by Rhys Hughes
“‘Are you generous or vindictive?’ I wondered.
“He blew a pungent smoke ring and explained his intentions. ‘Let me tell you something Catherine was never aware of. But before I do, allow me to say how much I dislike sentences that end with the word ‘of’. Like that one. And the one before. Anyway, when I was living with her, I moulted a lot, I’m made of cotton and I shed lots of fibres, including from my ears, fibres that became entangled with the fibres of the sofa, knotted to them until they were an integral part of the upholstery, and that’s where they remained. In other words, I left a portion of my hearing in Catherine’s house. Anything that was said near that sofa, I could hear, wherever in the world I was!’
“‘You eavesdropped on us!’ I cried.
“He shrugged. ‘I could hardly help it. There was no way of not listening. And I heard your plan to entice me back and decided to have a little fun of my own. I applied all my expertise at puppetry to trump you, to prove who the real genius is. I’m the one in control, my friend, not you. You got more than you bargained for but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Enjoy it. Why care if the Malibus and dusky maidens are puppets?’
“‘Why indeed?’ I conceded, but it didn’t feel right.
“He gave me a sly wink and I watched him go, flicking ash and humming a reggae tune as he wandered among jewel-eyed serpents and giant flowers. He was headed in the direction of the beach. I imagined him wandering along the shoreline, stopping to examine the big conch shells, waiting for sunset and the throbbing trance parties, rolling another spliff and sending scented smoke in a lazy spiral towards the emerging summer stars. I felt sure he would bump into Catherine in her hammock on the way.
“And talking about summer stars, I know plenty about astronomy and I know the names of many constellations. Some are named after dogs, Canis Major for instance, which means ‘the great dog’, and Canis Minor, ‘the little dog’, but I reckon there ought to be a dancing dog too and it should be named after Kelvin. He was definitely a Canis Raver.”
* * * *
Castor Jenkins will finish his pint at this point, wipe his lips and gaze longingly at the bar. A newcomer (just like you, dear reader) who wants to hear the rest of the tale will think it’s the right time to buy him another drink, but Paddy Deluxe and Frothing Harris will know that to stop him telling it, they need to buy him two drinks, one each. That’s what they’ll do, but he’ll tell it anyway, yawning, rolling his eyes and shrugging.
“How long do you think Swansea remained tropical? Kelvin’s puppets were good quality, designed to last a lifetime, and in theory there was no reason at all for grey skies and drizzle to return.
“But it did. It always will in Wales.
“Kelvin made one mistake – he misunderstood human psychology. Although the tropical environment was highly desirable, men and women just get bored of puppets after a while. We only put up with them for so long, however realistic and clever they are. And that’s what happened. Gradually people stopped going to the beach to surf and dance, the hammocks were left empty and the cocktails undrunk. Desolation set in. There’s nothing more desolate than paradise gone to seed, and at some point Kelvin must got disillusioned, packed it all up and left, because one morning I woke to find Swansea back the way it was. Since then it has never been tropical again.”
How can Paddy Deluxe and Frothing Harris respond to this ridiculous story? Only with extreme derision.
“Puppets don’t come in such unlikely types. People would notice if even the hot sun was made of cloth!”
“Would they? But you haven’t noticed your own puppet status.”
“What do you mean?”
“Both of you – glove puppets, nothing more or less!”
“Don’t be absurd! Prove it!”
“As you wish. Look towards the front door. Who is that coming in? The real Paddy Deluxe and Frothing Harris. Watch what happens when they join me at the table. Then you’ll be convinced.”
“By all the gods, he’s right! They are coming over!”
Castor now smirks and calls, “Good evening, Paddy. Good evening, Harris. I note you are shamefully late.”
“Yes, sorry about that, old boy. What’s that you’ve got there, Castor? A pair of deflated puppets in our image!”
“Yes and very nicely made, aren’t they?”
“Extremely sinister. But we can’t imagine anyone using them. Such a person would need enormous hands.”
Castor lays his own hands on the table. “Mine are normal.”
And so they are, right now.
1 Huw Rees, Kate Ronconi, Stuart Ross, Monica Konggaard, Neil Woollard, Richard Cowell, Dai Godwin, Nick Moore... The list is endless, not quite endless perhaps, but endless all the same. Not quite the same, agreed, but just enough. And not quite just, unjust in fact. This is called wordplay but it’s an obscure example, best avoided.
2 Little guitars played in tropical lands.
The Plucked Plant
Castor Jenkins has a bad habit of advocating outlandish ideas and even his mildest beliefs are routinely uncommon. If you ask him about the Primeval Soup he’ll insist it was leek and potato. He denies the existence of the colour purple, the number seven and the note G#. Once he went to great lengths to prove that mice are related to parsnips. The list is long and disturbing, not quite as long and disturbing as one of his neckties, but sufficient to elicit cries of dismay from the average citizen of the town of Porthcawl.
Given the extreme oddness of his concepts, it was with some relief that his friends greeted his relatively mundane announcement that reincarnation was his afterlife philosophy of choice. With Castor it was more than a question of faith. He knew that reincarnation was the correct theory because he remembered several of his previous lives. He was, so he claimed, an inhabitant of Ancient Greece. When pressed for details, he provided them in exchange for beer. In his slightly slurred words this is the story he told:
“I was a disciple of Pythagoras and I lived in a commune in a garden and it should have been a pleasant existence but I wasn’t a particularly nice person. A quick historical lesson might be appropriate here. Pythagoras wasn’t just that mathematical chap who devised the theorem about the square of the hypotenuse, he was also the founder of a mystical cult. His followers had to be sober, celibate and vegetarian, and fully committed to the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which is a fancy term for reincarnation.
“Anyway, I was such a bad person that I wanted to kill myself, because I thought it was the only way to prevent myself doing more damage to the world I lived in. But suicide seemed a terrible sin. I thought about hiring someone else to do the job, a freelance cutthroat or unemployed executioner, but I didn’t want to pass off the responsibility. The guilt was mine, the judgment also, and it was only fair that any bad karma in the offing was mine too. I couldn’t endanger the souls of any poor assassin with the task.”
“Hang about!” protested Frothing Harris. “Did they have the notion of karma in Ancient Greece?”
Castor drained his glass and sighed. “There’s evidence that the Pythagoreans were influenced by Buddhism and that’s not as unlikely as it sounds. Greece had trading links with India.”
“Continue with the tale,” said Paddy Deluxe.
“Well then, I was stuck with an insolvable problem. How does one kill oneself without committing suicide? I fretted over this question for weeks, months, years; and all that time I continued not being a nice person but hiding it well, so that nobody in the commune ever suspected there was anything malign about me. The answer eventually came to me and it surprised and delighted me because it was so easy. It was a three-stage solution. The first stage involved making no changes to my present character, none at all.”
“You remained a bad sort?”
“Thoroughly. I continued to be what I was, a hypocrite, a cheat, a sly and devious manipulator of my fellow human beings. I grew old and my body twisted to match the shape of my mind, but still I felt no remorse.
At last I died, asking forgiveness from nobody, for it was important to my plan that I didn’t weaken at the final moment. The chill of extinction sprang up in my bones. My flesh decayed, became food for worms and nourishment for roots under the soil.
“My body was gone but my soul soon found a new home. The walls of muscle and nerves that had imprisoned it were now broken and it rose like vapour from a fresh cup of tea and departed my grave. Because I had existed meanly and acquired lots of negative karma my soul was reborn in a lower form of life. I had calculated my nastiness precisely to achieve this aim. The mathematics of evil are complex but I was a Pythagorean and knew exactly what the square of hypocrisy is worth3.
“I was reborn as a humble plant, a simple herbaceous biennial growing along a riverbank, just one among many other kinds of flora in the region. The sun shone on my lacy triangular leaves, the wind combed spiderwebs out of my little white flowers, clustered in umbels as they were, songs both dire and lovely were sung to me by frogs and birds, other pastoral things occurred involving shepherdesses and pan-pipes. The situation was utopian.
“This was the second stage of my solution. I was a good plant and committed no crime against nature, and so it was clear my karma points would be replenished and that after death I might expect rebirth as a human being. Over a period of centuries transmigration is a jerky process, a soul being knocked down the ladder of evolution, then getting back up, only to be knocked down again, and so on. Progress around the cosmic playing board is rarely smooth.”
“You make it sound like a game of backgammon,” commented Frothing Harris, “with a soul as the solitary piece that keeps getting captured and sent to the bar until it can re-enter when the roll of dice is favourable.”
Castor considered his words. “Sent to the bar,” he echoed. Then he nodded and added, “The next time it happens, make mine a double whisky. With a beer on the side. Now where was I? Yes, I was a good plant. I had an earthy odour reminiscent of mice or parsnips, which is what first led me to suspect they are related in some way, and that’s also a hint as to what kind of plant I was. Shall I give you another clue? The lower half of my stem was streaked with red or purple. Does that help? Well, I was often mistaken for fennel, parsley or wild carrot. I contained several alkaloids including coniine, conhydrine, pseudoconhydrine and atropine. Conium maculatum was my Latin name.”
“I’m not a botanist,” glumly stated Paddy Deluxe.
“Nor I,” admitted Frothing Harris.
“No matter. The day of my death was pleasant and sunny. I had saturated my inside with my favourite drink of rain from a pre-dawn shower and now I was ready for a busy schedule of photosynthesis combined with supporting the weight of resting butterflies and the larvae of the silver-ground carpet moth. But suddenly my existence was cut short by a thumb and five fingers. Yes, I was brutally plucked from the ground by a hairy hand! I later learned what happened to my body but at the time I knew nothing, because my soul was already drifting upwards in search of a new rebirth venue. It found one quickly enough. That’s one of the things souls do best.
“My poor body was carried in a sack to a workroom in the cellar of a house. First my leaves were plucked from my stems one at a time and cast into a stone mortar, and then a heavy bronze pestle mashed my remains to pulp. Water was added until I became a solution. I was poured into a glass bottle, sealed with a cork and shaken, and finally balanced on a high shelf in a cool alcove. There I remained for many years while my soul grew and matured in a new body. Because I had been a good plant, accumulating lots of positive karma, I was reborn as a human being. I was back to the man stage!”
“How can a plant be good or bad?” protested Paddy Deluxe.
“They can’t steal or cheat or lie,” added Frothing Harris.
Castor Jenkins rolled his eyes in mild exasperation. “It’s a question of attitude. When I was a plant I had a fine attitude, very diplomatic and easy going, utterly at peace with my environment and neighbouring vegetation, respectful of passing insect life, even well disposed towards worms and fungus. I earned my right to be reincarnated as a human the hard way. And what a magnificent human I became! I started as a promising baby and never looked back! In my youth I was curious about everything, a real sponge for knowledge, but I was disturbed by the way the world kept changing. I wondered how I might trust a universe that simply wasn’t stable. So I looked for certainty in mathematics and logic and other abstract systems of thought.
“In other words I turned into a philosopher, a rationalist, a teacher of the young people in the city where I dwelled. And while I lived in this fashion, debating in the public squares, going to symposia, that bottle full of the juice of my previous body stood patiently on its shelf, waiting for the moment when it would serve another purpose, a purpose devised by that evil Pythagorean so many years earlier. I was oblivious to this fact, unaware of the schemes of my former self, but I doubt that knowing would have made a difference; I was too committed to wisdom for its own sake and I continued teaching.
“Athens was a glorious city at that time but constantly threatened by external powers and internal dissent. The last thing its rulers wanted was a maverick wise man, a radical sage, agitating the people and opening up their minds. I was arrested and condemned to death for impiety. The year was 399 BC. An executioner was chosen to descend into the cellar of a particular house and fetch a bottle from a shelf. Yes, it’s true. In Ancient Athens condemned prisoners were compelled to drink hemlock. That was the species of plant I had once been! I was plucked by the herbalist who was employed to make poisons for the authorities and in the official judicial repository I had lingered.”
“You were Socrates!” exclaimed Paddy Deluxe.
Castor inclined his head. “I don’t like to brag, it’s a very inelegant thing to do, but you’re right, I once was Socrates, the wisest philosopher of olden times. I’ll tell you about my final moments, if you like, but first allow me to point out that I was wise only in the sense that I knew I knew nothing. That’s what I always claimed, but paradoxes like that annoyed the prominent Athenians and turned them against me. I was also suspected of being a potential traitor. It’s true I opposed democracy and saw much to admire in the tougher Spartan system, but my loyalty to Athens was unwavering. The trial was a farce but I accepted my fate philosophically. As a philosopher, what else could I do?
“Trials in Ancient Athens were different from what they are in modern Wales. There were no judges: the jury was supreme. To ensure fairness, juries were huge, 501 men were present to decide my case. After I made a speech in my defence and the prosecutor, a chap named Meletus, made a speech against me, the jury voted on my guilt. This didn’t go in my favour, 280-221 was the outcome. Oh dear! But what would the sentence be? Our custom was for defendant and prosecutor to each suggest a penalty. I proposed a fine of 30 minae (about £1886 in today’s money4) and Meletus proposed death. Another vote was taken and the result was 360-141 in favour of death. Charming!
“But the truth is that I contributed to my own martyrdom every step of the way. I could have resigned from philosophy and avoided the trial. Even in prison I had a chance to escape: my friends bribed the guards but I refused to go. I did everything in my power to ensure my execution. My followers assumed this was because of my superior moral courage, my desire to live within the rule of law, my disdain for earthly experience. Even I was unaware that I was really paying for other crimes, crimes not mentioned at my trial, crimes in my past, that were committed in my previous life as a wicked Pythagorean, and that the death sentence was his justice rather than the justice of the state.”
“Did drinking the hemlock hurt?” asked Frothing Harris.
“It wasn’t a comforting beverage,” said Castor in a quiet voice, “unlike beer or whisky, but I can’t say there was unbearable pain. I drank the bowl dry and then walked around a bit. Plato was there, a close friend, a bit humourless but not a bad sort, and when I felt suddenly weak he helped me to lie down on a pallet. Then th
e executioner came and pinched my foot, asking me if I could feel anything. ‘No,’ I answered. He pinched my legs at regular intervals up to my thighs. ‘Still nothing,’ I remarked. He nodded and said, ‘When the numbness reaches your heart, you’ll be gone.’ And that’s exactly what happened. I died and my soul left my body again and went elsewhere, but I don’t know where. Of all my numerous incarnations I only remember those three, and it’s an amazing coincidence that they all happened in sequence in the same country.”
Paddy and Harris conferred together. Finally they said:
“We believe your story because we both read about the death of Socrates in a book and it was exactly as you described. If you weren’t Socrates there’s no way you could have got the details right.”
“Glad you’re not naïve in any way,” commented Castor.
“What will you be reincarnated as next time?”
This was a question Castor didn’t like. “I might make a reasonable guess, based on a tally of my sins against a tally of my virtues, but it would require lots of work and take the mystery out of the process. Reincarnation is an enigmatic business and shouldn’t be controlled too much. I’ve already meddled more than enough with it. Look at what I managed to do with those three sequential lives! I planned my own murder in the first, ended my second as a bottled poison, consumed that poison in the third. It enabled me to kill myself without committing suicide. What else lets us get away with such blatant paradoxes?
“Buy me a drink, I’m feeling generous,” he concluded.
3 It is equal to the sum of the scares on the other two snides.
4 At the words “in today’s money” both Paddy and Harris clenched their teeth and growled.
When Wales Played Asgård
The glory days of Welsh rugby were in the 1970s, everyone knows that, and the general feeling is that such heights of sporting excellence can never be equalled. Castor Jenkins knows better. Not only were they equalled recently, but actually bettered, and he was the man who made the miracle happen. At least that’s what he says, but there’s no evidence to back up his claim, because the bravest game Wales ever played was an away match and took place not on Earth but in the supernatural realm of the Old Norse Gods. Only a return match in Cardiff against the same side will provide conclusive proof.