by Hal Duncan
•
WET SAND, MANILA envelope, cappuccino, dry clay, wrapping paper, Nefertiti’s foundation—none of these quite match the colour in hue and lustre, a brown paled to buff but pinked as with embarrassment.
It looks nice, says Jaq. It’s like... shy sandstone.
The room is echoey empty to his voice, just the painted walls, the polished floor, and four fleshlings all jiggered, quanked by the sore swink and gaumed with paint, two of them fair spattered to clatty, the lovers roped in to sharpen the shift, make themselves useful for a change, having cabbled in play through the work—Don’t just stand there looking glaikit, dunderhead—Says the gormless galoot—Big numpty—Wee nyaff—and tipped the banter into full-on rammy shenanigans with the spraypacks, until curbed by simultaneous bellows from both Ana and Renart: Quit it!
The paint, which it would be an ignorance of haccaeity to call pale brown, is drying to a crust on Jaq’s face now, a full face-pack sprayed full brunt, sleeved off to smearage of streaks; and on the wall it is already tacky to the touch; and it is, Ana agrees, a whole lot better, much more her.
Renart brings in now, from the kitchen, the zig-zag chair of Gerrit Rietveld: four square planes of beechwood, dovetail-jointed; back vertical down to z-shape of: seat, diagonal, base: angles crisp as apple crunch. It won’t go here, he thinks, but it’s ideal for a seat, to study and plan: order, design, composition; tone, form, symmetry; balance: Sondheim chanelling Seurat.
A bedsuite for Ana scientist smoker syrinxist and so on Massinger, who insists that her science is not a reduction of his craft in its abstraction, but an expansion. At the extremes of science we enter poetry, she claims, the purest application of mathematics. Poesis is the suppositional calculus, notated not in symbol but in stance: epistemic; alethic; deontic; boulomaic. And if she should be able to see the impossibility of a viable life in a dull grey room, he should be able to wrangle a few numbers into sense especially when, look, it’s a glassy permutation of a Fibonnaci Spiral.
Puk, as Renart is musing, Ana making coffee, and Jaq idling, is weaving this decorative exploit into their gaming of an harpagmos, which required a twofold offering during the course of it—a votive tablet of painted wood, an animal sacrifice—at the sanctuary of Hermes and Aphrodite. The window frame, he has decided, can be their votive tablet turned inside out, object opened to its delineating edges to articulate its reverence with greater import, to make the world itself its prayer.
And there’s beef in the chiller, says Jaq. For Ana’s chilli. What? It’s dead animal.
Which reminds him: Puk needs new togs, Jaq has resolved, and it’s his task as erastes to busk his eromenos, bedizen the lad. He starts blethering of Puk comical with trouserlegs rolled up to bare shins, wading in the brook at the bottom of the stead. They could hit the markets if they’re surplus now, or if Sifu Renart can savvy the shipshaping of the bedsuite as pronto as Jaq is sure he will.
We need to get you some proper britches, he says.
•
SHE IS THREE in one, Karya, a trinity of sisters, English walnut flanked by hazelnut and sweet chestnut, Juglans regia flanked by Coryllus avellana and Castanea vesca, wearing the same name in all three guises to the Greeks who harvested from all three types of nut tree, this triune aspect an echo perhaps of the two sisters who schemed viciously to thwart a Lakonian maiden’s dalliance with Dionysus, and were driven mad for it, fled up the scree slopes of Mount Taygetos where they were turned to stones, while she herself, dying, was changed into a deciduous tree growing twenty-five to thirty-five metres tall, her male flowers drooping catkins which fruit in autumn with green fleshy husks around the edible nut, her summer canopies now lining the Avenue K. Leslie Steiner, shattering the sunlight as Susurrus dances her, to dapple Jaq and Puk and a gaggle of skimbooted kidsters who zip past them, whooping.
The goddess Artemis told her dad Dion of the unfortunate affair, insisted that he found a sanctuary in honour of Artemis Karyatis. So, at Karyai in Lakonia, in her sacred grove of walnut or hazelnut trees, she had priestesses known as Karyatides, this sisterhood of the nut tree immortalised: in the porch of the Erechthion on the Acropolis in Athens, in stone canephora carrying baskets on their heads full of sacred foods for the goddess’s feast, each pillar of individuality carved with its own face, hair, drapery and stance; and in similar stone caryatids down the ages, in Classical Rome, Renaissance Italy, Northern Mannerism.
As if every walnut tree were not a caryatid, and each tree unique, as here, along the whole length and on both sides of the avenue of shops and stalls the lovers stroll, these stately rows of verdant pillarings a ceremonial sorority in procession, leading back the way erastes and eromenos came, to the little dogleg of Stroedeker and the culvert off it, to the townhouse doorstep and a newly dedicated sanctuary more sacred than the grandest temple in its modest unpretension, as a home.
•
I’M NOT REALLY much for cooking, says Ana.
She slices the ends off an onion and peels, brown flakes of dry papery crunkle falling away, retaining curvature on the counter where they’re tossed, the smoother layer beneath stripping bit by bit under a thumbnail and scowl, to naked pearl white. She halves the whole now, lays each half flat, and slices, this half first—each knifecut through the pale crump of strata as crisp as the air is, sharp acidic waft watering eyes—then the next. Rough methodical chopping of the fanning slices, and the odd stray chunk firing out tiddlywinks from under blade, serve as a no comment on her self-assessment. Satisfied, she grabs a wooden spoon and takes the plateful to the pot, swipes the lot into a sizzle of olive oil, stirs.
Renart, as she stirs up the sizzle to a slowly richening aroma, as the onions shift imperceptibly gradually toward translucence, is still pottering on about his work, lumping gubbins dumped in Puk’s room or the hall, sometimes the kitchen, through to the master bedsuite, rapt in his task to a Scoobedy-doop-doop, bibbedy-bap absent and elsewhere mode of focus. In his element, it seems.
She dumps the diced steak in, to another sizzle, stirs, stirs and returns to the chopping board.
One sweet red pepper, one orange pepper, both cut vertically from the stem, down and around and back up, to be cracked open and have the seeds stripped and shaken and teased out with a finger. She returns to tumble the browning beef roughly with the spoon, flick a morsel over here or there.
Scoob, scoobedy-doobedy, doo-bow. Smells nice.
Four jalapeños, two green, two red, one of each finely diced, one of each sliced. These she takes to the pot and adds. Another stir, digging under with the spoon to shovel, fold, checking for blood red, turning.
Off in the bedsuite again, Renart folds togs and shelves them, carving some cunning system, no doubt, that will put all to hand, as she dresses of a morn, with the precision of some antique knight’s squire sprung to buckle armour; but Susurrus leaves him to it, is more attentive to the cooking, relishing the shift of it in him, the tickle of air currents spiraled from the heat, the tang of oniony steam that seeps him, swirls in him through the kitchen with the open window that invited him inside.
At the cooker, Ana cracks a can of some cheap carbonated drink, full of sugar and spice, pours it gluggling and hissing into the pot—her secret ingredient.
Tum-ti-tum, ti-tum-tum-tum!
Dried chilli flakes sprinkled liberally from a bag. A crush of crimsons and terracottas, seeded with dark and light ochres, it looks like it belongs in the pestle of some ancient artist, to be ground for pigment, mixed with egg yolk and applied to a church wall in tempera fresco, or daubed with a finger on the ceiling of a cave to conjure a bison in silhouette.
The tail of the turkey-cock turns to the sun! Sander of Tempe chanelling Stevens.
A carton of chopped tomatoes. A carton of kidney beans. A stir. A step back, a release of breath, halfway a stance of satisfaction at a dusted job, halfway a momentary daze, as if at a loss as to what to do now, or in suspicion of loose ends left. She looks at Renart, who stands in the kitchen doorway
.
Well, she says, it just has to simmer now. Won’t be done for a yonk.
•
WHAT DO YOU think? Am I prepped for action?
Jaq in Puk’s skivvies, pinging waistband and thumbing thighbands straight, rootling pod to set his bollocks, shift cock to the left. To the right.
I don’t know which way I dress, he says. These are yanked.
He settles on upright as fated outcome anyway given stirrings to the novel cling and intimacy of frottage by proxy, or loinspace incursion, or whatever it is that’s scrunching ballsack and rousing yen in his pintle. Yen that earns dints of esteem from other browsers in the togstore, an invite from a gazing ageling girl over by the hats, which he dints thanks and apologies to, sorry, he forgot to update his publics with his tweaked kinsey, which she missives a shame, them both being sixers, but sweet that he’d do that for his beau, shift his hanker to fit so snug, and no need to apologise at all. Also: his gambit to unspotlight Puk is adorable, if he doesn’t mind her saying.
Puk having been blithe to strip in the store, since Erehwynan nonchalance was on display throughout among the browsers—no different to the sauna, really—but unprepped for the sprucer those browsers were politely nudged to cleanse with before trialling summer-sweaty skin in whatnot. Heads turned to his yelp of startle, from the cubicle, at the blasts of high-pressure vapour from all angles, and hot air to dry, and focused particularly on nooks of flesh most like to be ripe. And of course the door opened auto the click it was done, so there Puk stood, mortified by the pricking of his pintle at the sprucer’s intimacies. Whereupon Jaq, fingersnap pronto, tossed him the first britches to hand, (navy blue,) nimble as could be, and dropped his own in a grand diversionary show of trialling this quaint custom of underwear, with a quick stride down the aisle a few steps, as if to optimise Puk’s view of his twirl, but in fact to set a precise distance whereby they weren’t a duo drawing more attention now, but rather a soloist and his singular but backgrounded audience.
Try the paisley, he says, the black on silver. It’ll be like a flip of your Geister synthe, a Fourier Harmony.
It’s not about transforming Puk to a native, Jaq explains as the Earther slips out of one set of britches and into the other, or painting him as a sham of such, but about finding the permutation of him for this new domain.
How about these ones? says Puk.
The same pattern in crimson and jade.
Even better, says Jaq.
•
HERBACEOUS, RHIZOMATOUS, PERENNIAL, Mentha spicata (or viridis) sprouts well in most any temperate climate, from her fleshy rhizome spreading wide and down into the soil—unless some spoilsport gardener captures her invasive roots in pots or planters—stretching her variably hairless to hairy stems from thirty centimetres to a metre tall in limber abundance. She does prefer partial shade, she has made it clear to Susurrus, but will thrive in anything from mostly shade to full sun, flourishing soft leaves with serrated margins, five to nine centimetres long, one and a half to three centimetres broad, the oil of spearmint chewed from her tender pale green flesh by Puk now, from a soggy leaf lipped from a straw, rich with the dextro-carvone which imbues her aromatic foliage with that scent so unmistakeably fresh it was only natural to use her on the bodies of the dead, to hold the line valiantly (if vainly) against the stench of rot. Used as a treatment for hirsutism in women too, spearmint produces flowers in slender spikes, each flower pink or white, a slight two and a half to three millimetres long and broad.
She has always been pretty, in sight, scent, taste. The god Hades loved his Minthê for that, and she basked in his affections, blithe until the day she boasted in her pride that she was so much better than his queen Persephone, at which the goddess, or her mother Demeter perhaps, transformed the nymph into the mint plant they’d then use to flavour the sacred barley-drink of their Eleusinian Mysteries, as she would one day flavour also, in far western lands of slaves, mint juleps and mojitos, which taste much better here, in a tavern on Boulevard Hovendaal, in the mouths of dark and golden-eyed lovers. Taste best in each other’s mouths as they kiss in the recessed booth, Jaq fumbling with the tash on Puk’s trews, unbuttoning the ballop, because when the tumblespace cast danced focus from a pairing in the New Davenport outlet to frame the snugged lushes, Puk gave an oh! oh! and a grinning handflap, and pounced to mash lips, to whoops and whistles of esteem.
•
DAWNLIGHT THROUGH THE door of the treehouse.
The fuzzled canoodling that inflamed, via gropes and giggles, opposed by half-hearted remonstrations from Jaq that he was far too soused, advanced, by resolute demonstrations from Puk that Jaq’s tadger was not, through frolic to hard fuckery is now reprised as mawmsey croodling, the two well-fucked and well-fadged in the after, snuggling still socketed. Warm breath on the back of his neck, canty in Jaq’s couthy embrace, Puk yawns as he drumbles how their socketing feels designed.
Getting back is a blur: a stumbling carouse along Steiner to cadge a hitch, Jaq’s brainpop scheme, from one of the nightcarters offloaded now at Bradshaw Market, headed back out through the subrurals, and ever resolute to grant passage on request, ever a seat kept free in their skimcart, in memory of the flight from Phobos’s shattering, a custom deep as oath: never again to have no room for one asking transport; Puk on Jaq’s lap squirming drunk and hyper to grope and clumse Jaq’s doublet free from a ferntickled shoulder, to show it—see?—his Phobian ancestry; midway in the weavy stagger after being dropped, along the long empty winds through forestry pitch black either side, paths carved in the gleam of asphalt below, the star-strewn and fob-scythed vault above, stumbling and tumbling in a crash into thick burdock, lying on his back, looking up at the vastation of that abyss, atramentine and asparkle; puking at the side of the road; being Nearly there, nearly there; taking a slug of rum from a flask magicked by Jaq from who knows where; being recovered and rannigant again enough, when at last they made it to the stead, that he flailed free of sensible steerage toward Jaq’s room, and went crash splashing prancing off in a run through undergrowth like a kidster in surf, to their oak and elm, calling Jaq to him like a mutt, cracking up at it; and the two clambered up into the treehouse to flop in a tangle, frisky Puk wrappling Jaq back out of laze and into lusty yen.
So they fucked wild, Puk astride at first, then turned, to his hands and knees, to be tupped under Jaq’s hunching thrusts, hips and shoulder and fists of hair yanked back, for the prick to ram jam bam and cram him, till he felt it fill him, and he’d swear to cock, the jism spouted into and through him and out his own spurting prick.
And now, here they lie on their sides, snuggling still socketed, Puk blissed to feel Jaq inside and around him as he gazes out at dawnlight through the door of the treehouse.
•
ACADEMIC OF THEOSOPHICAL Sufi, in his essay, “Mundus Imaginalis, or The Imaginary and the Imaginal,” Henry Corbin paints the landscape of an alterior realm of subtle bodies, an altjeringa of archetypes, Islamic, Jungian, Platonic. Stancing the imaginal, as he calls it, independent of any substratum in which it would be immanent in the manner of an accident, he comes so so close to unmasking the projectivity that guises as eternity, but ultimately surrenders to the mystical, the metaphysical. What he needs is Jarry’s science, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics, the science of imaginary solutions, attributing the traits of objects to their lineaments.
Yeats’s Byzantium, Joyce’s Dublin, Lorca’s Andalucia: a moorish wall, a wall, any wall. In sailing from the Byzantium of metaphysics, pataphysics returns us to the material, the moment; it simply approaches from a new direction, scrutinising the real in terms of the shift and span of time rather than its stint. Transpositions to analogue alterities of space and stint may be (must be?) conjured by the pataphysicist, as physicists conjure flavour and colour in a quark, but if we are not talking of the shift and span of the substance of this realm, the existential, then our pataphysics has crumbled back to the false infinities
and infinitesimals of spiritualism and semiotics, the superstitions of soul and sign.
So, Corbin crumbles back to the Cartesian homunculi of metaphysical soul or intellect, equivalent nonsenses of nous as puppeteer, when he stances imagination the interface to this realm, a third capacity between sense and intelligence, as if there was a difference. Intelligence is sense; ideas have their taproots in impressions, as Hume traced. Meanwhile, sense is intelligence; the visual import of blue as gleaned from any flower—Hyacinth’s actual bloom, Novalis’s romantic emblem, Hume’s putative unseen—is not an inherent quality of light but rather a stance in the blue-yellow opponent process, the percept always already a concept, a note as arbitrary in its relation to the real as the scents of hyacinth to benzyl acetate, indole and phenylacetaldehyde.
There is no utopia for subtle bodies, no out of nature: the pataphysique is animal flesh; the pataphysical realm is blood-stained soil, a field of poppies; both are matter being seen from another temporal angle.
This is what Ana is trying to explain to Renart, who of all people should savvy, his very craft the hammering of bodily form, the work of Yeats’s goldsmith sailed back from Byzantium to the real, the downright psychophysiological. How can the artisan, finally returned from aeons in fantasia, his sleeves rolled up, ready to fashion us the bold and beautiful pataphysiques we’ve all along been yearning for, not wrapple the notion of agencies emergent in the pataphysical reticulum without collapsing it to animist mumbo jumbo?