feels depressions of plasterwork on her spine: she follows few of his humours, and none of his transmutations, but guards, with jealousy, the drape-between dust-convolved conjuring of the room, as fragile as a bird in slow-motion; could shatter with a sour single gaze. To her left, brass instrumentation hangs from a profane and vicious hook, and to her right lean leather-bound symbols of craft.
"How long can it be until spring?".
She looks up at him, telephone-table hallway radiator leaning; past him to the garden-path window; sees Alex and Louise, skulkily leaving, and attempts a reply. She sat on the stairs for an hour, lulled by the rocking rhythm of computer-draughted fantasy; by his quests and challenges, by films and by novel; by devices and their release. He looks the chemist in the eye, and expects a response.
She had agreed, when it was clear that agreement was in order. When his eyes and mouth required them, she has sympathized, smiled, and frowned. But this question is too open and too broad for a reflex.
Her mind races, in search of fuel for deduction. His field, in truth, is fallow; left barren by Boyle and Lavoisier, centuries before. Her mind, rain-soaked industrial slate; in the midst of a storm she struggles to inscribe alchemical daemons, with impotent, slipping, crumbling chalk, and leaves no mark.
Rates and patterns are unknown.
Seasons pass separate and disjoint: cities, games, lives, stories, elections, economics; independent and strobing. She must recall, beyond mere foggy implicit drift, his most recent invocation: she must slam her mind backward, through walls of time-diminished history, and grab his words, crush them, and find solid ground.
Signals shine unclear, trapped in the low glancing bleach of winter morning sun: the light of necessary pharmacy; the light of spirits first slipped.
She cannot answer.
Mirage waters gliding over our hallway chemist's eyes heave in the rhythm of front-room bass: glisten in imploring thumps, in intervals toward midnight.
3.
A morbid fear of fancy dress: gin-trapped between a twee bourgeois anaemic Gilbert-and-Sullivan marvelous art-of-living death-mask spiral, and some mechanical terror of mechanized militarized vacuum-packed parachutist buckle-strapped sexuality. All the time, the casual and the fashionable, the defiers of ordinance, attending the carnage, cowardly, ironic, and detached.
Mark, on the sofa, eyes leaden, is staring at Sarah's thighs, Sarah dressed as Poison Ivy, her head back and on one side, contemplating the fireplace. Sees him staring, and thinks.
The hard-tamped wheat-chip airbag packaging between Mark and the world; the woodshop fog of sawdust which separates his smarting eyes from the objects he envices; is this perhaps all that keeps him from reaching out and taking? Is he good, or anaesthetic? If he were connected, as a record-needle, as a seismograph, as a house-of-cards is connected, if he grabbed his feelings firmly by the throat, tannoyed them to the world; even in the noon of reason, could a taste, a simple taste, balance-tip and ship-scuttle his life: is this why he cripples himself with whisky?
Sarah recedes.
As she diminishes, loneliness drips, streams, rivers from above. Loneliness stains the ceiling yellow, bloats the artex and bends it lethargically. Loneliness demarcates patches of plaster which chip, slide, reveal a sore dermis of dessicated gyproc. Loneliness runs through the maggot-hole of light-fittings, wrings around flex like maypole ribbons, hangs pendulous from bulbs, and then falls through warm frank air. Loneliness (the perfect solvent) stains a white rabbit bobtail yellow; drips Clepoatra's impermanently black hair to her neck and shoulders; soaks a pirate's cardboard hat into a sodden amorphous crown.
A dozen pickled friends, lego-men and explorers, bunnies and comic-book villains, sit, quietly fighting sherry schnapps whisky sauce nausea. Mortally wounded conversations limp slowly onward, shift their lumbering weight, from one foot to the other, waiting for the victor's bullet.
Mark's head falls forwards, and a yellow torrent bursts, shatters, explodes through a glorious bay-window, staves the window into kindling and aerial knives; cold ninety-six octane nausea floods the room; knocks them all unconscious in an instant, glistens with a migraine cresting, floats over heavy pooled loneliness like petrol over water, and carries the detritus of civility to its grave.
The battlefield next dawn, a cold, syncopated thudding of drums.
2.
I'm gonna take this car crash confetti, and put it in a jar.
He climbs over the barrier, and grabs a cut-glass muck-hand full of red and orange indicator shards and slivers of lamps; shows them to the girls. This stuff eclipse-corona encircles the roundabout, and he talks about gathering it up, and collecting it in a jar.
The girls sit on the bank: him uninstructable; try gentle persuasion. "The pizza will go cold, Markus". "We'll miss midnight, Markus, spend new year on the edge of a roundabout". "It's raining".
Three wise revellers caught, mid-transfer, at a city-edge interchange, and Markus losing his grip on the dotted-red line of travel. The road unnervingly devoid of traffic, Amy and Hannah admit defeat, open pizzas on the verge, and wait for his collecting to end. Cut into the embankment, right to the top with ziggurat pauses, is a staircase with a grey electric pillar at its summit. They sit, and watch him from the staircase. Mud begins to puddle through his hunting ground. Their corrugated boxes are scattered with sagging tuppences of rain, but manage to shield pizza from the gathering storm.
As the next piece is teased from the whole, rain splashes their food unpalatably cold. White and yellow cheese, running like sores, is peppered into a palette of disparate flesh: brown, pink, red, black. In accidental moments, indistinguishable from lightning, Amy thinks of the corpse-flower, stinking on a hot-house floor, the ulcerous Raflessia carrion-luring collage; she sees worms, their offspring, crawling across the surface of her food; she sees the carnage of combat captured in a small green box.
Hannah eats voraciously beside her. But Amy eats well, too. Her mind is so flat, and her disgust so thin and so sharp, that it slides along her tongue like the springing of a Yale lock with a credit card, and so she inhales, savours, loves the smell, the taste of the meat; still squirming, disgusted, but fearless of retching.
The nightbus appears through the rain-sheets. Markus steps out of the road, his right hand filled with white orange red glass, raised in a victorious fist which is bleeding from its purchase: pink running stains dispersed along his arm by rain; he's ready to grab something to eat, to continue his way to the party.
1.
Eyes closed. Develop in a Dark Room, to the sound of Overbombing; washing line photos hang from hooks, as carcasses in abattoirs. They say that this song is far too long, and that things unimpailed by photography are consequently unfixed, and so they will diminish with time.
These things I have: my parents in front of the old gas fireplace; a Christmas hoard of old orange, brown, and green plastic toys; nights on the town with teenage friends. Recorded and pickled in jars, though also grown alien with time.
A fox is caught at night, raiding bins for scraps; with two discs of reflected flashlight, suspended in darkness. A ray of light travels between two worlds: to the moon, and safely home. I stare: the fox stares. I hook it on a barb. A scene from long ago: from childhood?
Good music disrupts the rhythms of time. A film: it imparts a quality to your travel; movement differs; the sound of space crispens; utility architecture is elevated and enthroned; the colours of shadows intensify. But a song, a good song, has a tactic for eternity, or else it has nothing.
An accident at the interchange. Heaps of metal removed, detritus remains. A traffic light booted twenty yards toward Ely; snapped cable spine reaching, like Adam to God, God to Adam, toward its novel disconnection, bright stiff-stamened stub flowering from the verge, as a weed in spring. Prayer flag incident tape blows along the sliproad; unspooled like studio-discarded sound, caught on unlikely anchors: trees, fences, signs.
The bell rings and I answer. Hannah, Amy, and Markus arrive, with seconds to spare, soaked and matted; smiling and giggling. Markus has something precious cupped into his hands. I thought it might be a frog or a mouse, but it seems to be some kind of crystal, or jewel. He cannot show this prize to Alex, because he is gone.
An oblique friend sits on the staircase, entranced by the stranger leaning before her, delivering intense lectures without means of access. The three leave for the front room, where six disheveled acquaintances sit in some heady irritated haze, infrequently talking in geriatric anger. Markus' tail falls; he heads for the kitchen and finds a discarded bottle, half-full of Stolly. He swigs.
Hannah dyed her hair cherry red, and tied herself into alluring shapes. She stands in the corner of the room, her weight awkwardly distributed over her feet, leaning against the wall, and smiling distantly, nervously.
Superimposed over her form -- like the reflection of a sinking woman on the underside of the surface of water -- the shape of someone without makeup or costume, dressed for the practice of everyday life. Then, standing before the mirror, and with the aid of a beauty of bottles and cloth, properties of mind cause a determined assembly of her realized form: photographs; music; things caught in traps.
Amy turns, and Hannah grabs her with a gaze. Dyadic gossip rescues them both from the party, and they pass out of view.
Is there some order to the flow of events: does substance flow from frame to frame?
Verses and choruses subside into vanishing-point rivers of outro pulsing; breath zoetrope syncopates with downbeats and snares, as the planets continue revolving unscathed.
Midnight draws near. Disparate lives converge for an hour or two, and then rapidly drift apart. The music is lowered; we gather around the radio; await the discharge of the year.
I sigh without conviction because winter has its own rewards.
Grabs the kitchen knife from the dishwasher drawer; waves it forcefully illustratively vaguely in her direction. She takes a step backwards, watches the blade's lightrush mirror, concentrates deciphers records ten-fathom Scottish murmuring; others inch quietly away, back through the kitchen door. Leather jacket heavy on his lanky round shoulders, knuckle-whitened serrated grasping forward and ahead; she smiles, nods and inches.
"Like a fucking noddy doll, you are, Louise.", he says, "I've had, and you know I've had a shit load of speed, a whole European amphi-eat-amine mountain of the stuff, and so I've been talking, well, nothing but crap to you for just about forever" Sharp rhythm-baton knife jabs skin-crawl close. "And all you do is nod and smile. Like a fucking soviet priest, a bloody Gertrude Eisenstein October noddy priest. Forgive me father for I exist: some kind of statute-toppling marching war torn region of Ngorno Iraq; Viet Cong like some rubber Hoolywood villain; Steve fucking Jobs wipe-clean virgin no sharp-corners and up-your-arse syringe vibrate-mode iPod guitar-and-a-stool bed-pan Bulemic low-fat organic size zero carbon footprint crap?"
"Put the knife down Alex".
"Just as you pay me attention? Is that it? Fed up with me, are you?". More indistinct waving with OCD triplicate theatrical twists, beloved flourish, closer each time to Lousie's face, cheek, eye. "Though it does seem to have gone...", he turns red-cloaked pantomime villain to the empty kitchen, "PECULIARLY QUIET AROUND HERE." Tumbleweed. "Woosh. Woooooosh. Thirty six hours of continuous shift. I want to see how far I can go before I crack. Nobody notices: midnight milkos are already whacked and stoned. And then ... then a little new year's party, relaxation. That's all, THAT IS ALL, LOUISE. Pendulum wind-down like grand-daddy clock from eight wraps of the jumpy stuff, a fall down like a hypnotist's counting; each bong of big daddy ben". His free hand jitters, struggles to unscrew a hip-bottle of Stolly on the work-surface, swigs and sighs, groans, growls.
"Alex. Alex, why are you waving a knife at me? At Louise, Alex?. Put the knife down and we'll talk."
Paranoid distrustful pause. "'Put the knife down', and you'll bugger off."
"I won't, Alex. It's me, Alex. I don't leave you, do I? And until you put it down, Alex, I can't prove that to you. Let me prove it to you: dare me, Alex. We can go outside, cool down, and talk about stuff, whatever you want to talk about, talk about nothing, you know, in the dark: cool and open."
Knife challenge-slammed onto kitchen table, they, Louise and Alex, through the kitchen door, he goes screaming off into the darkness of the long-grassy garden, running in circles in the blackness like a four year-old, screaming at the moon, she leaning against the sand-sharp wall as he recedes into the distance.
"Are you okay, Louise?" asks the corner-head-poke magic host, made incarnate by the devil's recession.
"He's just a bit tired, David. He'll be okay." Screaming, swearing, collisions with undergrowth: sound-effects prompt-side (distant). "He'll calm down. He's just had a bad day. That's all."
"We were just thinking, this is all, that it might be best if you, you know, if you took him home: to relax, to sleep it off. Best for all of us, we think".
Looks him in the eye, Louise smiles disappointed, eaten, resigned. The heaven choir chorus-line mob in the distance, talking laughing listening; endless Sisters of Mercy pulsing in perfect hi-fi.
Midnight arguing the toss with the nightbus driver.
David returns the bread knife to the appropriate drawer and, with perfect timing, rolls it soft-close shut.
4.
A Triflic Acid protective-group GS-NMR chemist is sitting on a cute alchemist's lab bench, legs dangling over the floor, listening to him speak. Retorts, uncleansed of herbs, are strewn impurely in unquantified heaps; a crocodile hangs from the ceiling. Aqua regia noxiously fumes beneath a zombie-eyed window.
He strides, the alchemist, strides across the floor in his robes, all calomel, vitriol, and alkahest; all elements of houses; all planets and their empires. The chemist silently listens, hears, and drifts: the transmutations of antimony, the white and the red fuming waters, the heat and nausea of the tiny room, his drink which she drank, too strong, too bitter, now swimming in a cold dry sweat. The ebb and flo of his words on the knotted air of his mouth clutch-snap closes the space between them, and land-slips departures from reason.
He thinks her expert in his craft, but the chemist's back is against the laboratory wall. She thins herself against solid brickwork, feels depressions of plasterwork on her spine: she follows few of his humours, and none of his transmutations, but guards, with jealousy, the drape-between dust-convolved conjuring of the room, as fragile as a bird in slow-motion; could shatter with a sour single gaze. To her left, brass instrumentation hangs from a profane and vicious hook, and to her right lean leather-bound symbols of craft.
"How long can it be until spring?".
She looks up at him, telephone-table hallway radiator leaning; past him to the garden-path window; sees Alex and Louise, skulkily leaving, and attempts a reply. She sat on the stairs for an hour, lulled by the rocking rhythm of computer-draughted fantasy; by his quests and challenges, by films and by novel; by devices and their release. He looks the chemist in the eye, and expects a response.
She had agreed, when it was clear that agreement was in order. When his eyes and mouth required them, she has sympathized, smiled, and frowned. But this question is too open and too broad for a reflex.
Her mind races, in search of fuel for deduction. His field, in truth, is fallow; left barren by Boyle and Lavoisier, centuries before. Her mind, rain-soaked industrial slate; in the midst of a storm she struggles to inscribe alchemical daemons, with impotent, slipping, crumbling chalk, and leaves no mark.
Rates and patterns are unknown.
Seasons pass separate and disjoint: cities, games, lives, stories, elections, economics; independent and strobing. She must recall, beyond mere foggy implicit drift, his most recent invocation: she must slam her mind backward, through walls of time-diminished history, and grab his words, crush them, and find solid ground.
Signals shine unclear, trapped in the low glancing bleach of winter morning sun: the light of necessary pharmacy; the light of spirits first slipped.
She cannot answer.
Mirage waters gliding over our hallway chemist's eyes heave in the rhythm of front-room bass: glisten in imploring thumps, in intervals toward midnight.
3.
A morbid fear of fancy dress: gin-trapped between a twee bourgeois anaemic Gilbert-and-Sullivan marvelous art-of-living death-mask spiral, and some mechanical terror of mechanized militarized vacuum-packed parachutist buckle-strapped sexuality. All the time, the casual and the fashionable, the defiers of ordinance, attending the carnage, cowardly, ironic, and detached.
Mark, on the sofa, eyes leaden, is staring at Sarah's thighs, Sarah dressed as Poison Ivy, her head back and on one side, contemplating the fireplace. Sees him staring, and thinks.
The hard-tamped wheat-chip airbag packaging between Mark and the world; the woodshop fog of sawdust which separates his smarting eyes from the objects he envices; is this perhaps all that keeps him from reaching out and taking? Is he good, or anaesthetic? If he were connected, as a record-needle, as a seismograph, as a house-of-cards is connected, if he grabbed his feelings firmly by the throat, tannoyed them to the world; even in the noon of reason, could a taste, a simple taste, balance-tip and ship-scuttle his life: is this why he cripples himself with whisky?
Sarah recedes.
As she diminishes, loneliness drips, streams, rivers from above. Loneliness stains the ceiling yellow, bloats the artex and bends it lethargically. Loneliness demarcates patches of plaster which chip, slide, reveal a sore dermis of dessicated gyproc. Loneliness runs through the maggot-hole of light-fittings, wrings around flex like maypole ribbons, hangs pendulous from bulbs, and then falls through warm frank air. Loneliness (the perfect solvent) stains a white rabbit bobtail yellow; drips Clepoatra's impermanently black hair to her neck and shoulders; soaks a pirate's cardboard hat into a sodden amorphous crown.
A dozen pickled friends, lego-men and explorers, bunnies and comic-book villains, sit, quietly fighting sherry schnapps whisky sauce nausea. Mortally wounded conversations limp slowly onward, shift their lumbering weight, from one foot to the other, waiting for the victor's bullet.
Mark's head falls forwards, and a yellow torrent bursts, shatters, explodes through a glorious bay-window, staves the window into kindling and aerial knives; cold ninety-six octane nausea floods the room; knocks them all unconscious in an instant, glistens with a migraine cresting, floats over heavy pooled loneliness like petrol over water, and carries the detritus of civility to its grave.
The battlefield next dawn, a cold, syncopated thudding of drums.
2.
I'm gonna take this car crash confetti, and put it in a jar.
He climbs over the barrier, and grabs a cut-glass muck-hand full of red and orange indicator shards and slivers of lamps; shows them to the girls. This stuff eclipse-corona encircles the roundabout, and he talks about gathering it up, and collecting it in a jar.
The girls sit on the bank: him uninstructable; try gentle persuasion. "The pizza will go cold, Markus". "We'll miss midnight, Markus, spend new year on the edge of a roundabout". "It's raining".
Three wise revellers caught, mid-transfer, at a city-edge interchange, and Markus losing his grip on the dotted-red line of travel. The road unnervingly devoid of traffic, Amy and Hannah admit defeat, open pizzas on the verge, and wait for his collecting to end. Cut into the embankment, right to the top with ziggurat pauses, is a staircase with a grey electric pillar at its summit. They sit, and watch him from the staircase. Mud begins to puddle through his hunting ground. Their corrugated boxes are scattered with sagging tuppences of rain, but manage to shield pizza from the gathering storm.
As the next piece is teased from the whole, rain splashes their food unpalatably cold. White and yellow cheese, running like sores, is peppered into a palette of disparate flesh: brown, pink, red, black. In accidental moments, indistinguishable from lightning, Amy thinks of the corpse-flower, stinking on a hot-house floor, the ulcerous Raflessia carrion-luring collage; she sees worms, their offspring, crawling across the surface of her food; she sees the carnage of combat captured in a small green box.
Hannah eats voraciously beside her. But Amy eats well, too. Her mind is so flat, and her disgust so thin and so sharp, that it slides along her tongue like the springing of a Yale lock with a credit card, and so she inhales, savours, loves the smell, the taste of the meat; still squirming, disgusted, but fearless of retching.
The nightbus appears through the rain-sheets. Markus steps out of the road, his right hand filled with white orange red glass, raised in a victorious fist which is bleeding from its purchase: pink running stains dispersed along his arm by rain; he's ready to grab something to eat, to continue his way to the party.
1.
Eyes closed. Develop in a Dark Room, to the sound of Overbombing; washing line photos hang from hooks, as carcasses in abattoirs. They say that this song is far too long, and that things unimpailed by photography are consequently unfixed, and so they will diminish with time.
These things I have: my parents in front of the old gas fireplace; a Christmas hoard of old orange, brown, and green plastic toys; nights on the town with teenage friends. Recorded and pickled in jars, though also grown alien with time.
A fox is caught at night, raiding bins for scraps; with two discs of reflected flashlight, suspended in darkness. A ray of light travels between two worlds: to the moon, and safely home. I stare: the fox stares. I hook it on a barb. A scene from long ago: from childhood?
Good music disrupts the rhythms of time. A film: it imparts a quality to your travel; movement differs; the sound of space crispens; utility architecture is elevated and enthroned; the colours of shadows intensify. But a song, a good song, has a tactic for eternity, or else it has nothing.
An accident at the interchange. Heaps of metal removed, detritus remains. A traffic light booted twenty yards toward Ely; snapped cable spine reaching, like Adam to God, God to Adam, toward its novel disconnection, bright stiff-stamened stub flowering from the verge, as a weed in spring. Prayer flag incident tape blows along the sliproad; unspooled like studio-discarded sound, caught on unlikely anchors: trees, fences, signs.
The bell rings and I answer. Hannah, Amy, and Markus arrive, with seconds to spare, soaked and matted; smiling and giggling. Markus has something precious cupped into his hands. I thought it might be a frog or a mouse, but it seems to be some kind of crystal, or jewel. He cannot show this prize to Alex, because he is gone.
An oblique friend sits on the staircase, entranced by the stranger leaning before her, delivering intense lectures without means of access. The three leave for the front room, where six disheveled acquaintances sit in some heady irritated haze, infrequently talking in geriatric anger. Markus' tail falls; he heads for the kitchen and finds a discarded bottle, half-full of Stolly. He swigs.
Hannah dyed her hair cherry red, and tied herself into alluring shapes. She stands in the corner of the room, her weight awkwardly distributed over her feet, leaning against the wall, and smiling distantly, nervously.
Superimposed over her form -- like the reflection of a sinking woman on the underside of the surface of water -- the shape of someone without makeup or costume, dressed for the practice of everyday life. Then, standing before the mirror, and with the aid of a beauty of bottles and cloth, properties of mind cause a determined assembly of her realized form: photographs; music; things caught in traps.
Amy turns, and Hannah grabs her with a gaze. Dyadic gossip rescues them both from the party, and they pass out of view.
Is there some order to the flow of events: does substance flow from frame to frame?
Verses and choruses subside into vanishing-point rivers of outro pulsing; breath zoetrope syncopates with downbeats and snares, as the planets continue revolving unscathed.
Midnight draws near. Disparate lives converge for an hour or two, and then rapidly drift apart. The music is lowered; we gather around the radio; await the discharge of the year.
I sigh without conviction because winter has its own rewards.
Night Swimming
Sep. 20th, 2009 09:32 pmCold, dark, water murmurs secrets with each stroke of my hands.
During the day, it's difficult to know the power of a river. You can glimpse it at a weir, where the mildest of rivers will tumble in rabid foam. But to truly feel the power of a river you must hide it from sight.
On a moonless night, walking along the banks of the Great Ouse, you can feel the river's presence, as if accompanied by a silent friend. But, right now, I -- fourteen year old daughter of the famous Dr Fleishmann -- right now I need more than that friendship. So, now I swim.
In the dim star-light, I can identify plants on the riverbank: the hooded flowers of Wolf's-bane buried amongst vast flocks of cow-parsley. Everywhere, June is scented with Elder-flower and bind-weed.
An ivied oak marks a bend in the river. I cannot detect the change in my stroke which lets me turn with the river. I head for the upstream lock. An eel brushes alongside my naked hip, and I pause in my strokes to hear a trout kissing the air for flies.
Again, the entire population of the world is in imminent mortal danger. It's all getting rather tedious. Important people run in and out of my father's house. He will save the world, again. Or else he won't, and we shall all die. I'm neither concerned nor impressed.
At times like this, the rest of us are awkward obstacles for the eminent to collide with. Pressed into corners by marching engineers with their rolls of blueprints, I would sit in his laboratory and mess with his apparatus. I would play with each of his forces, and energies, which are demonstrated in his lectures, his side-show experiments of bangs and flashes which keep the slumbering awake through pages of algebra. And I would wonder how these toys might relate to this particular day's armageddon. But the world has teetered once too often, and I'm leaving that house for my new home, for my river.
I tread water to watch an adolescent mallard as he sleeps on the bank; his iridescent blue-green cap only just emerging from beneath the down. The sides of his head shine barely aqua in the reflected star-light, while in a band along the top, like a latter-day punk, he bears the dark brown stripe of his youth. My noise has awoken him, and he rises up upon his feet, and proudly plumps his soft belly. Settling down, he rearranges his wings and, reveals, for a moment, lance-corporal stripes.
Often the crisis concerns focusing arrays. I cannot remember what the focusing arrays are for. Perhaps they provide all the world's energy? Or beam all of its television? Or produce cheap instant coffee? But whatever they do, a world without energy, or television, or instant coffee, is so horrific that it's unquestionably worth brilliant minds expending vast amounts of nervous energy to maintain them.
Father has so many awards that he keeps them in a room of their own. With the door open a little, a watery reflection of shimmering gold projects itself onto the hall floor. A number of times there has been a tumultuous crash from the trophy room as one of his shelves collapses under the sheer weight of adulation. Perhaps the focusing arrays would be more reliable if they had hired a space scientist who could master simple DIY?
However, as I'm constantly reminded by the whirlwind of visitors to our house, father is unique. In form, I believe, the focusing array is some scaffolding and bakofoil construction, and is stuffed full of Plutonium. But I can't remember why.
On the left bank there is a half-harvested field of potatoes. Two mobile toilet cubicles, one pink, one blue, and a bright red ToolVault, at the far end of the field, are the only evidence of a day's work. They have been left there for tomorrow's harvesting, if humanity survives that long.
When it is not the focusing arrays, it is usually the geostationary Xenon lasers. I believe they share a purpose with the arrays. It sometimes seems to me that space must be as cluttered and dilapidated as father's laboratory. And, even now, a keen author is probably noting the latest adventures of our gallant heroes, and the manner in which they are about to save the world, again.
The books will be all spaceships and spacesuits, and sex. So much civilisation and quantum physics, but sex still ripples underneath. Not that any intercourse actually occurs during these averted disasters. Our knights of thought and calculus pass out over their drawing boards, while their partners lie nervously in half-vacant beds. I am miles from that madhouse.
At night the surface of a river appears as black and as uniform as asphalt, but it feels, sounds and smells alive. I often wonder if I could just stop swimming, and so go under, and cause myself to die. I don't think that I could. To stay afloat, I must keep moving. But each stroke fails to lessen the need to stroke again.
If I return, my father will have earnt another trophy to test his fragile shelving. I wonder if the river is shallow enough that I can stand in it? I hope not, it's reassuring to imagine that there is some kind of infinity beneath me.
In a moment, a headache overcomes the sky. Shooting lights and bizarre synthetic sounds reveal the story in its unfolding. Sometimes I wonder why my father had me born. If the gold and glass of the trophy room is a true reflection of his eminence, then all of the earth's inhabitants already owe their existence to him, what more was there to prove? Perhaps he thought I would follow in his footsteps? But, I exist now, the cat out is of the bag, and now I swim.
On both banks, now, ox-eye daisies. Lit by the pyrotechnics above, a water-vole darts from its hole by the water's edge, up and into the cover of the daisies. Bats fly overhead now. They nest in the Ashen copse further downstream. I feel scaly skin tickle my midriff, and below me something kicks at the river bottom, and releases a plume of mud.
A light as bright as the sun, and arc lamp white, fills the sky for a moment, and fades into the darkness. That was probably a climax. Either my father is re-crowned king of the world, or else Plutonium baned dust rains to earth.
I reach the lock, and pull myself up onto one of the cross-beams of the gate. The sky is quite dark again now; the science fiction novel has been put down, and the bedside light extinguished.
Letting myself tumble backwards, I fall into the stream and let the river carry me back, like flotsom. On my return, then, I shall see nothing but the sky and of it nothing but stars -- stars and satellites. It's difficult to tell the true star from the human folly. If you look at their light for long enough, you can see satellites constantly falling. But you need to be still, on solid ground. To drift-wood, star and satellite are quite alike, each dancing chaotically in reply to the eddies beneath.
Space becomes clearer, now: fully dilated in black belladonna. An aeroplane flies tangentially to the stream: maybe a president, congratulating father on his fireworks. Or a ghost author departing with a notebook filled, eager to start another adventure.
I drift back, to the house.
During the day, it's difficult to know the power of a river. You can glimpse it at a weir, where the mildest of rivers will tumble in rabid foam. But to truly feel the power of a river you must hide it from sight.
On a moonless night, walking along the banks of the Great Ouse, you can feel the river's presence, as if accompanied by a silent friend. But, right now, I -- fourteen year old daughter of the famous Dr Fleishmann -- right now I need more than that friendship. So, now I swim.
In the dim star-light, I can identify plants on the riverbank: the hooded flowers of Wolf's-bane buried amongst vast flocks of cow-parsley. Everywhere, June is scented with Elder-flower and bind-weed.
An ivied oak marks a bend in the river. I cannot detect the change in my stroke which lets me turn with the river. I head for the upstream lock. An eel brushes alongside my naked hip, and I pause in my strokes to hear a trout kissing the air for flies.
Again, the entire population of the world is in imminent mortal danger. It's all getting rather tedious. Important people run in and out of my father's house. He will save the world, again. Or else he won't, and we shall all die. I'm neither concerned nor impressed.
At times like this, the rest of us are awkward obstacles for the eminent to collide with. Pressed into corners by marching engineers with their rolls of blueprints, I would sit in his laboratory and mess with his apparatus. I would play with each of his forces, and energies, which are demonstrated in his lectures, his side-show experiments of bangs and flashes which keep the slumbering awake through pages of algebra. And I would wonder how these toys might relate to this particular day's armageddon. But the world has teetered once too often, and I'm leaving that house for my new home, for my river.
I tread water to watch an adolescent mallard as he sleeps on the bank; his iridescent blue-green cap only just emerging from beneath the down. The sides of his head shine barely aqua in the reflected star-light, while in a band along the top, like a latter-day punk, he bears the dark brown stripe of his youth. My noise has awoken him, and he rises up upon his feet, and proudly plumps his soft belly. Settling down, he rearranges his wings and, reveals, for a moment, lance-corporal stripes.
Often the crisis concerns focusing arrays. I cannot remember what the focusing arrays are for. Perhaps they provide all the world's energy? Or beam all of its television? Or produce cheap instant coffee? But whatever they do, a world without energy, or television, or instant coffee, is so horrific that it's unquestionably worth brilliant minds expending vast amounts of nervous energy to maintain them.
Father has so many awards that he keeps them in a room of their own. With the door open a little, a watery reflection of shimmering gold projects itself onto the hall floor. A number of times there has been a tumultuous crash from the trophy room as one of his shelves collapses under the sheer weight of adulation. Perhaps the focusing arrays would be more reliable if they had hired a space scientist who could master simple DIY?
However, as I'm constantly reminded by the whirlwind of visitors to our house, father is unique. In form, I believe, the focusing array is some scaffolding and bakofoil construction, and is stuffed full of Plutonium. But I can't remember why.
On the left bank there is a half-harvested field of potatoes. Two mobile toilet cubicles, one pink, one blue, and a bright red ToolVault, at the far end of the field, are the only evidence of a day's work. They have been left there for tomorrow's harvesting, if humanity survives that long.
When it is not the focusing arrays, it is usually the geostationary Xenon lasers. I believe they share a purpose with the arrays. It sometimes seems to me that space must be as cluttered and dilapidated as father's laboratory. And, even now, a keen author is probably noting the latest adventures of our gallant heroes, and the manner in which they are about to save the world, again.
The books will be all spaceships and spacesuits, and sex. So much civilisation and quantum physics, but sex still ripples underneath. Not that any intercourse actually occurs during these averted disasters. Our knights of thought and calculus pass out over their drawing boards, while their partners lie nervously in half-vacant beds. I am miles from that madhouse.
At night the surface of a river appears as black and as uniform as asphalt, but it feels, sounds and smells alive. I often wonder if I could just stop swimming, and so go under, and cause myself to die. I don't think that I could. To stay afloat, I must keep moving. But each stroke fails to lessen the need to stroke again.
If I return, my father will have earnt another trophy to test his fragile shelving. I wonder if the river is shallow enough that I can stand in it? I hope not, it's reassuring to imagine that there is some kind of infinity beneath me.
In a moment, a headache overcomes the sky. Shooting lights and bizarre synthetic sounds reveal the story in its unfolding. Sometimes I wonder why my father had me born. If the gold and glass of the trophy room is a true reflection of his eminence, then all of the earth's inhabitants already owe their existence to him, what more was there to prove? Perhaps he thought I would follow in his footsteps? But, I exist now, the cat out is of the bag, and now I swim.
On both banks, now, ox-eye daisies. Lit by the pyrotechnics above, a water-vole darts from its hole by the water's edge, up and into the cover of the daisies. Bats fly overhead now. They nest in the Ashen copse further downstream. I feel scaly skin tickle my midriff, and below me something kicks at the river bottom, and releases a plume of mud.
A light as bright as the sun, and arc lamp white, fills the sky for a moment, and fades into the darkness. That was probably a climax. Either my father is re-crowned king of the world, or else Plutonium baned dust rains to earth.
I reach the lock, and pull myself up onto one of the cross-beams of the gate. The sky is quite dark again now; the science fiction novel has been put down, and the bedside light extinguished.
Letting myself tumble backwards, I fall into the stream and let the river carry me back, like flotsom. On my return, then, I shall see nothing but the sky and of it nothing but stars -- stars and satellites. It's difficult to tell the true star from the human folly. If you look at their light for long enough, you can see satellites constantly falling. But you need to be still, on solid ground. To drift-wood, star and satellite are quite alike, each dancing chaotically in reply to the eddies beneath.
Space becomes clearer, now: fully dilated in black belladonna. An aeroplane flies tangentially to the stream: maybe a president, congratulating father on his fireworks. Or a ghost author departing with a notebook filled, eager to start another adventure.
I drift back, to the house.
X1.
Steps red-velvet off an X5: the moon in her bag, Gaiman and Moore in her bag, Ophelia drowning in her bag, steps into a crowd heaving through Christ's Pieces, first day in the city, follows the sink-hole through the crap grey arcade, curious amongst the crowd.
They caught an angel on Union Lane. Injured, he was, dazed and confused. Crying, he was, funny in the head. Screaming at blackbirds, he was, a danger to traffic. A cage was built with scraps from Mackays. A cage they put him in, wheeled over the common. His wings, they beat the cage-bars which rang out like a choir: sheet aluminium from the cutting room floor, singing like the choirs of heaven, hollering, it was, all over the common. Took him to Petty Cury, they did, where Snowy Farr once pitched.
She followed the crowd to where his cage stood, where they prodded him and probed him. He had a limp blue bag held to his chest, and was screaming loud: an angel funny in the head. The bag was the prize of their hunt. They opened the cage door, and the angel tried to escape, but they kicked him in the chest, kicked him in the bollocks, kicked him in the eye, grabbed his bag and slammed the door.
Out the bag: equipment. Wires, notebooks, Enochian microfilm one-time-pads, alien holy indistinct machinery, short wave radio tuned to number station, bits of stuff which made no sense, real stuff with no name nor description.
Velvet girl looks at the angel, apart, stage left. The others fight over bag spill, dead centre. Her alone, thinking: what washes flows powers this city?
X2.
"I raise my glass to punting" the angel says, "my champagne dangles on a string, tealights in moonlight: a moon most expertly packed in your bag, by the way, folded into quarters and wrapped round with string. I raise my glass in vague remembrance of Brideshead", he says, "and to the glorious Jeremy Irons. I raise my glass to the honour and glory of your chosen profession, to balls, and porters and to stream regurgitating incontinent consciousness forty-year-hence Desert Island Discs."
His wing cage rang like a choir colliding with a sanding machine. "This is swarf to you, now, white-noise fetish kitsch, to you, now. I deal in hope: yours amongst others, by the fraction of an ounce. And I have none left, I am cleaned-out, dry. Raided by Scotland Yard, precursors impounded flagged deprecated eliminated from products by 2009 by act of Parliament queen and state. A drugless dealer; a street corner bum. Allegory and metaphor, excrement of study-note despair. I low like the cattle standing heavy on a common".
The mob turn towards the angel, now: shout "spy". Bare his nameless things before his eyes and demand their names. She steps back, now, as the crowd inch forward, glances aside now as their faces meet.
"You want to meet a boy? A girl perhaps? A boy.", Angel off to the side, to new-to-the-city girl.
"YOU ARE HERE, in a room in a college", he says. There is a boy here, and it is his room. You are there now: she is there now. High-ceiling candle-in-bottle red-velvet dress gas-fireplace picture-rail gloss edge of bed, sitting, hands in lap, listening. The angel, and the mob, distant transparent dessicated like flowers, the two of them sitting in awe. He is talking, the boy, and she listens, now, knows his name now, what they did last week, now, where they went and who they met last term, now, the moon unpacked and long discarded on the floor, though a moment before they had never met, and the moon was secured with string.
X3.
He killed a dragon today, though three more were added to his list. Glass cabinet green baize quaint-locked serif-type timetables nailed onto classical columns. There is so much to be killed.
The dragon, he hanged from a lamppost, as a warning to others. Dictator-wide streets and Soviet blocks, a dragon hanging from a lamp standard in the central reservation, neck distending by the weight of its own guts, and the elasticity of their putrefaction.
The barricades moved 300 yards forward, today, sheet-metal scrap barbed-wire concrete martyr-shield lock-in tunnelled complexes of mechanico-ethical machinery; and the river is ours to Jesus lock.
Grantchester Meadows was defoliated today, brown and sour. Their crime, not ours. A headphoned and sunglassed soldier leans from a helicopter and drops confetti shreds over the common, watches it drift in the breeze; radios angles of attack. Still, before dawn. Three sweeps of polychlorinated broom and it is gone. The meadows were ours, but strategically nothing: he shouts, cries, hollow-laughs gives life to the space of his tall, visited room.
One of the oxen was weak today. "A friend of mine from college", he says. He will writhe in anxiety into small hours, for the sake of his ox. "Do not think you are worth anything, without an ox". (She prays that hers is well).
The newspaper said that they are closing in on traitors who are laming our campaign. They have files, a whole library of files, to be sorted translated and analysed. No room for the books, so they sit in the rain. We dare not burn them, so they pulp in the rain, riches of cities now a cheap sentimental pile.
He has some music to play her: a yawing cassette of seventies folk-rock: a band she does not know. The girl and the boy they crouch and listen, in wonder of each others listening. I saw an angel today, she said, in a cage by Lion Yard.
Today we played football, he said, with boys from the college, against a unit from Waterbeach, of irregular fusiliers. A fusilier, they say, can kill five a day: muted, grey, brown, and black ones, but five dragons all the same. And anyway, the iridescence fades as the porphyrins crack, so, after an hour, they all look the same.
Unsteady folk wanders. Time for sleep, Abilene!
One to bed, the other the floor.
"I'd fuck her if she wasn't a boy."
X4.
Within an inch of an aborting storm, the president lands in Sverdlovsk. A motorcade takes him expressly to the lab, where in an hour he will turn on the machine.
Even in Cambridge, you still can see, from place to place, small and bounded fires, surrounded by yellow-jacketed attendants, their idle tenders flashing primary colours into the evaporating mist.
Both he and she decontaminate land. He, and a gang, shift barrels onto a low-loading truck; she picks particles from a field, into containers.
Evening, and the others sit in the front room, watching the president's progress on TV, while the two of them, exhausted from work, perch awkwardly on the patio threshold; pass a joint to-and-fro; and watch the sun set uncertainly.
She tells him that she hopes that the machine will fail; that they go on living this life, this life which destroys them both; hopes that they become contaminated with the decades of dirty work; and that they both slowly, anonymously die.
He tells her that she is a fool, that life must go on, that Rose has had kids, and the work is for the children, and their children, too. She says, with a sigh, that for her abdication does not substitute for success, that induction fails without a base case, and that after a work day, when she stands and looks behind her, at twenty or thirty square metres of land ready for the plough, she is content if not happy.
He asks her if she really did see an angel on Petty Cury: a pause, an absent nod. She says that she didn't think he had heard her, when she told him amidst his stories of war.
The two of them watch hollyhocks rock in the wind amongst long grass, and hear occasional peaks and cries of debate emerge from the crowd deep within. They sit silently, think over the decade which they have past in the company of each other, and stare into the last light of the day.
Newsweek, once, had him on the cover: at work, shirtless with labour, muscles taut, pulsing, a picture of a war-crime in beautiful progress, cover of a special edition; his image flashed around the world.
Hero and villain have been determined by document, by data, by flags on file, by divisions inevident to the eye. Divisions conceived after the fighting has ended. Like tornadoes, they would attack, unaware of designations; as amoral as a storm.
From time-to-time, people who pass him, as he works in the street, will recognise his face from the photograph. They catch sight of him as he pushes barrels up a plank, onto the back of the truck. They will stand stare with equally warrantless admiration or hatred.
In those early days, he asks, if you had cracked us open like eggs, would you have found inside us that seed, dust, germ, of blossom and of decay? We are not cracked like eggs, she says, but stained glass: permuted red here, blue there, assembled into form, each from each other with the passage of time.
If you had the choice, he declares, between living like this, and living as once you were, where you saw an angel in a cage on the corner of the street, you would jump at the chance to return.
With a choice, she said, it would be neither that world nor this, a paradoxical place where angels rather danced on the heads of pins.
You're avoiding the question he says.
She smiles.
X5.
At 08:37:30, in Courier font, the voltage dropped on bus-bar 5. In the electrical switchroom, breakers tripped in unprecedented unison. Those which remained closed were then manually thrown and locked out, pending incident reports. By now it was now 08:38.
How rare it is, to see, recorded, the slow-motion dignity of working life, except as a prelude to some terrible mistake. How beautiful it would be to see a single moment recorded, in the life of a railway, or in the operation of the Sverdlovsk machine, completely without incident, in the detail only afforded to inquests and commissions.
She found her once-favourite dress, the other day, beneath a pile of parcel-twine: the dress which she had once arrived in town in, and the twine she had once wrapped the moon in.
She wonders where he is, now, what he is doing at this moment: what all of them are doing at this undistinguished moment, early on a Wednesday evening in spring. If there were an accident, an explosion, a calamity, she would know: it would be recorded by a Lord sitting in committee in parliament, then pieced together, and published in a report.
But without the benefits of such expert narration, what can her memories mean to her?
Days go by, deeper into the century.
Steps red-velvet off an X5: the moon in her bag, Gaiman and Moore in her bag, Ophelia drowning in her bag, steps into a crowd heaving through Christ's Pieces, first day in the city, follows the sink-hole through the crap grey arcade, curious amongst the crowd.
They caught an angel on Union Lane. Injured, he was, dazed and confused. Crying, he was, funny in the head. Screaming at blackbirds, he was, a danger to traffic. A cage was built with scraps from Mackays. A cage they put him in, wheeled over the common. His wings, they beat the cage-bars which rang out like a choir: sheet aluminium from the cutting room floor, singing like the choirs of heaven, hollering, it was, all over the common. Took him to Petty Cury, they did, where Snowy Farr once pitched.
She followed the crowd to where his cage stood, where they prodded him and probed him. He had a limp blue bag held to his chest, and was screaming loud: an angel funny in the head. The bag was the prize of their hunt. They opened the cage door, and the angel tried to escape, but they kicked him in the chest, kicked him in the bollocks, kicked him in the eye, grabbed his bag and slammed the door.
Out the bag: equipment. Wires, notebooks, Enochian microfilm one-time-pads, alien holy indistinct machinery, short wave radio tuned to number station, bits of stuff which made no sense, real stuff with no name nor description.
Velvet girl looks at the angel, apart, stage left. The others fight over bag spill, dead centre. Her alone, thinking: what washes flows powers this city?
X2.
"I raise my glass to punting" the angel says, "my champagne dangles on a string, tealights in moonlight: a moon most expertly packed in your bag, by the way, folded into quarters and wrapped round with string. I raise my glass in vague remembrance of Brideshead", he says, "and to the glorious Jeremy Irons. I raise my glass to the honour and glory of your chosen profession, to balls, and porters and to stream regurgitating incontinent consciousness forty-year-hence Desert Island Discs."
His wing cage rang like a choir colliding with a sanding machine. "This is swarf to you, now, white-noise fetish kitsch, to you, now. I deal in hope: yours amongst others, by the fraction of an ounce. And I have none left, I am cleaned-out, dry. Raided by Scotland Yard, precursors impounded flagged deprecated eliminated from products by 2009 by act of Parliament queen and state. A drugless dealer; a street corner bum. Allegory and metaphor, excrement of study-note despair. I low like the cattle standing heavy on a common".
The mob turn towards the angel, now: shout "spy". Bare his nameless things before his eyes and demand their names. She steps back, now, as the crowd inch forward, glances aside now as their faces meet.
"You want to meet a boy? A girl perhaps? A boy.", Angel off to the side, to new-to-the-city girl.
"YOU ARE HERE, in a room in a college", he says. There is a boy here, and it is his room. You are there now: she is there now. High-ceiling candle-in-bottle red-velvet dress gas-fireplace picture-rail gloss edge of bed, sitting, hands in lap, listening. The angel, and the mob, distant transparent dessicated like flowers, the two of them sitting in awe. He is talking, the boy, and she listens, now, knows his name now, what they did last week, now, where they went and who they met last term, now, the moon unpacked and long discarded on the floor, though a moment before they had never met, and the moon was secured with string.
X3.
He killed a dragon today, though three more were added to his list. Glass cabinet green baize quaint-locked serif-type timetables nailed onto classical columns. There is so much to be killed.
The dragon, he hanged from a lamppost, as a warning to others. Dictator-wide streets and Soviet blocks, a dragon hanging from a lamp standard in the central reservation, neck distending by the weight of its own guts, and the elasticity of their putrefaction.
The barricades moved 300 yards forward, today, sheet-metal scrap barbed-wire concrete martyr-shield lock-in tunnelled complexes of mechanico-ethical machinery; and the river is ours to Jesus lock.
Grantchester Meadows was defoliated today, brown and sour. Their crime, not ours. A headphoned and sunglassed soldier leans from a helicopter and drops confetti shreds over the common, watches it drift in the breeze; radios angles of attack. Still, before dawn. Three sweeps of polychlorinated broom and it is gone. The meadows were ours, but strategically nothing: he shouts, cries, hollow-laughs gives life to the space of his tall, visited room.
One of the oxen was weak today. "A friend of mine from college", he says. He will writhe in anxiety into small hours, for the sake of his ox. "Do not think you are worth anything, without an ox". (She prays that hers is well).
The newspaper said that they are closing in on traitors who are laming our campaign. They have files, a whole library of files, to be sorted translated and analysed. No room for the books, so they sit in the rain. We dare not burn them, so they pulp in the rain, riches of cities now a cheap sentimental pile.
He has some music to play her: a yawing cassette of seventies folk-rock: a band she does not know. The girl and the boy they crouch and listen, in wonder of each others listening. I saw an angel today, she said, in a cage by Lion Yard.
Today we played football, he said, with boys from the college, against a unit from Waterbeach, of irregular fusiliers. A fusilier, they say, can kill five a day: muted, grey, brown, and black ones, but five dragons all the same. And anyway, the iridescence fades as the porphyrins crack, so, after an hour, they all look the same.
Unsteady folk wanders. Time for sleep, Abilene!
One to bed, the other the floor.
"I'd fuck her if she wasn't a boy."
X4.
Within an inch of an aborting storm, the president lands in Sverdlovsk. A motorcade takes him expressly to the lab, where in an hour he will turn on the machine.
Even in Cambridge, you still can see, from place to place, small and bounded fires, surrounded by yellow-jacketed attendants, their idle tenders flashing primary colours into the evaporating mist.
Both he and she decontaminate land. He, and a gang, shift barrels onto a low-loading truck; she picks particles from a field, into containers.
Evening, and the others sit in the front room, watching the president's progress on TV, while the two of them, exhausted from work, perch awkwardly on the patio threshold; pass a joint to-and-fro; and watch the sun set uncertainly.
She tells him that she hopes that the machine will fail; that they go on living this life, this life which destroys them both; hopes that they become contaminated with the decades of dirty work; and that they both slowly, anonymously die.
He tells her that she is a fool, that life must go on, that Rose has had kids, and the work is for the children, and their children, too. She says, with a sigh, that for her abdication does not substitute for success, that induction fails without a base case, and that after a work day, when she stands and looks behind her, at twenty or thirty square metres of land ready for the plough, she is content if not happy.
He asks her if she really did see an angel on Petty Cury: a pause, an absent nod. She says that she didn't think he had heard her, when she told him amidst his stories of war.
The two of them watch hollyhocks rock in the wind amongst long grass, and hear occasional peaks and cries of debate emerge from the crowd deep within. They sit silently, think over the decade which they have past in the company of each other, and stare into the last light of the day.
Newsweek, once, had him on the cover: at work, shirtless with labour, muscles taut, pulsing, a picture of a war-crime in beautiful progress, cover of a special edition; his image flashed around the world.
Hero and villain have been determined by document, by data, by flags on file, by divisions inevident to the eye. Divisions conceived after the fighting has ended. Like tornadoes, they would attack, unaware of designations; as amoral as a storm.
From time-to-time, people who pass him, as he works in the street, will recognise his face from the photograph. They catch sight of him as he pushes barrels up a plank, onto the back of the truck. They will stand stare with equally warrantless admiration or hatred.
In those early days, he asks, if you had cracked us open like eggs, would you have found inside us that seed, dust, germ, of blossom and of decay? We are not cracked like eggs, she says, but stained glass: permuted red here, blue there, assembled into form, each from each other with the passage of time.
If you had the choice, he declares, between living like this, and living as once you were, where you saw an angel in a cage on the corner of the street, you would jump at the chance to return.
With a choice, she said, it would be neither that world nor this, a paradoxical place where angels rather danced on the heads of pins.
You're avoiding the question he says.
She smiles.
X5.
At 08:37:30, in Courier font, the voltage dropped on bus-bar 5. In the electrical switchroom, breakers tripped in unprecedented unison. Those which remained closed were then manually thrown and locked out, pending incident reports. By now it was now 08:38.
How rare it is, to see, recorded, the slow-motion dignity of working life, except as a prelude to some terrible mistake. How beautiful it would be to see a single moment recorded, in the life of a railway, or in the operation of the Sverdlovsk machine, completely without incident, in the detail only afforded to inquests and commissions.
She found her once-favourite dress, the other day, beneath a pile of parcel-twine: the dress which she had once arrived in town in, and the twine she had once wrapped the moon in.
She wonders where he is, now, what he is doing at this moment: what all of them are doing at this undistinguished moment, early on a Wednesday evening in spring. If there were an accident, an explosion, a calamity, she would know: it would be recorded by a Lord sitting in committee in parliament, then pieced together, and published in a report.
But without the benefits of such expert narration, what can her memories mean to her?
Days go by, deeper into the century.
