Speculate

by Eugen Bacon

  Vestigial night

  Mirror, mirror . . . we sip milk tea with unfinished pining, and what we murmur in the flowers circling the grapevine is not the greatest show of all time but the ramble of an earthquake that collapsed a tourist island. Out yonder in Southampton as a silver spoon dances in a golden broth, it floats to the surface white seeds that outline the end of a pen and the start of Hellboy and an evil sorceress sitting on marigolds. Mirror, mirror . . . a silhouette of M. Night Shyamalan whispers the story of a dark phoenix and thirty greyhounds, dragons and aliens in collision at an air force base in Vegas. How I bore you. A blue fly with overgrown ears races in shadow inside the pupils of a chef in a pop-up restaurant near a pet cemetery someplace in the whistle of our half-dazed sleep. What sort of affair are we going to see this time round?

  * * *

  What kind of affair? It’s hard to tell. I’m a kinda down to earth bloke. Still stewing over a Union meeting where one of my mates got ridiculed. I can’t remember what he said. Only just see him adjusting the straps of his overalls over his crumpled shirt and stooping to stuff his towel and plastic bags into his workbag. As he wiped himself and pulled the shirt over his chest he frowned as though I might have been telling the worst thing ever. I said he had not come out into the assembly as we all did, but tailed behind. I said he had not said a word as we all listened to the union report on his dealings with the managers and as he grew restless. Perhaps, I said, it seemed as though he had sought something to hold on to. The mirror was one-way as.

  The bury ball

  It was an era of the ballers, they bounced everything on showcase. First there was the money world, a financial circuit of coins rolling across screens and sofas. And then, in a NASA special, astronauts bounced along spherical planets, volley-balling spare oxygen in cylinders across the surface. But when the talk show came, with the greatest respect, parliamentarians uncloaked and flashed the live TV viewers and in an official statement declared an important difference in the art of war: Don’t make an issue out of it. All proceeds go to a non-profit charity. This captivated the war heroes and they bounced nuclear ratings at the network. It prompted a redefined global excellence that involved optimism on a local level and it translated onto an international stage. This drew an apocalypse of intelligent aliens on extra-terrestrial visits only on circular nights, and they were not a danger to civilizations that did not argue or fight against them.

  * * *

  In that era when private lives appeared to be ruled by the force of historical events, people were contradictorily challenged by creative achievements that, even if originating in apocalyptic scenarios, developed a self-sustainable energy that superseded material circumstances and foreshadowed alternatives. No matter how intelligent the aliens, they were bound to be defeated by powerful artistic representations of how war and geopolitics create the plight of humanity. I must remember posting “An Earthling Sends a Postcard Home.”

  Unprecedented

  The wandering cow like a serial bomber was desperate but defiant. She added daffodils and rainbows to each masterpiece and it traveled unchewed to the rumen and then to the reticulum. Satiated from the eating, she rested and waited and thought through stuff. She calculated the right time to cough up bits of cud, now chewing them completely before she swallowed. They raced through her gut, exploded from her bovine ass and splashed pat in a polychromatic mess on the polished shoe of a visiting president just checking in on his way to the next town with a new detail—most had mastered the perfect low ponytail, and those who hadn’t wore tail-hair wigs. As cameras flashed, the cow took back to her eating and continued to be an artist ruminating to dung the next political dunderhead.

  * * *

  As cameras flashed, the cow took back to her eating and continued to be an artist ruminating on how to improve dyed patterned fabrics. She mastered the direct application process, the resist or indigo process, the mordany, madder, alizarian or modern process, the application of a thick pigment known as roghan made by mixing a yellow powdered color with castor oil and then heating the mixture. She perfected the art of representation and moved on to self-representation. I own a framed painted cloth that I keep in a safe where she figures with Sri Nathji, an incarnation of Krishna playing the flute and herself among a herd of fellow cows listening intently. The central figure, Nathji, is superbly executed in pichhavai Kishangarh style, coming alive in gold and encrusted with jewels. His neck and chest are draped in a profusion of necklaces and beads, seemingly defying the burdens of time, caste and geopolitics.

  Nothing new

  Life is a seagull walking barefoot on sand, connected to the soil. It’s the greatest earthing. Look out across the choppy waves, kite surfers soaring on wind. The seagull hops from a whitewash, follows shoe prints on the beach that’s so freaking cold, a blind man can see. Windswept: look at the tree shrub, see how it grows—aslant from the ocean. The seagull flaps its white wings, hops without settling on a vault bar of the beach gym. Hop, hop without stopping. Recover repeat. Yonder on the road, as darkness swells, cyclists branch to Danks Street, just before Nimmo Street. “Barefoot on earth,” the gull says to no one. “The greatest earthing, so underrated. I had the biggest poop ever.”

  * * *

  Life is a chameleon feeding on chance encounters subject to the whims of composite weather maps, or synoptic charts that display conditions over areas too broad to fathom where cold fronts and warm fronts collide, occasioning sudden changes in temperature and barometric pressure. Such maps don’t have anything to do with cardinal points, let alone arrowheads, crossbars and feathers that seemed to give stability to the weathercocks adorning the churches, town halls and schools of my childhood. I hate the numbers around the station model. I always end up on a stationary front. Synaptic charts would be more useful. One could even imagine using a dual scale thermometer to record the fluctuations of human desire.

  The nature of reflection

  In a matter of blink and swallow, the piano riff thunders, sighs and drones to foreshadow a flicker of eyes in the oppressive dusk. Under interrogation it doesn’t matter there’s a super blood moon etched in the embers of the night. “Bring out those mugs,” says the watcher. Three culprits shuffle slowly, slowly out of the holding room that is also a ghost of the 1885 Station Cafe. “These are not mugs, now there’s a handsome rooster!” The culprit in question teems with life, But I am a girl! No one walks through her claim and they get down to probe the matter of fare evasion that landed the culprits in the conundrum of an interrogation that could go until six in the morning, then start over. You can collect side effects and a lifetime of ridicule where latitude doesn’t help in accelerated focus on non-accountability oblivious to misinformation, uneducation or simply uncleverness.

  * * *

  Possible side effects unrelated to misinformation include at worst paranoia. At best, agoraphobia. I don’t believe it. Truth came to stay when I was away. It’s been six months (yes, it’s been out to celebrate). Time to sum up developments on the theme of sharing space. It’s noon and I’m in bed in a dark room keeping my mind busy in a kind of reversed situation. Nothing’s happened except for the fact that Truth went through my cupboards and riffled through papers in the drawer of my desk where I keep my will, foreign currencies and Speculate manuscript. So furious was I that I looked up the web for flats to rent. Found one in Spacious City. Meanwhile, I found: a film titled “The Uninvited.” It’s giving me ideas for a different mode of reflection. Any bubbles of blood from your bite will be absorbed, not smudged, and I will play you Ravel’s Bolero for good measure.

  Part II

  Dominique Hecq & Eugen Bacon

  [Bacon’s italicized responses to Hecq’s prose poetry

  History lesson

  Again and again, the shrink and I work the sand on the beach in the backyard. Today, we build mountains and towers and castles in the air. We hollow out tunnels. Bury our bottoms, feet and legs in the squeaky sa
nd, erasing all traces of the Dark Ages with its fortresses, battlefields and armies. In the blink of an eye gone are the Renaissance, the Restoration, the Discovery of the New World, the French Revolution, the Declaration of Human Rights. The Great Depression and the Return of the Repressed. We uncover broken records, heels, shells, husks, knife blades, pricks and spurs. Stirrups, crampons, hooks. I unearth a shattered honey pot, a bottle top, the head of a doll. Bones. I try reviving a dead bird. Look at the sky’s vault. Sing (repeat) Ten Thousand Miles Away. I take a deep breath. A giant leap. Yes! I land on the moon and bump into Neil Armstrong.

  * * *

  Like a child in amniotic fluid, the violence that had plagued medieval mountains and castles hollowed itself underground through what was once a champion’s tunnel but was now simply a sewer, and hauled itself to the surface. It toddled across Flinders Street, found itself in a laneway full of coffee lovers and buskers no one wanted to hear. There, it took a breath and ignored an impulse to wail at the stares walking alongside its pockmarked fetal body. A legal studies unit encouraged thinkers to dissect this conundrum, as the biology lab would touch nothing of its saber teeth and hairpin bones wrapped in shells. But the leap came in fiction, a bestseller on the five senses of horror that livestreamed for decades and inspired a new documentary called Curtain Falls, its countless parodies including a cameo of the Pope and Madonna soaked in a bathtub full of honey soaring to the moon without an arm strong.

  Confession of a bookworm

  The book is in a cardboard cover marked Fragile. I tenderly lift the volume out of its dogeared case. Scraps of leather binding and confettied paper fall on the floor in a cloud of organic matter. I wish I were an alchemist, botanist or physician, but my eyes naturally turn to calligraphy and flashes of color. I kneel. Sneeze. Finger the powder when out of the blue the Abbé Raynal storms into the library and screams: malheureuse! My fingers are red and as I try to rub the color off, the palms of my hands grow red. Malheureuse! Dactylopius coccus holds the secret of cochineal. You’ll be tried for treason to the sound of Spanish, thundering cannons and French trumpets. You will receive angry salutes from twenty-four pounders. And you’ll burn among phials and flasks and cases of books.

  * * *

  The book is in a quiet room, squeezed in a working space of strong opinions and no respect. Nothing reveals its abstract or a cover, no textual conditioning pointers or blurbs that will adulterate your approach to the text. No Unauthorized Entry, says the preface, but you lift the first page anyhow and discover the book is a lantern-lit building that acts with integrity and travels on a tramline. Pedestrians give way to it. As its doors groan and bang open you wish you were a song that is a child, so you could climb skipping and whistling into the lanterns and travel all the way to a dance of drowning souls.

  Today’s word is fire

  You can smell it in the air. In full light, specks of ash twirl and swirl like a miniature beehive. The water is slick with sunlight. I dive in. Touch the bottom—unsettled silt, rocks, pebbles. Surfacing, I feel the water flowing ice-cold over my shoulders. I begin to swim. Long strokes upstream toward the fall. My chest expands, arms bracing the water. I don’t feel the cold, but my toes and fingertips are numb. Dappled glare on the surface, then the brush of hair-like roots. I dive through the fall, water drumming my back. A red sandstone outcrop, porous soil, a cave. In one step, I’m inside. Wait for my eyes to get accustomed to the dark. On a slab of stone, a smatter of nuggets: reds, ochres, whites. On the walls, a splash of fingernail moons.

  * * *

  Today’s word is donut, and it is butterflied, a clean split before a gobble. There are diners and waiters and chefs full of resourcefulness, but none equipped to tackle the donut as it leapt out of the dessert plate. Having endured the butter knife’s cut, it was profusely wild in its escape attempt, betrayed by the pastry chef who had lovingly added yeast and self-rising flour, full cream milk and pure vanilla extract, watched it rise and golden. But the classic glaze, thin as a sigh, the cinnamon whiff that danced and dazzled, both meant nothing as the little girl dislocated the donut’s top from its bottom with a blunt knife. Before she could drag it to her mouth, tear it with her teeth, the donut clapped itself shut and did a burn out across the table, landed onto a waitress’s hands and she packed him into her pocket. The feel of her hands made him forget his destination, and he lay against her hips wound so tightly. The touch alone was enough.

  Footnote

  Ella knew she would not be able to make it to old age gracefully without a source of income other than earned from her pen and so she applied for a variety of jobs for which she received curt rejection slips, the latest being for the position of sandwich hand in a new age deli that specializes in dishes flavored by renowned international writers. An excellent cook versed in the history of gastronomy, gluttony and intemperance, Ella had thought her prospects were good. Sorry. No references, said the note.

  * * *

  The footnote took to questioning what might make a princess want to vanish, why a great poet was turning into a pumpkin, when a live TV host might resign with his dreams and violins, what a dead snorkeler was doing with a tired smile on a football field, and all such things that inspired sudden intellect. It was a matter of philosophy to find answers to these questions, to value knowledge and existence as much as reasoning and language. But the note found itself on a red carpet and everything that came from each celebrity’s mouth disabled thinking. Distraught, the note surrendered to house arrest inside a room wallpapered with simple words and associations: able: fool / beauty: published / cruel: wet . . . you get the gist. Frustrated by the year, the note took to busking at Flinders Street Station, roaring emotive numbers of asylum seekers, nurses and first responders, and a few people hurled coins. To the note’s astonishment, it won a Grammy.

  Letter to a bride to be

  Thank you for sharing with me the newest (yet quite retro) issue of Vogue Bridal Patterns. I love that off-white silk you brought back from your travels, it will suit your complexion perfectly. It looks much better than the Nora white organza and is a tribute to your integrity. I hope I’m not reading too much into your choice of color. Before you start making the dress, I urge you to indulge in an intertextual journey around your maiden room, if I may say so, for I’m not sure you know on what galère you are embarking. Mark my words. I don’t mean gondola, or anything romantic, but galley, a low, flat ship with one or more sails (glad you opted for a visor instead of a veil) and up to three banks of oars worked by slaves. First, as an artist, you must re-read Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” against the grain. Then turn to Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Gentleman of Shalott” and Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River. I studied both in year twelve (wish I’d paid more attention). Finally, and this may surprise you, especially coming from me, read Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House, a work your father drew on to devise our home. I now think Ibsen understood the difference between need and desire; desire and love; love and lust. Your father would disagree, but I would maintain that Ibsen was really a proto-feminist writer. Wink. One last thing: beware of identifications. With two (anti)heroines bearing your Christian name, you wouldn’t want to become unduly hystericized. Much love. X

  * * *

  In a letter to my silence, I study the keyboard for a space between sleepers and their dreams that may surprise you. Each dream is like sitting at the top of a house with no earthing, and it is right between power poles in the middle of side rain. Nothing is neutral, the dogs are howling at invisible warriors of the night. No one knows how it happens, but there’s a breakout, and then tongues and tails. Wake me, my love. I need to hear the syllables of my thoughts. Xx

  Lines

  This line is lost in a science of nowhere, but somewhere is happening and it’s growing through the night on its way to the moon. You are so beautiful, people stumble as you cruise. Trucks stagger at the crossroads, trams forget the lights have turned. A cyclist crumples in th
e gutter. You say, Pardon? This line is lost, asunder from the verselet, but you’re so beautiful. The symmetry of nose to lip, the balance of your forehead, the array of hair on your head, dimples in your smile. Oh, what hue are your eyes? Classes suspended so teachers can gawk, pupils bundled to see through the casements, voices calmed but they fall infected, a drumbeat of rhetoric. What a wonderful view! Just a line, basic geometry, a lost line in the middle of a page, oh, so beautiful, you can fly.

  * * *

  This line has already migrated past the immargination of the page. It’s moonstruck and I watch its metamorphosis with wicked fascination. We are made of letters, and letters both liberate and oppress. As I watch the text liquefy in the pool of light on the desk, thirst takes hold of me. Peel me an onion, I say. And you do. I am waiting for you to blink. For me to produce tears that will wash away all the lines and the words and the letters in the universe.