Heres a little story I wrote a little while ago. Perhaps you might be interested in reading it ...
Cold hard mother. She is laid, prostrated matter. The bed is anisotropic oak, a dark and strong and aligned box, filled with vessels. Within the cavity the technology of springs and foam creating a mechanical softness, a new uterus. Enclosed within is a Mother. She lays now, metamorphosed into solid, from the fragments which she was. The sediment, all bits and pieces of flesh, of warmth and cold, changing and becoming and not becoming now seems solid, finally permanent. An illusion, as all ways are. But still, there seems to be permanence about her, as Strazza had constructed and the hands of Alexandros of Antioch had assembled. Beauty; a permanent matter.
The room was the coldest I had known it. Her warmth no longer exuded into it’s corners. It was the coldest I felt. The pale box was no longer blue. The origin; shine, blonde, blush, fulminate, phlegm. All lost now save bleak. A bleak box and a contained loss. The sun did penetrate, it would be untrue to say that it was not present, but it failed to blaze, failed to bleach; only the presence was known of it through hard glass.
I stand to the right. My physical state? I am vertical. I am straight. See the top of my head. I am lost. I fall to my knees. Upon the floor I creak and joints abrade roughly. I am in pain. My mother is lost. I will stay here for maybe two hours, bent and wilting with grief.
After a little time has been given I am dragged up, pulled to elevation. I move into my study and sit. There at my desk I make only the slightest and most necessary movements. You can barely see me alive. All the pieces of me do not wish to be given away. This room too is cold and quiet, not silent, but so quiet.
Why do you do this? You. What a cruel thing. I have spent all that you have given me on you. My moments, mine, I gave them to you. My mother’s love, it was always received through me and in to you. Do you not think that I knew? That I know? That I did not think this so right, and so unfair?
All my joys, because of you. As a child, playing upon a swing, the air kissing over my skin was your breath. As a young boy, all my achievements; gifts from your hand. The knowledge learnt during schools; all your rules. Searing passions of me, a man with youth (yours too), all fragmented offerings from the Everything. The world that I have, it is constructed, the worlds that I use to make it ordered, they too are decided. Why is it that there is no such word as ‘sensical’ if there can be a ‘nonsensical’?
And to give gifts. To be capable of everything and to give as you do, when nothing is asked. And then to take it away, at your will. So cruel. So unjust. I asked for nothing, and to be made to exist, to have something of Everything enforced. And all this, only so that you may have the final pleasurable, powerful withdrawal. So cruel. Why are you so cruel?
I am at my desk still, letting thoughts ravish me, sweeping and swinging, as a child in a fantasy. I sit in the early afternoon. The thin veil of my curtains frame a gentle light that brings no warmth and casts grey shadows across the walls and floor and ceiling, not creating shapes but simply adding weight to the objects which shield boxes of light. I have been here perhaps an hour, perhaps a day or a week. The time has struck me, carrying significance because I do not know from where this moment has come.
The cruelty of your control, your decision to withdraw is still raw on my flesh. Perhaps you do have the will to explain, but you wish to be asked. Others have asked you. And I believe that you told them, that they knew because of you. The First and the New; I believe them. I trust you, you cruel thing. I’ve been told, I cannot understand, and I believe. Now I ask you why. I don’t ask with malice and doubt. You have given me hunger that I have not eaten for forty one days. And now I ask for food. Is it not your due? You cannot be surprised. Please. I am your child, whom you can punish. But does it not make more powerful the one who can and chooses not to? Oh why do I bother persuading you of your own power. Whatever I say will make you sick with the sweetness of creation. However I phrase my torture, all that will be heard will be ‘look at that little miracle of mine’. A boastful parent. Please.
I give in and go to eat. I need to absorb and I must continue. I rise from my seat and make my steps toward the door. It is dark that I barely see. Down the stairs I creep, the marionette. My crimson dried to a thoughtful brown and lemon, now sallow. I can scarcely make the boards of the steps scream underfoot, I am of such little matter. The knots which I feel under each step are not seen in this darkness. Each could once have been a branch, could have extended. But growth has been cut in order that my practical eyes may not see that there was once life. Cruel nature deciding which branches are to be and which are to be knotted and cramped as the invalid’s limb. And for what end? No, I’m not asking for an answer this time so be quiet. For what end? I have my answer to what I ask in this instance. For what end? For some overall form? So that a tree can be a tree and not any other shape? But what I ask is not this, I know this. But why must it be so? Why must a tree be a tree and of no other shape with its branches growing from all manner of places, some being prevented whilst others allowed? Purpose upon purpose upon purpose? Now I am asking you.
I have reached the kitchen. How long did it take? Don’t ask me. The warmth of this place has not yet been completely lost. I try my best to remain there but I am slipping, recalling stealing biscuits whilst my mother baked. The milk-warm Sundays. Having to reach up to half her height and over the counter, and touch tentatively amongst the knives and heated implements to find warm, sweet, golden viands with my fingertips. I am just a child.
Back in the carcass of my recollections as they slide cinnamon to sepia to grey. And I feel hungry again. Opening boxes, cupboard doors, glancing, draws, examining, sliding them, pulling at the sides, opening, shutting, looking. I find a pear and some stale bread.
No temptress. No sneak brought this, a pear, for the eye to widen with desire. No Pome, no delectable floral exterior, its ovarian remains dangling. I bite into the pear and fall slowly to my chair placed a little distance from the pinewood table.
I don’t remember eating the bread, though I know it is inside me for the pains of hunger have dulled. It could have tasted of whatever I wished it to be. I don’t remember ascending the stairs. If you told me that I had flown. If you had kindness to tell me so that I may know, I would believe you. I am back at my chair, at the desk, in a house.
Are you there? How foolish. I’ve begged of you and asked you please. Often I’ve thought that it isn’t an answer that is really sought, only a little longer to keep asking, more time to be confused. More time. But not now. I want an answer. I am not asking for the questions. So there you have it. Do not ask me the time, I don’t know it, all I could tell you is the light looks as morning and it looks as autumn has looked.
I will shut my eye, yes? I shut off my view. My head falls back, heavy with layers of copper, cobalt, vanadium, zinc. It swings back on the elastic of ligament, back and forth before momentum is lost and it settles at a point secure behind my torso. Taut, taught, tort. My skin pushed into the slats of the chair. I am lax and simultaneously strained by inescapable forces.
I know what is there behind the blanket of my flesh. I know what would be seen were my eyes freed from their enclosure. The point at which the ceiling and wall and wall reach to touch one another. That is what is there. Their angles conveying some variation of colour, which is an illusion. They are all the same, but not to me, even if I know them to be so. I am ready for your response. No more Pleas. More please.
I open my eyes abruptly, quickly, so as to trick the little nymph of opportunity, just about to develop wings and gather flight and leave me. God. You are there. Just there. Completely visible. All manner of things of passing through me. Don’t leave. Remain there. Answer me. You are answering me. I see it all. Just a little spot, black as all that has been. This spot, it penetrates my ceiling, through the roof it cuts, tears a slice the circumscribing atmosphere, smudging out into nothingness. A point, a ray which disperses, scattering twinkles of black, which disperse themselves, filling everything with their nothing.
Oh god. You are everything in there. A point, a place, no dimensions, no measurements. A circle cannot be the multiple points equidistant from you. Oh god. All that I understand reduced to nothingness. The only way I can know it is as a slice of something more full, a cut form of fuller whole, and that too is a spot. You are huge. Had I the impertinence to talk of cruelty? I’m sorry for simple morality. Oh God. You can cast an answer with a dot of yourself. Light soon recedes and the day is finally shut out. The weakness of my possessions fails me, I can no longer see.
Answer given. I sleep.
When I wake I am sure that I have slept for almost forever and been woken just at the very last moment. Hello dirty God on my ceiling. I will be on with my business today if you will please.
I pass from my bedroom across the narrow hallway to the bathroom. When was my mother taken away? I told you that I will be on with my business, quiet please. I am grey with lack of warmth, dry and sterile of movement. I stare through the mirror for a little while. It would seem that everything has been painted grey. What time is it? Why would God need this. Please be quiet with your existence. I run the water over my hands and face and neck. It is warm and then very very cold as the energy is being stolen from my skin.
I make plans for trips. I will buy things, I will see people, I will be in different places. But I fail to move, my intentions are a pretence to fool my limbs.
Alright. I submit. All the intricacies of life, they can no longer be done today. All my movements seem tiny. I let myself sit down. The study seems an empty box on the edge of then and what is to be. The dark floor a rectangle eclipsed by a thin red rug. The walls bathed in paint and tiny wriggling particles of dust. The ceiling will keep you out.
My hand is upon a pen. It is twisted from where it lay with my solid fingers. A take a sheet of blank paper from the draw and begin scraping shapes and circles and lines. There is nothing of any reason that I could give you, though I would if I had the capacity. I just keep on. Round and up and down a little then to the left then up then round then down to the point I began.
You are a mass of all. Everything has been done and all the negatives too. It seems that you result in nothing at all. I look down. I see my attempt, my action, and my blank page, now with the writhing of a pen marked into it. I don’t suppose that you are capable of this? No that is wrong. You are. You have done this in all ways, and not done this too. That is worse. How pathetic, how I give you my sadness. It is yours? No it has been lost by you, only made something by my tiny shell. Me; a vessel.
All that you can do is send out your little specks from up there and watch as they are no longer you anymore. Paralysed as you observe what you create as becoming so much more than you are.
You slime. You extend, spread, infinitely thin over everything. Into all your dimensions. Our gifts. Our measurements. Our ordering of your faceless mass. All you can do is everything. That is why I am able to wander. That is why the appalling can happen. Because you are fixing and dismantling.
All this time I have worried and wonder about my own pointlessness. Here is a point. I stab at the paper with the pen grasped in my hand. Ha. God. You. The paper rips a little; a tiny triangle is scraped almost from its centre. Big you. Giant You. Massive. Pointless. Ineffectual.
I do terrible things. I do wondrous things. Other things. Actions are taken. Changes are made. I say yes. Then no. Yes. No. No. Yes. Yes. No. None has replaced the other, they have all been said. You are erasing yourself as you begin. In all ways. We do the appalling. Yes and you do nothing. Little specks dancing around.
You see him sweating. You see him very pale now. His skin suffers to surround him. Wherever he is. You see him dart from one place to the next. Swinging and throwing papers. He does not attempt to leave the painted box.
Why do you look at me with the black eye. Absorbing all perfectly. I am one of your specks. Yes? I am an example, one of your actions? Yes I am your action. Have you not erased all that you have done by not doing? I am created I am uncreated.
You see that he stops. As still as he has been made to be. The world is dancing around him, all shadows and colours and ugly things. It takes a little time for the train to fully run through him. This thought is heavy. It stops him. He settles gradually down onto the floor.
Now let me think. Be quiet you, just stay there and be quiet. The only way that I may be real, complete, not to have a purpose but to fully exist, is to be bounded. I must have gentle points as the fronds of a fern does. I must possess the frontiers at which the wave is bent. Then I will be and you will have nothing else to say on the matter. Yes I must complete my boundaries.
He tears down the staircase, the fragments of his outer strata flying wildly from his outer surface. Banging and smashing into things to reach the point he sees. You barely have chance to see the tiny garden, growth over growth, following him.
In the dark cellar he pushed boxes, knocking metal against metal, things crawling quickly into cracks. He is unconscious to them, to what he is moving.
I have it. Yes. Paint. I have it. A brush. See?
He pushes out of the darkness, covering himself with heavy light. The door is heavy with water contained in its cellular boxes. Let him run on up the stairs. It is worth listening for a moment to the gentle screams of the door as it is left dancing too and fro in the wake of his unguarded displacements.
Painting the room black
You see that there are already splashes of deep black dragged into the wall by the time you have travelled to him.
No you are wrong. This is not the black of heraldry. No doubt cast. No danger. No you are wrong. No mistake. This is not immoral night. A blur of right. My right. Because I can. You can’t. I will not be erased. No. Erase your edges. Run away then. You have run. You are still. Here and there and not there and never here and always here. Bye Bye. Hello. Never gone. Always never.
Markets and males. You seem him. He is taking you away. Yes it is true that you can do nothing and that really nothing is being done, save the fact that a room is being made to night. You are a terrified little god, reduced to everything. What a shame. Don’t cry. Oh you already did? Yes and you didn’t bother. You did everything but cry? And Cried with it as well? What a shame.
And now what do you see? In the gloomiest of boxes. Yes you see a man, that is true. Shh. All of you be quiet. I am here, I am the important one. Me in my box. And now I will create myself. You little scum of a god, gave me my beginning, my slippery, grovelling emergence. But I will give myself a clear ending. So rarefied and pure.
He raised the knife in his left and drove in into his right. Deep red flowed down the creases of life, tracing that which was still contained inside his tributaries. And awful rumbles and screeches escaped from him. Out it is wrenched and into his thigh. Minuscule fragments of tissue spatter, wet onto wet, and are completely invisible. The room is already as black as it can be. Though layer after layer was made, scraped off himself and smeared onto the walls, not a thing more can be seen.
Are you sad now? No. You wretched faceless thing. Nothing can be done. You couldn’t even manage to be sad for yourself. Stay forever more and watch your little speck now that he is reduced to a mass of bits and pieces ripped up carelessly but with so much thought. And even then he will escape you with your time. He will be reduced further and disperse into many beautiful fragments. And still and still and more still you will have nothing of everything.
