A Prayer

Explain the world to me in my dreams
That knowing may guide my night
Though when I wake the knowledge may be gone
The having known forever remains

Know the world for me in my waking
That it may be hers through my eyes
And let this little thing forever be
A sign for those to come

Let thought the tiger abide
There is no peace here

Like a Muggins

This is my first non-fiction entry since my shamefaced, ninja-silent return to the magic of the interweb.

Good lord, look at all that blank space.

Um.

I left the internet two years or so ago, saying that I didn't feel the need to blog anymore; that it had become a chore to fulfil instead of a pleasure or even a catharsis. I deleted my blog, said farewell to my literally teens of readers, and sloped off. Well, now I need to have a corner to rant in again.

My previous effort was ridiculously frank; I bared my chest and wailed at the computer and hid nothing. This time won't be like that, I suspect. I will use this mostly to put up things that I have made, and that probably fairly infrequently, in contrast with the glut of posts so far. Photos might happen soon. There will be some ranting, though, at some point. When I began to type this entry I thought it would contain rather a lot of ranting, and maybe some expletives for good measure. However, this isn't the time.

Listen (W.I.P.)

Listen:
When this is ended, you will remember three things.

The first will come by accident
On a summer's day
You will be eating an orange in the shade
And the breeze will bring you
Memories of dancers
Of the heavy smells
And solemn mysteries.

I dreamt a world of cranes.
I flew among and over them
And though I could not see
To what purpose they swung and dipped,
I knew their work would never end
That what was to come
Could not surpass.

The fruit in your hands
Will become a sphere of my flesh,
And you will eat.

Four Things (W.I.P)

At our most desperately broke, when I’d been unemployed for a year, Jenna was chewing through every prescription drug the doctors could throw at her melting brain, and Lisa was still two years short of school, we barely lived off every government benefit we could beg in a sub-let basement studio half an hour’s walk from any recognisable area of east London; I guess it was Mid-Ham, if you want. All three of us ate, and slept, and cooked, and Lisa sang and danced and cried and ran and Jenna drew, and sat, and stared, and I wrote and self-dramatised and played at holding a family together that in fact I had no hope or intention of saving, at least in its current form, and Jenna and I almost never, ever fucked, in one yellowed, subterranean room with charcoal carpet tiles taped over the floor, excluding the hospital-green linoleum-covered ‘kitchenette’. Our bowels moved and our ablutions were performed in a peeling cupboard we shared with the anonymous inhabitants of, I think, four similar holes.

Lisa spent most of this time playing with a toy horse my grandfather had made for me. I have to this day no idea how he fashioned this little concoction of wood, springs, and wire, but however the mechanism functioned, the upshot was that, when pulled along with a string, the horse would follow, not on wheels but at a fragile trot. He could be upset by pulling too hard, or not hard enough, and any obstacle would topple him, but the horse was Lisa’s greatest joy, as it had been mine; this was a particular relief at a time when actually buying a toy was out of the question. It was a roughly-carved, childishly painted, oft-repaired thing, a fabulous thing, an object I envied every time Lisa caressed it with her fat, beautiful hands. I could not have her play with it when I wrote; the plod of uneven hooves on the carpet tiles, or worse, the slap on lino, would unnerve me with a jealous desire to be small enough to justify tearing it from her arms and cradling it and abdicating. So Lisa would be unsettled as I wrote, and Jenna would draw, always dancers and birds. What’s that, mummy, it’s a dancer, why are you drawing a dancer, mummy.

‘I like to remind myself how ugly anything can be if you pin it to a piece of paper’.

Always looking at me.

She said crap like that a lot. It really helped when she had an appointment. She always presented well, especially when it meant she could score a point, be it against me or against a medical professional. She didn’t care an inch that her daughter didn’t understand, she didn’t care an inch that her daughter understood just well enough to start crying, she didn’t care an inch that the same thing happened every day, it seemed. She held our sobbing child in our pathetic home, in her pathetic, flaccid arms, and poured recrimination from her sallow eyes, blue spots in yellow cups in a purple shroud.

Jenna Mackie died at the age of thirty-two in a nice house on a nice street a very long way from her daughter, which is as it should be. Her grave lives in my mind always accompanied by her second husband, who wanted so badly to save her. Never trust a man who wants to to save a woman who is beyond it, because he will destroy her faster than anything else, and himself too, by the by. Jenna, lovely Jenna, bitch, was an addled vortex, sucking love from whoever gave it, the more, the more quickly and ferociously. She sucked everything that sweet, kind, stupid man could give her, and when he was almost dry, she took every pill in the house, I mean, a lot of pills, and followed it up with oven cleaner, just to be sure, and maybe for a flourish. I heard from elsewhere that she’d draped some used condoms, not his, but hers anyway, around the place for the husband to find, the ultimate suicide note – not only, but also. She was naked and frothed up and four hours dead and five hours last fucked when he came home. Thank all things holy they hadn’t a child.

I would like to say that he will be better off without her, but no-one was ever better off after Jenna. That was the first of the four things she had pinned to her door when I first knew her.

You will not be better off without me.

It was at the world, and once you were swept in by the outer arms of her furious, pointless little storm it was irremediably true, forever and ever amen. She made your world smaller and smaller until there was no room in it for anything but her: not just lovers, but friends, flatmates, her ruined mother, I hope not yet our child.

My first relationship after I finally achieved escape velocity, 1000 small atrocities after I should have, was with a woman who had been Jenna’s confidante some years before; she had been discarded without warning after half a year of abuse, the solvent of her adoring company worn out. Lisa loved Anna, loved her cakes and her full, chubby black fingers which stroked Lisa’s hair as they sang together, and I loved her, because she had known my now ex-wife well enough that we could talk of her endlessly. It seemed for a time that we would spend our whole lives together, conducting a shared post-mortem on our gall-encrusted love for the irreplaceable, unforgettable Jenna: Jenna, who transcended sexuality, who overcame all objections, and became the object of every unlucky acquaintance’s jealous, horrific devotion. We talked of her, honestly and sadly, and I held Anna’s adipose hands with their mother-of-pearl fingernails and the semi-permanent burns just below both thumbs as she revealed, unawares, a love that certainly eclipsed ours for each other, and perhaps matched, in its unrequited intensity, even mine for Jenna. When she remembered Jenna fondly, Anna would smile a great cracked-earth smile and I would realise how happy a person she had been, and how much she had had taken away from her, and I would love her all the more.

What drew us together of course tore us apart, as our burgeoning feelings for each other and our eternal ones for Jenna crossed with increasing frequency. A shared notion became a cause for envy or mistrust, and the honest core of our communication, always her, became careful, tentative. The ruptures revealed how little we had in common, how little this love was in comparison to that which spawned it, and so our runt love died. At least the resigned animosity that grew up in its place bore the clear hallmarks of its progenitor, so that we could remember Jenna even as we parted, point two of her little manifesto – You will never forget me – proven at a double remove. Thanks for the memories.

I was a midway through my PhD when I first encountered the woman who would come to overshadow my life; Jenna was a surly, feral undergraduate in an introductory seminar I taught, inspiring rather unwholesome thoughts that made it all the more difficult to try to inspire bored teenagers to care about Hume. Initially, while noticing her beauty with passing indifference – as one must when tutoring eighteen-year-old girls – I had found her irritating, her sullenness overshadowing the whole class and her full, spiteful lips only parting to snap some withering and wholly unhelpful remark at one of her nervous peers. She must already have had me by then, because the force with which I reacted the first time she smiled at a crack I made in class belonged to a maiden in romantic fiction rather than a diffident, posing postgraduate.

I left Elaine, my girlfriend of three years, left my supposed soul-mate, left our shared flat, left our planned future, two months after that smile: she seemed too stunned to be truly upset, or so I thought. Many years later, when we were firm friends and occasional lovers, she told me that she had met Jenna, once, before I left, before she knew that I had been unfaithful to her with a girl six years her junior. Jenna had been hand in hand with the deputy head of our department, buying groceries and grinning; interest piqued by a truly academic love of gossip, Elaine had asked around to identify the ingénue for whom our superior was risking his career. When she realised for whom I was leaving her, she told me (with no little glee), she’d looked forward to hearing of me lying in the bed I’d made only to find it riddled with vipers. In fact, Jenna was still screwing the professor a full year into our marriage. I found out a week before the wedding, a month after her graduation, but was powerless to remove him; their affair, as bleak, which had destroyed his marriage, only ended when he suffered a non-fatal stroke that affected his speech, causing Jenna to lose all interest and leaving him in the care of his hollow wife. She informed me one evening, as though passing on news of distant acquaintance’s ill fortune, heard third-hand; she was pregnant with Lisa at the time. I could not help but think the blighted man lucky, even as a clenched fist of triumph flowered in my stomach.

That triumph was to haunt my ugliest moments. I felt it most strongly standing at Jenna’s graveside, next to her second husband, triumph over her because I’d outlived her, triumph over him because he was the one who’d spend the rest of his life feeling he’d killed her, triumph because our daughter was now mine, triumph because now, at last, every time she corrupted my dreams, I could awake and remind myself that she was gone, forever, and it was only the bit of her horror that she had gifted me that could torture me; only my imagination, so much weaker than hers, that could craft new punishments. That night I comforted my daughter, my daughter, relishing the words, suffused with a sense of victory.

In Paradisum (more Kaspar stuff)

Life as we would now understand it came to a choking end over the spring of 2044. The underground paramilitary wing of a pressure group lobbying for a decrease in the global population, despairing of progress through political means, released a virus targeted at removing all those with a blood type other than AB- - thereby destroying more than 99% of the world’s population and leaving as many people across the globe as had existed in Germany at the time of the virus’ release. By a staggering oversight, this virus happened to decimate the group itself, leaving the world short both of humans generally and of homicidal lunatics specifically.

Kaspar reflected on this as he sat, smoking his pipe, on Hampstead Heath; June 17, 2044, was his 62^nd Birthday.

Aleanna had perished in those horrible days, expiring toward the end of April, and Kaspar had wept for her for a time, wept sorely. Summer came, though, and quiet started to settle around him, and Kaspar found a peace that surprised and pleased him. He pictured Aleanna without sadness now, fond memories tinged with pain only in their last days together. She had tolerated him, and come to love him, and he would remain grateful for that to the end of his days.

The thing, however, that most appealed to Kaspar about his brave new world, apart from that lovely quiet, was that he no longer needed to be tolerated. He sought understanding from no-one, not least because he saw no-one from whom to seek it. He had spend the last four days walking to London, just so as to see this view on his birthday, and could count on fingers and toes the people he had seen. Armed in anticipation of greater numbers, he had instead found the capital deserted; as the worst came, many had crawled away from the city in the hope of escaping the disease, only to die instead in Romford, Norwich, Reading, or a smaller place, Colne Engaine or Shere. So there was almost no-one here to sully the summer-holiday school hall of London.

Looting, a perilous activity in March, was commonplace and peaceful now that so few remained; Kaspar still left some change in each abandoned store as he topped up his tobacco stockpile, reasoning that he was unlikely to have much use for the British Pound before his erupting cells claimed his life. A barter culture, he supposed, would spring up when things returned to something like normal.

He was not worried about who would run things, because no-one had shown much aptitude for it before. Kaspar assumed that the protected blood type would be spread evenly across the populace, hopefully preserving enough engineers and so forth to prevent nuclear meltdowns, but he didn’t find himself particularly troubled by the possibility that this was not the case. The tobacco and the sunshine and Aleanna

s memory and the skyline, some plumes of smoke rising darkly but unthreateningly, like a child’s Halloween mask, absorbed his whole world. Kaspar smiled.

Bartering what? Tinned goods, he guessed, at least until some industrious folk revived agricultural practices. The livestock still seemed healthy; animals seemed largely unaffected by the socially conscious plague. Each thing, thought Kaspar, carries its own end with it; perhaps the whole race had had this close encoded in it from the start. Kaspar wondered whether that was his thought, or someone else’s. Maybe Aleanna’s. Oh well. He puffed, found the embers out, and slowly tapped out, refilled, relit his pipe, enjoying the each stage and the smell and good god the tie, the ease of it all. Winter would be harder, he thought, and took a long, calming breath.

Splinters

I’ve always been interested in the idea that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die because, as I see it, if it does, you don’t; you’d just shuttle back and forth between your birth and your impending death forever as replay absorbed replay absorbed replay. Sure, to the casual observer you might be seen to die, to hit that pavement or that car or that internal, biological wall, but your personal time would, like one of Zeno’s arrows, be reduced to infinite splinters, your end unreachable. As a child I thought that this might be what caused déjà vu, and whenever I felt that strange little itch I wondered how many times I’d been through my own story, and whether I’d remember any more next time round.

During my unfortunately prolonged adolescence, as the fear of death that was to gently asphyxiate my life slowly took hold, I yearned for this eternal, purgatorial recapitulation to be our fate, but no such luck. Just before you die – at least where death comes suddenly, inevitably, and gives you just enough time to recognise it – the main sense is of mental paralysis, as if something has thrown you totally off your train of thought. If anything comes to you, it is likely to be supremely trivial; you are much more likely to think of an uncompleted chore or remember something that made you laugh a few weeks before than anything to which you can cling. It is very difficult to get a real hold on the fact that you are about to die, and where you would hope for a memory of your lover or your child or anyone who once mattered to you, you are likely instead to die thinking of nothing much at all.

So Bright

It happens like this. At some point on any given day, at seemingly random intervals and with no discernible pattern, I will notice something slip. This is the only indicator, and it usually comes so close to the start of the episode that it affords me little or no time to brace myself. A finger fumbles on a keyboard or a mug drops or someone stumbles. At first I imagined that this started it, that a small wrongness opened a door for a greater one, but now I believe that it is not causation but correlation, the seeping of the wrong time into my world - the first soft wavelets of the change unsettling one or a few things before the full effect has time to spread out and engulf everything. Soon colours alter and fade, stone-washed and pastel, and no sounds come.

A man stood on the curb ahead of me drops the mobile phone into which he was talking. The phone is safely cradled in his hand, but without the pause that seems in one's mind to precede an event or the segue that indicates cause, it’s dropping to the floor, as if hand and phone moved at different speeds. About half-way down, the object will accelerate unnaturally. The man’s expressions, his reactions, will pick up pace; now I have about ten seconds to find somewhere safe before the rest of the world is shifting so fast that I can’t move. People’s faces are a good guide, because they are changed by the sudden rapidity of movement; blinks and glances build a blurred cataract over the eyeball and a purple stain above and below, as the lids move too fast; the teeth of a person sat in conversation seem to become liquid, leaving trails. It is not that their time has become fast, but that mine has become slow; I solidify and become brittle, and they all carry on as before. I drop out of their world, unable to keep up.

An episode can last seconds or days; I think they may be becoming longer and one day I shall be imprisoned forever, though I cannot say. I have seen others, sometimes, trapped like me. Their eyes are so bright in a world of muted shades. Someone held for the first time can be destroyed so easily, stuck in the wrong path, confused, panicked, trampled by a stampede of commuters, or ripped through by paper airplanes and tennis balls that move like the inexorable bullets of bathos. You have to find a place devoid of people as quickly as you can, and it is the hardest thing you can ever do because you are running to save your life and being held back ever more with each passing moment, until you freeze, suspended in mid-air as you fall down a man-hole, jammed in a disused doorway with your trailing leg left dangling dangerously in the street. No one can see you more than five seconds in, because you fade from their sight like a myth, unless they were staring at you when it began. Then you are locked for them like a bronze sculpture in a square, and they cannot understand why you are rigid, why you cannot move or talk, or why no-one else can see you there.

The first time I saw another it was a young woman; she was crouching beside a small tree in a park where I was lying under a bench. Her eyes, so bright, were fixed on me, feeding me with hope, and we watched each other until it passed. As it receded I rose from my hiding place and ran, my limbs gradually building up speed, my body flooding with relief and with the freedom of my sudden fluidity. She seemed as though she might flee but she stayed ever so still, almost as if she were still trapped, until I wrapped my arms around her in disbelief and she yielded to me.

We talked for days, barely sleeping or eating. She had first felt time go wrong as a small child; a vase fell and her mother, running from another room, could not see her by the time she arrived. The police nearly trampled her while they searched the house. She was better than me at hiding, more used to it. She told me that there were many others trapped, but that she had never before seen two people begin and end a phase in synch. It seems romantic and absurd but it felt like a sign and I wanted to hold her to me and never relinquish that grasp because she was mine and we could always hide together.

Her eyes, so bright, transfixed me as she told me of her loneliness, of her fears, of the way that she used her slow time in her mind. She talked of the unparalleled joy and the incredulity she had felt as she watched me crawl under that bench opposite her tree, and of how she had locked her gaze upon me so as to see whether we were released together, and then I heard a door slam too loud and her eyes glazed with buzzing motion and her teeth began to drip and cling to each other and her hands blurred into a solid arc, and I tried to scream but it was too late and my mouth would not move and no sound would come. I saw her face recoil too fast with the sudden realisation that she was alone as before, and I knew that my frozen mask, unable to respond, must have made her feel sick, as I did. She left and I could not cry for three days, because for three days I could not do anything except replay in my mind those eyes, so bright, clouding over.