Who Said That?

“Trust anonymity.”

One Two

A wrinkled box of water.  I into a painted corner unlock the blue clatter of the tin.  On this is the island on which I live where birds fly high nothing survives the four winds into which the dust motes speed like the red nailed barbs of the cactus animals that society has bent on pasteurisation.  The verb denotes action.  Or vice versa.  Everything dies.  Everything dies is always something and something being what it is is always there.  There are two on my island.  Walls define it.  Two of me.  Being what I am.  Each finitude stays like a cut and paste advert hanging above the kites of fallen horses.  Where I hide what’s worst is hidden.  Has no place to hide but in creation.  The other is my echo.  I don’t believe I’ve ever heard.  This is my sad egg.  My happy hatch.  Where all sands down.  My patch of grass, my full blown flung dung of self, food arrives here, a toil of Pyramis.  In this little place of sun. 

Defining terms

My life, the defining terms:

Nothing is wrong until something is wrong.

Something is wrong until nothing is wrong.

Something is wrong.

Nothing is wrong.

Is anything wrong?

Something must be wrong! 

What, if nothing is wrong, is that something?

Did I forget about it or did it forget me?

How can something that has forgotten about me be anything that I still care about if I don’t know what it is?

I don’t know how long ago it forgot about me.  I can’t remember.  Could I remember would it matter?

If it forgot about me can I remember that it was important in a way that is important?  If it is important, that automatically disqualifies me from its knowing since everything I know is trivial.  The important thing is triviality.  One step at a time.

Multiple Choice

Complete the phrase.  (Here is a game.)  Using one of the choices below say which you think is the real situation with human beings:  “The human species is unique amongst the living species of the world because …”

1) It has language

2) It has opposing thumb and forefinger

2 1/2) It wears sharp suits

3) It is ill

4) It plays games

5) Something is wrong

6) It is conceited beyond repair

Did you get the right answer?  Why not?

Two full halves

The brain contains two halves: one sensible and therefore  that half is fully cogent, and one not sensible and therefore that half is empty of cogency.  For one side therefore the two halves are empty, dull, but for the other the two halves are full in so far as since both are understood then in spite of a half being incogent it’s cogently so.  But – so - should we conclude that if you add two full halves that gets you a full empty because now doubled and that if you add two empty halves that gets you an empty full or should it be vice versa?  Thus that adding two empty halves will get you a brain sensible but adding two full ones will get you a brain senseless.  This is like the question of the empty sleeve.  Put a glove on it.

Works

The work I am writing, it is in my head.

And there are two compartments.  A wall down the middle, separating the two sides.  In one something sensible takes place; in two something meaningless takes place.  A circular window, a porthole, joins these rooms.  In one you peer out of the sensible into the senseless; in the other, the reverse: out of the senseless into the sensible.  The theme I want to explore is what does the sensible person make of the senseless view and what, in reverse, does the senseless person make of the sensible view?  Is it sensible what the senseless person sees?  And by the same token on the other hand is it senseless what the sensible person sees, because the perceived is, in the two cases, respectively, the opposite, in the terms of our hypothetical observer, which is a sensible but where senseless and senseless but where sensible – . 

A five finger-ed exercise

Hands.  The hands that do digital.  Real or metaphor.

Hands on, hands down.  Hands up.  Give them the finger.

Fine hands.  Hand cream.  A labourer’s hands.  A gardener’s green genius.  Hands that have never done a day’s work in their lives.  Half-moons, and long painted nails, and life-lines, all fingers and thumbs.  The left is what you have done but the right is what you will do.  Gaucheries. There is the Bad / there is the Good.  The hand that signed the paper.  Hands have no tears to flow.  The arthritic hand.  The secretary’s hand.  Handsome.  A single hand.  A royal flush.  Even-handed.  Shade for the eyes.  The whispered lies.  Pulling the trigger, releasing the bow, turning the ignition, dialing the number, typing the story, emphasising the fact.  The gesture of exasperation.  Clapping.  Hammering.  The thumbs down.  “These hands are not the hands of someone who has shirked life.    80 years are in these hands.  In the fine hairs and freckles and wrinkles.  This hand waves bye bye.  This hand says hello.  My hands are like two baby banana bunches.  Handy when you need them, so cross your fingers.”

Narrative

Narrative is the only story in town.  Everything tells its story.  A bus conductor for example.  He, or she, as is, tells you a story.  The story is “I am a bus conductor.”  You look at them, you know their story.  You look at a fence; you know its story.  You look at a tree, you know its story.   You look at bird.  You look at a house.  You look at an arrow.  You know its story.

Metropolis

There is a moment, morning and evening, when I move through crowds with the indifference of a ball-bearing.  People in motion; people everywhere, wheels and ball bearings, they too wizz somewhere else, elsewhere, going, going, into the far distance: on and on they vanish in a coiling breeze of smoke – sometimes it seems without breath we being the pieces in this speeded-up game of circuses in which the parts are wheels and the ball bearings they use, this replayed again and again in a loop backwards and forwards of black and white soundless and in the narrows of an event taking place under glass: under a microscope which as the microbe looking back up into it, the seeing eye sees nothing, or nothing but a huge black single finger of hair flicking the glass as the camera whirrs in its lit gloom underwater in the late afternoon of the West to East of the sun, the slapped light thrown the length of the street so that the side lit space is a lengthening line of bricks that finally diminish into the tungsten and darkness.  Does everyone breath still?  It is difficult to believe they are not phantoms populating a proscenium, a diorama of shopfronts, the real air beyond entered by ticketed permission and ruled over by an invisible collector; and in this way stretching to the place actual where we all want to be which is a baby carried frontwards in a pouch, two small headlamps for eyes, an inhuman look, it perches wondering, expressionless, uninflected; contained by its serenity and golden blue; its mundane cocoon not in the same place, carried by its dad who a fig of its ambidextrous weight, moving just as I am, in old motion through the stroke conveys him with price and so I pick a route, stepping at right angles to the quick – the heels oncoming where someone is puffing a cloud in glass and so using my head I punch through and shut my eyes and walk in straight diagonals, purely vertical like a shiver where few things are ever actually what one wants them to be.  Iconic; things of which one can say: Here is a street-corner; there is a shop.  Instead they seem poor approximations for themselves.  Comfortless.  The sun is not visible, everywhere is white, everywhere is grey.  Dun.  Dim.  An approximate: an approximate pavement; an approximate letter box.  An approximate person.  An approximate plate glass.  Approximate parked car .  Someone on their hands-free, fag waving, eyes down, feet shuffling, head tocking, engaged but not here.  On the underground, the brown tiles a nearly satisfactory underground stuff at last; one enters the animal tunnel past the barricades they are real.  You look out of the tube carriage like a mouse and only people from their lower bodies show.  Headless, they collect, someone has their hands together, as in church, her left hand clasps the fingers of her right, two are holding each other’s hands, the arms are folded, arms reach out as though to speed the approach to the door, shifting figures slip jostling, gathering, appear through the door complete, miraculously she is restored, the trunk rejoined to its owner, an assemblage of bags stowed situated as each expertly decides their place.  The adverts, they slide in front of me like disassembled faces, that one day I hope will look directly at me, smiling: the features solitary, shattered by movement they are all looking elsewhere.  A giant black O and the fullness of an S visible in hot orange between two coats.  Then a crowd; the scene changes.  Pink footed geese field after field rise like a train passing one continuous roar.  Faces blurred but the expressions one can guess.  Ecstatic.  And yet no-one moves in the same direction.  They are all moving towards something but if they are the same and the direction appears the same, it is different.  What it is is hidden - in perspective somewhere behind the seat where I sit gazing, staring at the flat surface beyond the glass this is the ease of sliding, somewhere where we move off and are for the merest fraction of a second transformed into true daylight and its far darkness.  The next station is that side, there where I get the platform muddled with another.  As I get off the train, I slowly shuffle, patient, I am easing forwards blankly but somehow elated, with the crowd, everything is moving slowly; the muscles in the backs of my legs form my thoughts; they surprise me; is shows the ease with which they move; in perpetual motion.   Slowly I move like this and it takes so little effort that I am excited by the idea of this energy and its boundless nature.  It will never end.  Before the week or day is out.  As before a race.  You crouch there, stand at the starting blocks with a sick feeling in your stomach but all the time sensing the effortlessness of it, too, the promise of the race about to begin, but that has already ended, so real is it, so that imagination flies ahead down the track to the fat ribbon of victory: it will be effortless; except that you are aware that everyone else has the same idea; so that the confidence and imagination with which this is envisaged dissolves like pop in an opened bottle left for hours.  So that finally as I slide frictionless along the flat to the escalators, in a single sustained moment, I am in stasis, an anxiety, a waiting and expectation, I have lost everything, so that now that I reach this point it reduces back to the opened flapping newspapers of bad intent that work the neutral cynical faces, the faces that being everyone else are not me even if they are reading; and all the day’s news conveyed on their sunless skin consists in the exact same words that I read.  The women standing in various poses of desire, they glance out sideways for someone, someone who no no no no, someone whom they will never connect with, everyone impatient with their lives, purposes, conceits, imaginary, but they could be friends, with them they could have a cup of coffee and a chat – they could talk in the Pret but in the end preferably to a female in sex who is dressed equally inspirationally.   We collect at the bottom of the next flight of escalators.  A spool of spotted trouble, we are unwound upwards into the worlds of non-motion.  Threaded shadows airborn and free of the steep track of the earth from which we emerge! we ascend the rocket’s sides, the ramparts are full of soldiers, the soldiers and space cadets of fortune, but weaponless, vanishing into a portcullis of bright adverts and mist, there the air beckons, there a puff of steam puffs, where above ground buildings stand, and beyond the silence that slips invisible under the crackle of slow shoes shuffling on glazed tiles the twinkling screens lining every surface make gently sharp pleas; and in the overt act of brainwashing us friendless and static, dispiriting, they have the exemplary forthrightness of the dull truth, a clarity that fills out in every dimension as we look at these idylls of perfection for the imperfect.  Our conforming feet that marching on; make sure of us; so that on we go past; a foghorn voice for us all, keep to the right and affirming, for all, that the lines are running a good or a not good service thanks to the service of this good.