by J.W. Carey
Robert Frost
You may have noticed that, much like the prodigal alcoholic, the man or woman who cannot function at their apex without some warped desire for self-destruction floating in their veins, as the narrative progresses in leaps and bounds over dog shit, broken brick and the jagged edges of the post-industrial estate, that He, or Me, or They, or It, becomes more jaded, more bitter, more like a reflection of some Angry Young Writer sitting on a rattling train, caged in the cage of his own design, placed in the place he dreamt and dreaded, as a remuneration of his own consciousness.
But, in an example of the residue our consumerist past and present has left us, it must twist and turn like the rat in the hole, like the bayonet in the innocent man’s gullet or the flash sale in the poor man’s balance. That is me, I am the weakness supported by the admitted lack thereof, I am the plot holes filled with the voice of an enraged shade, and, my dear reader, I am the voice within your head, spouting these words as though they were the lyrics of a forgotten song, some nonsense scratched upon the stone.
I have tried, despite my education, (which lacked a great deal more than I would now have hoped), to avoid the idea of Religion when my voice is carried directly to you on standardised coloured pages, tinted with black ink or electrical stains. I had wanted to lie to you, to say that, after all this, I do believe there is a little man squatting on a cloud somewhere. In fact, there may well be. Even as the Author, I am not privy to the secrets which the moral authoritarians of great wealth and little consequence seem to be. But if He is up there, the replication of a Greek God, then he certainly is squatting, because all that is raining down is shit.
These contractual observations of ours have not been upheld. But not by us, of course, despite what the beasts incapable of coherent thought may well believe, as they cower behind placards proclaiming that, in the end, they will be proven right when the Rapture comes for us poor sinners. Well, I don’t know about you, dear reader, but if your experience of Religion has been anything like mine, then I would rather burn for eternity than to spend a second amongst those morally pious outcasts of thought. Not that I bear any aggression towards the self-denying worshippers of a Jewish Zombie and the virus that birthed him, but the only explanation one can realise, in order to maintain one’s sanity, is that they are either lying to themselves and, by association, us, or that they are mentally ill, and should be treated as such.
* * *
‘Remember, if you are going to express your own personal hang ups, then be sure to do it in such a stylised way that the reader has no way of realising you hate the thing.’ Her broad Salfordinian accent was jarring in the partially hung-over segment of my brain, which I had agreed to sacrifice to the meaningless explanations of the morning. ‘You need to trick the reader into sharing your opinion, to provide a world where the unthinkable is simply anything that goes against your descriptions. To the reader, whether you are speaking in Fiction, Non-Fiction or some variation between the two, you cannot offer them honesty. They will take your honesty, and they will use it to break you.’
She seemed to sag a little, her lank blonde hair falling around her as though broken by the words she removed from her mouth, as though a surgeon carefully cutting around a cancer. For the first time in months, I pitied her. She had an impossible job to do, to turn this crowd of dishevelled youths and the world-weary advanced students, into something resembling writers. Her lack of talent as an educator was a barrier enough, but the impossibility of her task toppled down on me as I looked around the small, cold room high in an aging building’s rafters.
To my left sat one such ‘advanced student’, as vile a person as any I can recollect. Her hair was in a strange kind of bob, in particular, that stylised variant which seemed crossed with an afro. Her sagging, wrinkling flesh bore a startling resemblance to Churchill, all jowly chops, slightly slurred speech and big, drooping eyes. Whether the image of a transvestite prime minister, or a cruelly dressed up bobble-headed dog tore its way into your mind then, probably says more about your character than any description I can offer. Despite opinions which you may, or may not, have gleamed from my barely coherent ideology, I actually bore her very little ill will for the abhorrent appearance she cultivated, nor for the age which hung from her creaking bones like scraps of flayed flesh, like a torn banner fluttering in a bloodied breeze. It was her attitude which I could not stand.
The very first time we sat together, I mean the group as an entirety rather than the two of us as a coupling, she petulantly demanded of the tutor an explanation as to why her and the few other advanced students had to ‘babysit’ people of a much younger age which, of course, translates to several degrees less talent, as though age was the marker of skill, as though the failure of the flesh indicated an increase in wit. From then on, the decrepit bitch was already a corpse to me, a state of being which she was rapidly approaching in the eyes of everybody else anyway.
To my right was a more pleasing sight. Odd, that sentence carries undertones of uncomfortable sexuality, doesn’t it? As though the mere act of pleasure, an emotion which should be cherished in the grey days, has to be tied into to some thin, big-titted blond teenager in a low cut top. Well, in actuality, the character sitting beside me is a man. His hair is cropped short, and the almost laughable attempts at a goatee, the long, curling hairs scattered about his face in a manner resembling weeds on a mountainside, puts paid to any possibility of femininity in his appearance. His hoodie is thick and plain black, wrapped around a Family Guy t-shirt with the Baby and the Dog lounging against each other in a setting of clear Latin origin. Ripped jeans, but those ripped from a year of rough wear, rather than an attempt at faux-punk, cover up his short legs, all the way down to a pair of scuffed trainers.
In a brief flash I catch a glimpse of the idle pen work he leads like a pet across the notepad. Song lyrics, poetic quotes, a scattered narrative in the shattered mind of a character, carefully and callously sectioned from a fully realised personality, I cannot say, but it looks interesting. Better than the meaningless scribbles across my own, all torn images of half-realised patterns and the beginnings of abandoned plagiarism.
I was almost certain that he shared the same opinions of our creative advisor as me, but I never knew for certain. We never shared our thoughts and dreams; we never crossed quills in place of blades, nor drank whiskey together beneath a Mancunian moonlight. There were too many barriers in the way. Of course, they were barriers I had built so tall and so thick that I never knew if he had raised any himself. Isn’t that a depressing thought? People raising walls to each other, so that they never even realise if the other person did the same?
* * *
Well? How many times did you roll your eyes during that last paragraph? Did your pupils spin like revolving worms at my overused, hackneyed metaphor for isolation in the modern world? If they didn’t, if you felt that it actually managed to fit into the tone of this prose, would that make me happy? Knowing that an entire phrase of this experiment, isolated by nothing more than a half-built wall of asterisks, was sacrificed to the meaningless deity of the Idiom?
A phrase of Eight-Hundred and Fifteen words, born like a child destined to give life to a sibling, desired at its culmination but its origin lost in the midst of enforced generosity? That phrase gave itself so that a simplistic metaphor could be thrown into the winds between us, safeguarded by nothing but the goodwill of strangers.
Eight-Hundred and Fifteen words that will live eternally, or as close to it as I can dare to comprehend, though they will be forgotten by you in less than a sparrow’s heartbeat. Damn you, metaphor. Another child lost to your whims, damn you.
* * *
Some songs, whilst on a loop in your head or plugged directly into your senses, affect your perception and interaction with the world around you. Not simply emotionally, any kind of input can alter such malleable affectations as those, but literally. Simple things like the speed of your pace subconsciously matching the beat, your hands
flickering like butterflies or, more realistically, the furtive motions of the shame-faced public masturbator in your pockets, the nod of the head despite your whole being attempting to refuse the action. In this instance, in engaged in the long-term futility of removing Dylan’s Desolation Row from my head, a Punk Poet muttered in his place.
I muttered Beasley Street into the cold, shrugging my coat tighter about my shoulders, still uncomfortable at the slight stain left upon my sleeve, unable as I was to remove its ineradicable mark. I clamped my lips tightly around powerful, plagiarized words when the silhouette appeared, hiding my slight jump in one step’s sudden acceleration. In the distance, flickering from between streetlight to streetlight like some leftover villain from a Noir horror, a shape was approaching me.
It was humanoid in its dimensions, though it appeared as a shadow, as a spot of blackness which suggested the passing of emptiness through space otherwise occupied by light the colour of urine. My hand, the one hanging below the stain of my discomfort, shook gently, though from a sudden, otherwise unfelt, blast of chilled air, the onset of hunger scratching at my strength or an outlying symbol of my fear, I could not say.
It was tall, taller than me, and its gait was warped, as though it had to drag a foot behind it. Somehow, I know not how, the idea that such a creature could be so crippled and yet remain at such a height, that it could possess such an ominous air despite its assumed injury, only contributed to the tremors which twisted my curled fingers into a shape beyond recognition.
We drew together as though locked on course, trapped on immovable, fundamentalist railways. The figure’s head shifted slowly from side to side, more beast than man. A bloodhound with the scent of its prey. A jackdaw with the sight of a worm far below. A snake with the man’s ankle mere feet away.
It came past me in a matter of moments, though amidst its heavy-breathing, the thud of its flat foot fall and the scrape of its boot against the pavement, it seemed to stretch on and on, until the moments filled the world around me, blotting out the unnaturally yellow brightness, the faint glimmer of light hanging over the horizon like an echo of Hiroshima. Even the air shrunk, compressed into a burning heat which settled around my shoulders and crept into my tight-lipped mouth.
It was not, as I had believed, dressed wholly in black, but it may as well have been. An oversized green coat hung limply over several layers of shirts and woollen jumpers. Its hood was pulled up, but a few trailing strands of hair were visible beneath the tattered, dirty rim. It stank of cheap beer, and that heady mixture of weed and month-old sweat which seem to go hand in clammy, dirt-ingrained hand.
Moments after it... after He passed me, I forgot myself and froze to the spot, staring after him. There had been something grasped tightly in one clawed hand, something white and cold to the sight. His shifting back hid it from my view now, as the hand holding the thing moved to his face, as though he whispered to it, or could not resist tasting it between his ageing, broken lips. Ignorant of my tired, complaining muscles, I fell to one knee. I must have looked the fool, in the middle of that sickly circle of man-made light, my shaking hand picking something up from the floor, careful not to crush it in my own twisting claw.
I opened my hand slowly, staring down into it. I, like a newly-appointed father holding his child for the first time, ran a finger along it slowly, holding back tears as my dirt-covered nail scraped gently across the white petal.
* * *
A petal? Such simple, childish imagery! You swore us no resolution, instead you give us this, a half-cut imbecility? You have lied and cheated and stolen from real writers throughout this drivelled piece of prose, and this is how you decide to thank your audience? Those whom have abandoned their doubts by the side of this road, this path proud of its anti-literature, have burnt their criticism due to an over-stylisation?
We agree with you now though, you certainly ARE no author. The author is as accountable to the actions of his people as is their God, and you entered into the same contract as He! You told us yourself, or the man you pretend to be, in black and in white, in italics and in plain text, that you would take us on an honest journey! Well, a journey has an end! A journey has a beginning! And nowhere, nowhere amongst this alcoholic self-obsession, have you offered us either of these!
* * *
Here, at a first ending of this horror, this mangled narcissist’s narrative, a worthless God leans back in his chair and, with the idle forefinger and thumb of his twisted right hand, pinches the bridge of his nose. The movement is so normal, so simple in its humanity, that it ill-suits the gigantic figure in a squeaking, worn black leather office chair, with wheels hidden amongst the thick carpet. He leans forwards, resting his elbow in the cup of his left hand. The rattle of heavy metal on heavy metal comes with the movement of his limbs, as though chained to the text before him.
The computer screen before him is white, with small, increasingly unnecessary black shapes forming some poor copy of literature. He traces a hand across the last three words, as though mimicking his characters actions, hoping for some inspiration, for some symbol from the God he refuses to believe in. With trembling hands, stained with a lifetime of relative leisure, He reaches out and types a series of words, separated by twenty one hard stabs of a space bar.
‘Whilst a standard Journey will have a beginning, and an end, the only Journey worth travelling is nothing but an empty metaphor.’
He feels his exhaustion in those words, in that full stop with its sickly sense of closure, feels the weight press down upon him, tastes the disappointment of ill-formed words, and hears the laughter of the crowd at his every motion. His world flickers black as heavy eyelids drop like a theatrical curtain, its arrival announcing the end of a first act, a necessity it had provided innumerable times before, by its tarnished and frayed existence.
Thank you.
Honesty
Today, I have been productive. Even proactive, one might well be generous enough to say, though in nothing besides idle musings of half-formed opinions, abandoned before they can gather any momentum. Some sectioned segments of rock, tumbling from their mountain laden with metaphors. I have heard it said, heard it shouted from the mouths of wild-eyed devotees of ignorance armed with theory, that a rolling stone may gather no moss. Is that necessarily true? The moss it gathers may not begin as its own, but instead a product of all of those brambles, of those fallen branches and, even, other rocks which have long since stopped their own tumultuous passage down this jagged slope. Every new rock, one could say, becomes entangled in the moss of a previous failure, in the lack of momentum offered by those it uses as passage, to carry it further and further, before it too falters beneath the threat of emptiness, of solitude and knowledge beneath suddenly foreign skies. These same issues repeated over and over again as though an interminable circle of rolling stones which, we can only hope, are slowly moving their way towards some inevitable resolution. Our hope must then be stretched, like an elasticised band stolen from a first love’s hair in the cage of playground, that we may ask whether this resolution is one worth the passages of all these fragmented mountains.
But today, ignorant of such lazy idioms and idle opinions, I have been staring out over the semi-folded screen of my laptop, past the dying books and the dog-eared aspidistra on my windowsill, past the sudden dust and through the sun-soaked glass. Today, I have watched the people walk, run, drive and leisurely ride their way past me in complete ignorance of my existence. Even had they known I watched them, that my gaze judged them in some semi-liberal alternative to Big Brother, would they have been able to fight through their apathy to react, if it is even apathy which allows them to watch their parents’ world crawl further along the gutter of natural existence?
But here, in this continuation of supposed honesty, you find yourself in a different place, not so far from that tortured figure kneeling on the pavement like Caesar on the Ides of March as I would desire, though certainly further than the ‘writer’ of this text, if we can
give him such a term, would have thought possible in the bright lights of recent history. I would ask you what, exactly; do you think he should do? When the petal is tossed aside as the pitiful imagery it is, when the dirt is brushed from his hands as a chain to the earth, when the poison of an ‘artist’s’ influence has drained away with his desperate need for a piss against a rusting fence, what do you think could possibly be left for him?
Nothing would you leave for him, no secrecy within his malignant breast. You would use me as a blade to cut it out, as a cheap, uninterested whore to peel the clothes from his body as though flesh was honest in of itself. Even as I abuse you, as an audience for my narcissism’s culmination, you abuse me in manners at least a volatile, though lacking the honesty of my own admission.
I need you. We’re in this together, you and I, though it is my name which creeps through the gaps in these opinions, my officious title which is used to block the holes in my arguments, no matter how ill-fitting it may be. I need you, to act as the crowd raising my name to the phantasmal hovels of the Gods, both Old and New, to carry my palanquin through the streets and to whisper in my ear ‘Remember, thou art mortal’. For all that I profess to place myself above you; I am more than aware that I am unable to thrive within the confines my own pretension without you wasting your wealth on my empty words.
Who can say why I write them, if not I? Perhaps some amongst you have some deep understanding of the simplicity of the human mind? Maybe you can steadily advance through the previous prose and know my character from the lack of individuality in the narrator’s voice, by the lack of unique stylisation?
‘Perhaps’, ‘maybe’, those words fail to inspire any hope I might have enjoyed had I kept that thought unwritten. Even now, the ominous failure of the ‘BACK SPACE’ glares at me with punitive demands, with its constant companionship on the impossible journey towards perfection. How I do hate that key, with its lack of contribution, with its presence as a niggling doubt like some rotten molar amongst a set of perfectly maintained teeth.