Journey to the centre of the night

dark house, urban den-dweller, solitary abandonment; reclaiming the myth of the night. All writings by Stephen smith, unless otherwise noted.

[markfisherreblog]

“You won’t be able to stop yourself, you might as well enjoy it”: eXistenZ and noncognitive labour

(Originally published in Film Quarterly)

“Can what is playing you make it to level 2?” asked Nick Land in his landmark 1994 on cyber-theory, “Meltdown” (Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, Urbanomic, 456). Ominous and playful, Land’s intuition that computer games would provide the best way to understand subjectivity and agency in digital culture was also the gambit of David Cronenberg’s 1999 eXistenZ. eXistenZ takes place in a near-future in which games are capable of generating simulated environments which can barely be distinguished from real life. Instead of computer terminals or game consoles, players use organic “gamepods”, which are connected directly to the players’ bodies via “bioports” in their spines. (Cronenberg conjectures on the DVD commentary that if people choose to have laser eye surgery, they would also be willing to have bioports installed.) The lead characters are Ted Pikul (Jude Law) and Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh). We are first of all led to believe that Pikul is a neophyte gameplayer, being reluctantly initiated into the gameworld by Geller, who at this point seems to be the designer of the game, eXistenZ, which they are playing. The two are pitched into a complex intrigue: a struggle between rival games corporations, and between gameplayers and “realists” – those who believe that the games are corroding the structure of reality itself. This corrosion is performed by the film itself, with what one of the characters memorably describes as “reality bleed-through” effects, so that the reality layers – only very weakly differentiated in any case - become difficult to distinguish. By the end it seems that both eXistenZ the game and what we had taken to be real life are both embedded inside another game, tranCendenZ, but by now we cannot be sure. The last line of dialogue is “tell me the truth, are we still in the game?”

At the time, it seemed like eXistenZ was a late-arriving take on a series of themes and tropes familiar from 80s cyberpunk, and which Cronenberg had himself already explored (and did so much to shape) in Videodrome. In retrospect, however, it is possible to position eXistenZ as part of a rash of late 1990s and early 2000s films, including The Matrix and Vanilla Sky, which mark a transition from what Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance” of the 1990s bubble economy into the early twenty-first-century War on Terror moment. There is an abrupt mood shift towards the end of the film, with a military insurrection complete with heavy artillery and explosions. But the dominant feel is more quotidian. By contrast with the hyperconspicuous CGI of The Matrix, with which it was destined to be most compared, eXistenZ was sparing in its use of special effects. As Cronenberg’s DVD commentary makes clear, most of the CGI deployed in the film was used to produce naturalistic effects. The film’s look is subdued, resolutely non-spectacular: brown seems to be the dominant colour. Looked back on now, this brownness looks like a refusal of the gloss that will increasingly come to coat the artifacts of digital culture. With its dreary trout farms, ski lodges, and repurposed churches, the world (or, more properly, worlds) of eXistenZ have a mundane, lived-in quality.Or rather worked-in: much of the film happens in workplaces - workshops, gas stations, factories. This focus on work is what now seems most prophetic about eXistenZ. Labour is never explicitly discussed in the film: it is instead something like an ambient theme, omnipresent but unarticulated. The key to eXistenZ’s self-reflexivity is its preoccupation with the conditions of its own production (and the production of culture in general). It presents us with an uncanny compression, in which the “front end” of late capitalist culture – its cutting edge entertainment systems – fold back into the normally unseen “back end” (the quotidian factories, labs and focus groups in which such systems are produced). The clamour of capitalist semiotics – the frenzy of branding sigils and signals – is curiously muted in eXistenZ. Instead of being part of the background hum of experience, as they are in both everyday life and the typical Hollywood movie, brand names appear only rarely in eXistenZ. The that do appear– most of them the names of games companies – leap out of the screen. The generic naming of space is in fact one of the running jokes in the film – a country gas station is simply called Country Gas Station, a motel is called Motel. This is part of the flat affect, the strange tonelessness, which governs most of the film. On the DVD commentary, Cronenberg says that he made the actors wear unpatterned clothes, because patterns would consume more computer memory.

The digitization of culture which we take for granted now was only in its infancy in 1999; broadband was a few years off, as was the iPod. eXistenZ has little to tell us about the digital communications equipment that will proliferate in the decade after it was released. Communications devices do not play any major role in eXistenZ—the odd glowing phone belonging to Ted is thrown out of a car window by Allegra (Jennifer Jason Leigh)—and, with its longueurs, its lingering in dead time, the film is very far from registering the jittery, attention-dispersing effects of “always-on” mobile technology. The most resonant aspects of eXistenZ do not reside in thebody horror which was then still Cronenberg’s signature—although the scenes of the characters being connected to their organic game pod by bio-ports are typically grisly. Nor are they to be found in the perplexity expressed by characters as to whether they are inside a simulation or not—this is a theme that was already familiar from Videodrome, as well as Verhoeven’s Total Recall, both of which (in the first case indirectly, in the second more directly) took their inspiration from Phillip K. Dick’s fiction. Instead it is the idea—in some ways stranger and more disturbing than the notion that reality is fake—that subjectivity is a simulation which is what is distinctive about eXistenZ. In the first place, this emerges through confronting other automated (or rather partially automated) consciounesses: entities who seem autonomous but in fact can only respond to certain trigger phrases or actions that move the gameplay down a predetermined pathway. Some of the most memorable (and humorous) scenes show encounters with these Read Only Memory entities. At one point, we see one of the characters locked in a “game loop”, silently lolling his head, while waiting to hear the key words that will provoke him back into action. Later, a clerk is seen repeatedly clicking a pen – as a background character he is programmed not to respond until his name is called. More disturbing than the third person (or non-person) encounter with these programmed drones is the experience of having one’s own subjectivity interrupted by an automatic behaviour. At one point, Pikul suddenly finds himself saying, “It’s none of your business who sent us! We’re here and that is all that matters” He is shocked at the expostulation: “God, what happened? I didn’t mean to say that.” “It’s your character who said it,” Geller explains. “It’s kind of a schizophrenic feeling, isn’t it? You’ll get used to it. There are things that have to be said to advance the plot and establish the characters, and those things get said whether you want to say them or not. Don’t fight it.” Pikul later grimly notes that whether he fights these “game urges” or not doesn’t make any difference. The emphasis on the curtailing of free will is one reason that Cronenberg’s claim that the film was “existentialist propaganda” seems odd. Existentialism was a philosophy which claimed that human beings (what Sartre called the “for-itself”) are “condemned to be free”, and that any attempt to avoid responsibility for one’s actions amounted to bad faith. There was an absolute difference between the for-itself and what Sartre called the “in-itself” – the inert world of objects, denuded of consciousness. Yet eXistenZ, in common with much of Cronenberg’s work, troubles the distinction between the for-itself and the in-itself: machines turn out to be anything but inert, just as human subjects end up behaving like passive automata. Like Videodrome before it, the film draws out all the ambiguities of the concept of the player. On the one hand, the player is the one in control, the agent; on the other, the player is the one being played, the passive substance directed by external forces. At first, it seems that Pikul and Geller are for-itself, capable of making choices, albeit within set parameters (unlike in The Matrix, they are constrained by the rules of the world into which they are thrown). The game characters, meanwhile, are the in-itself. But when Pikul experiences “game urges”, he is both in-itself (a merely passive instrument, a slave of drive) and for-itself (a consciousness that recoils in horror from this automatism).

To appreciate eXistenZ’s contemporary resonance it is necessary to connect the manifest theme of artificial and controlled consciousness connects with the latent theme of work. For what do the scenes in which characters are locked in fugues or involuntary behaviour loops resemble if not the call-center world of twenty-first century labour in which quasi-automatism is required of workers, as if the undeclared requirement for employment were to surrender subjectivity and become nothing more than a bio-linguistic appendage tasked with repeating set phrases that make a mockery of anything resembling conversation? The difference between “interacting” with a ROM-construct and being a ROM-construct neatly maps onto the difference between telephoning a call center and working in one.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre famously uses the example of the waiter: someone who overplays the role of waiter to the extent that they (to outside appearances at least) eliminated their own subjectivity:

Let us consider this waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too forward. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe. (Being and Nothingness: An Essay On Phenomenological Ontology, Routledge, 2000, p59).

The power of Sartre’s example depends upon the tension between the would-be automatism of the waiter’s behaviour and the awareness that, behind the mechanical rituals of the waiter’s over-performance of his role is a consciousness that remains distinct from that role. In eXistenZ, however, we are confronted with the possibility that agency can genuinely be interrupted by the “inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton”. In any case, eXistenZ compels us to re-read Sartre’s description of the waiter in its terms, especially since one of the most horrific scenes of automatism features none other than a waiter. Pikul and Geller are sitting in a Chinese restaurant when Pikul feels himself overcome by a “game urge”.

Pikul: You know, I do feel the urge to kill someone here. Geller: Who? Pikul: I need to kill our waiter. Geller: Oh. Well that makes sense. Um, waiter! Waiter! [she calls over waiter] Geller: When he comes over, do it. Don’t hesitate. Pikul: But… everything in the game is so realistic, I-I don’t think I really could. Geller: You won’t be able to stop yourself. You might as well enjoy it. Pikul: Free will… is obviously not a big factor in this little world of ours. Geller: It’s like real life. There’s just enough to make it interesting.

“You won’t be able to stop yourself, you might as well enjoy it” – this phrase captures all too well the fatalism of those who have given up the hope of having any control over their lives and work. Here, eXistenZ emerges, not as “existentialist propaganda”, as Cronenberg had it, but as decisively anti-existentialist. Free will is not an irreducible fact about human existence: it is merely the unpreprogrammed sequence necessary to stitch together a narrative that is already written. There is no real choice over the most important aspects of our life and work, eXistenZ suggests. Such choice as there are exist one level up: we can choose to accept and enjoy our becoming in-itself, or uselessly reject it. This is a kind of deflation-in-advance of all of the claims about “choice” and “interactivity” that communicative capitalism will trumpet in the decade after eXistenZ was released.

Autonomist theorists have referred to a turn away from factory work towards what they call “cognitive labour”. Yet work can be affective and linguistic without being cognitive – like a waiter, the call center worker can perform attentiveness without having to think. For this noncognitive worker, indeed, thought is a privilege to which they are not entitled. Writing in The Guardian recently, Aditya Chakrabortty (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/31/why-our-jobs-getting-worse) referred to a study of two of Britain’s biggest supermarkets by the sociologist Irena Grugulis. “A trained butcher revealed that most meats were now sliced and packaged before they arrived in store; bakers in smaller shops now just reheated frozen loaves. In their paper, published this summer, Grugulis and her colleagues note that ‘almost every aspect of work for every kind of employee, from shopfloor worker … to the general store manager, was set out, standardised and occasionally scripted by the experts at head office’. Or, as one senior manager put it: ‘Every little thing is monitored so there is no place to hide.’” According to the labour theorist Phil Brown “permission to think” will be “restricted to a relatively small group of knowledge workers” in countries such as the UK and US. Most work will be routinised and outsourced to places where labour is cheap. Brown calls this “digital Taylorism” – suggesting that, far from being engaged in cognitive work, digital workers will increasingly find their labour as crushingly repetitive as factory workers on a production line. eXistenZ’s muted tones anticipates this digital banality, and it is the banal quality of life in an digitally automated environment - human-sounding voices that announce arrivals and departures at a railway station, voice-recognition software which fails to recognise our voices, call center employees drilled into mechanically repeating a set script – that eXistenZ captures so well.

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

The modern world is an endless tray of choices, to choose, to pick, to listen to endless chattering voices. 

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

The Man He Expands

Man, he expands. I saw him once, he was like a leaf landed gently on the lawn, Brushed about by the winds, Catching the clothes on the line.

Now I hear he’s grown,  His hair, his skin, his bone.

Now like a big log he lays about on that lawn. The mother cries for him to come inside, And when he moves he lifts the lawn with him, dragging in bits of a shrub, or a dozen small bugs. Man, he expands.

[cerceos-deactivated20160308]

Catherine Lemblé

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

Panic.

Panic on the streets of London, Panic on the streets of Birmingham, I wonder to myself Could life ever be sane again? The Leeds side-streets that you slip down, I wonder to myself. Hopes may rise on the Grasmere, But Honey Pie, you’re not safe here. So you run down To the safety of the town, But there’s panic on the streets of Carlisle, Dublin, Dundee, Humberside, I wonder to myself. Burn down the disco, Hang the blessed DJ, Because the music that they constantly play, It says nothing to me about my life. Hang the blessed DJ, Because the music that they constantly play. On the Leeds side-streets that you slip down, Provincial towns that you jog ‘round; Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ...

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

The Burning of old St. Stephen’s

Again in 1952, this time in the tiny village of Lower Pemburton, south of Turtham in the Sussex Weald, a curious incident caught the attention of the national papers. The incident in question shot briefly to fame for its devilish pagan overtones, the absurd nature of its iconoclastic act,  and, I presume, because it seemed so antagonistic to some of the more enraged conservative voices of the time.

The story I tell now is cleaved from articles of the time in a variety of local and national newspapers. A few anecdotal records from the time can also be found in local hands. These proved valuable in my attempts to recreate the scene as it must have been at the time.

Upon the morning of the 3nd of March, the local pubs, both The Duchess and The Ward of Anglia, were riven to a hooting storm of yells and shouting that quickly engulfed not only their respective inhabitants but also those in the nearby vicinity. The Duchess was the first to splutter with the voices of chaos, being the first pub on the route of the old baker Mr Sims, with The Ward of Anglia being reached by the disused miner’s path up by the stream, Mr Sims, then panting and wheezing, coughed up the words:

“St Stephen’s is on fire”.

The village-folk had no fire warden, but all pitched in and offered their hand to drown the conflagration. A few hoses and ropes were sought, even some ladders, and Mr Michaels, a local farmer, brought down the pre-war engine from his barn to help pump the water. The rag-tag bunch made a courageous stand as bit by bit the ancient village church caught the flaming tongue of fate. Of course, Turtham was called, but the response was slow, and by the time the fire-engine arrived it was only able to limit the damage.

By the end of the afternoon, the church had been burnt through, leaving only a charred husk and a blackened tower remaining. It was devastating for the community, but the effect was to increase over time as the truth surrounding the matter unfolded. For a number of days the vicar, Mr Longbottom, had confined himself to the vicarage, receiving only a few guests as he publically hid from view. It was on the Thursday that the next parish newsletter arrived. In it, and you can read this yourself, you can find an article written by Mr Longbottom.

It begins: “Dear parishioners, I, Mr Longbottom, your honoured vicar shall address the issue of the fallen St Stephen’s, our once beloved church….” He continues with the pleasantries for another two paragraphs before arching his article towards its intended subject, a theological and romantic polemic-cum-allegory, in which an idealised service is given that begins inside St Stephens, before moving to the churchyard and then out into the green pasture, where the churchgoers become disciples to a new cause, a wild and ancient dream of total physical and psychological oneness with Him. “It is a romantic dream I grant you, but a fuller, more contented life shall we lead; oh good, honest, kindly folk, we shall have our Sunday service upon the ruins of old St Stephen’s, and we shall rejoice once more in the message of God.”

Upon the Sunday the good, honest, kindly folk of Lower Pemburton made their way down to the still much blackened remains of St Stephen’s church, as they had every Sunday. Mr Longbottom, eager, contemplative, anxious, moved in alacritous circles before the crowd. When, upon deciding that all were present, he beseeched his flock for calm and to alert their ears to what he had to say.

In a number of anecdotal records that describe this incident it is said a special liquid was provided and given to all to drink. However, this aspect of the event is not detailed in any of the newspaper articles. Regardless, whatever was drunk, or whatever was said must have been powerful and consuming, because his flock left with him, moving through the churchyard, across the stream and out into the countryside whereupon they danced gaily in the fields, laughing and singing and rejoicing. Where marital ties had once been strictly adhered to, they were now loosened; neighbours fornicated with neighbours, men lay with women, women with women and, what horrified conservative mouthpieces of the time, men with men. This catechismic celebration continued for a number of days, the vicar leading his flock in the dance, attempting to bind the people together and unionise them with their God.

It transpired, of course, that the vicar committed the arson at St Stephen’s. It was him, in his new found dogma, that decided to set the church ablaze in a battle against idolatry and false worship. He wished for the people to look inward for God. After a couple of the weeks, the parishioners fully realised what had happened; a month or so later the vicar disappeared and new vicar arrived, replaced by the diocese in remarkably rapid fashion and swept cleanly under the rug. The people of Lower Pemburton had touched the divine, but, finding it too removed from their social order, had renounced it. Only remembered by the old folk now, this rarely talked about story has become a myth for the village, a troubling and confused myth that people seem ill-equipped to deal with.

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

Draft #2

Seleb Mas: An Hullicination

PREFACE:

The first man and the last man act in sympathy. Their lives run parallel, yet they are cut off by millenia. The first man, of course, was so and is ever thus, his portrait spans thousands of years and his ego lives on in the faint memory traces of the human psyche. But just as the last man knows the indifference of a destiny unbounded, so the first man is touched by the indifference of all that has come before. The last man pays a certain sort of homage to the first in that respect. They will, but are unwilling. In sympathy their most oblique moves are reduced to biology, their most outward excesses, it can be said, are nothing more than physical processes of actions imprinted on them in a genealogy. They are unlike you or I, for they are in most respects truly free of the taint of humanity; their destinys’ being almost entirely out of synch with that prevailing cultural imperative that is the mark of man, viz., one must follow in sequence to those that have gone before. Seleb Mas, the protagonist of this tale, marks the disarticulation of that sequence, acting in his part as the last man. In this story Seleb loses his mother and comes to adopt that curious unknown future that is the mark of the last man. Having been free from the life that others wished upon him, not through courage but by an insouciance of feeling, Seleb has become a wanderer and his detached reality has now, with his mother’s death, become at once more real and yet less real.

BODY:

‘Are we all dying, just flecks of life flaking away, from the time we’re born to the time we die?’ Seleb Mas felt the pangs of death’s proximity after his mother’s passing. The skin on his face no longer felt young, his hands looked older, his body more wrinkled and flabby than ever. At this he realised that, with the nearness of death, the whole world comes closer. Seleb tested his hypothesis neatly; he stared into the bathroom mirror and jabbed at his cheeks, feeling the loose skin on his finger-tips. He concluded that the vividness of the image of his slack skin slowly rebounding with each prod was enough to prove this. The world had become closer; he had stared into the mirror and it had shown him that life was speeding up. His cadaveric shell was in the process of discolouration, the skin was in degradation, he was being buried under time.

In his panic he left the toilets and ordered another drink. He drank that alone, rested against the bar, and then ordered himself another. For most of his life he had never really consumed alcohol. He would remember its bitter taste whenever someone asked if he wanted one, and, instead of relenting, would often find some curious excuse to pass it up. Now, with his mother gone and with the funeral out of the way, he suddenly found reason to drink; perhaps he even wanted to taste this bitterness, to have it on his tongue. The ale tickled his throat and hung on the end of his moustache, he licked it off and giggled into the glass. The bitterness stung initially, but the taste grew more familiar and accepting with each gulp. Upon drinking the second pint he felt an odd lightness in his stomach which found a partner in his head. This lightness felt almost new to him, sure he had felt drunkenness before, but it had been so long ago he couldn’t quite tell if the memory was real or not - like all things, Seleb thought, once so great a distance between the event’s occurrence and the present date has passed, one can hardly begin to know the truth of the matter. So with his body enjoying itself so much in this new childish state, he decided to try another to see if it would, perhaps, make him feel better - of course ‘better’ used here, would not be exact to describe Seleb’s psychological disposition. What he knew was true were certain rather trite facts regarding his mother, but he could hardly say that he really knew his mother. She was a woman and like all women, in fact like all people, she was aloof to him. He could not entirely bring himself to know other people, and despite living with his mother for so many years he could not really know her either. And so perhaps, what ‘better’ would mean to Seleb, was that in some way such a lightness would bring him to her: to finally know his mother, in some small or interesting way.

At nine thirty, and with one final drink drank, he left the pub and sauntered out into the darkening June evening. Although the blue sky was still hanging around, the sun was dripping down over pastoral hedgerows, wet and dry both at once, and was quickening towards dusk. Time was running away. Seleb pottered off down the lane, past the last few houses at the edge of the village, and continued onto the narrow road in the falling light. It would only be another few minutes until he reached his house. He filled that time in contemplation: he thought of his mother alone on that last night, her whole eighty-nine years soon to be a dream left behind her, imagining what he thought she would imagine; her only child, the father long dead, the many countries she had visited, her career, moments crystallised in memory; her first love? Her wedding? Childhood memories of truancy, of having her parents reprimanded by the school master, of disappointing her dad? He didn’t know. He didn’t know whether these were real or not. He asked himself if they weren’t just illusions.? He thought he had heard of these occasions somewhere in his distant past. But were they not just some part of a narrative that only meant something to Seleb and to no one else but him, as if he himself invented them? That could be it.To compare it, he picked apart his own mysterious life; his own child, his ex-wife, his farm (well, his father’s farm). All of this as much an illusion as anyone else’s cryptic existence. He thought of his child again, a girl, now in her thirties. He tried to attach significance to moments in her life that somehow could be linked back to him, but his memory was too loose and disparate. Thinly constructed memories rushed in and out of his consciousness, bits of childhood and intermittent conversations appeared, yet his search was in vain. He could picture her face and once or twice distant memories came closer, but he couldn’t grasp hold of them. He thought to himself that this was unusual, significant, almost, in its nature, for he could often find some old memory that would dig its roots in, somewhere deep inside of him. Presently such a lightness had uprooted him, he was now a dog with no master, detached from the reality of the everyday. As his mind pondered the day itself he thought about the few people congregated at the funeral and realised that these people connected him to his mother, that there were indeed friends, relatives, family, that those were tangible, functioning people, and that that experience wasn’t the fungible dispensation of some idiosyncratic dreaming. It was the real thing. Seleb Mas must have been connected to people at some point. Then he reflected again. His wife had left him - understandably, he thought, not because she had got some more attractive offer, but because of some quality of his own - and his daughter had become distant too, simply because he wasn’t there. He thought again, he simply was never fully there. He repeated it to himself again and again, to try and make it stick, to give some reality to the words. How could he offer her any of the quantities of love and happiness that people require when he couldn’t even provide it to himself?

He ran his finger across his neighbour’s fence giving each pole a long, thick thwack,  and letting that finger accumulate enough spring to rebound upon the next pole, one after the other resounding joyously. As he reached the last post he turned to face the fence that opened to the path as it wittered down to his front door.  He stood for a moment and recognised that the walk had seem a kind of blur to him,where had the time gone? Feeling grainy and clouded over he took one long look over the farm cottage: he had always lived here, on the farm, even when married, even after his father died when he became more of a burden on his mother than before - what with her having to look after him more than he after her. His marriage was obviously strained; in reality he had no certain idea as to why she married him; his aloofness, he thought, it must be that. Perhaps some people find it alluring. To be so disconnected all the time. Assuredly some one could enjoy being with that, it might even be considered an aid to romance. Yet, he could not remember; just a vague flicker of light stained his impression of that dim time. He reckoned it was the isolation that did it - being so detached always made him forget, and always being detached had wrenched apart the real from the fantasy. Right now he felt positively gnomic, his mind floating on a cloud, yet his senses confirmed that the ground was still there, that the fence was still there, that gate was still there. Seleb pushed open the gate and walked down the steps towards the farm cottage. He noticed that there were flowers by the front door, he thought that it was probably his daughter.

He had enjoyed, in his time, an estranged relationship with his daughter. Before his mother died he had not spoken to her for at least a year, and now today he had spoken to her only sparingly. It wasn’t, he felt, because he had nothing to say to her, only that he did not know how to say it. He had never known how to say things; he liked her enough, thought that she was a good person, that she would love him despite himself. But that, that was just part of what it was to be Seleb. This problem, this deficiency, had been with him throughout his life, though more pronounced since his divorce, and had been the main factor in his aloofness. Sure he was aloof before, but now it seemed to drive this alienated sense of being just as much as his alienation drove his aloofness. And so relationships had become strained, he rarely spoke to people now, and would spend most of his time in the drawing room reading his father’s books and not thinking beyond himself. His mother had long since contracted out the farm work and so now his own real priority, if he thought about it as a priority at all, was on keeping above a minimum level of subsistence for himself. The rest, he thought, would take care of itself.

Today, as he had stood in the face of death, he had become consumed by a new reality. Where previously only subsistence caused worry, now the present seemed fraught too. With his memories of the past so cloudy, it smelt uneasily like the end of a long, half-remembered narrative. The strings of the pasts now so faint and unclear were no longer held in the present, but had been severed at some point earlier that day, causing his troubled mind to feel incredibly laden and heavy. With that, he thought of a calendar with each day an event unfolding its mystery, the blank box being slowly filled, but whereas before he might have conceived of events of the past retaining some of their significance, now everything was a blank space - past and present. Worse, the events of the past had actually faded from view entirely. The difficulties of his life, the aching boredom of his own loneliness, had now come to a perfect fruition. He had always felt a sense of grand meaningless; that he felt within himself a sort of ethereal worthlessness like that of a ghost lost between worlds, stinking in purgatory, and now he knew the truth of it. His was the life of an empty calendar, simply counting time, not events, nor even memories, but like a clock uniformly marking out numeric figures. One day the clock would tick and his body would drop dead and he would no longer exist. From one second to the next; from birth to death. With nothing in-between. But what of the story?

He remembered some scattered thought in a book: ”The last man is the fatal consumer of time, eating it up and erasing the past. His mantra becomes the last philosophical declaration: it’s all meaningless; it was so and is ever thus."

Seleb opened the gate and walked down the steps towards the farm-house with the sun now descending behind its roof. He picked up the flowers and read the message: “Dear Seleb, I’m sorry for your loss. Samly, x.” t was his daughter, in his current state he smiled tentatively and caressed the flowers, putting them back down on by the flower bed, still in their wrapping. Opening the door Seleb made for the front room, he sat down on the sofa, its warmth still retained from the sunlight piercing the window at the back end of the living room. He looked around and felt a certain sort of comfort, a homeliness that was casual and easy. But after a few minutes staring blankly towards the fireplace something disturbed him. He noticed that, by the television, his mother’s mug sat on a placemat. He was sure that he had not put it there. He stood up and made his way over to the television. The light was now dimming quite rapidly, turning the room a greyish blue. He picked up the mug and noticed that it had been used, a residue of tea remained at the bottom and still warm.In a panic Seleb ran to the back door, his short, stubby legs making speed difficult. He checked the door, noting that it was still locked and then made for the adjacent kitchen. He felt the kettle, it was still warm too. He moved from the kitchen to the drawing room and checked the windows. Everything was locked and had remained in the same state as he had left it this morning. Thinking that he had heard some noise from upstairs he pushed his way through the drawing room to the hallway door, opened it and peered up the stairwell. He could see nothing. He then made his way up the stairs to the landing. By this time the light had almost completely gone, the sun now far below the hills on the other side of the valley. On the landing he walked into the separate bedrooms opening and shutting wardrobes and closets, peering out of windows, checking for intruders. The final room, the last room on the corridor, was his mothers, it had remained closed since her death - he had found no reason to enter it. He walked in and took to undertaking the peremptory checks before he made his way to the window. He found himself looking into the darkness for a few minutes in reflective repose. He wondered what it would feel like for her to die. It had been on this very bed, the one directly behind him. She had quietly found death in the night, passed peacefully in her sleep. But what would be it be like for the brain to just shut off? Would she have known? Did her body not give her some warning signs, some way of telling her that the light will remain no longer? He imagined how that might have happened, like a clock tick-tocking until it decided to sound no longer. Her regulatory heart beats monitoring her lifeline, and then nothing. But in some way, perhaps it was more like a process, with each stage a system that slowly drops off or declines until the whole thing cannot retain its basic functions and just has to stop with it. A machine that, with dates and times set for the shut-off of certains programmes, finally ends the last programme in a controlled and measured way, perhaps known in advance. ‘How could she not know her time of death?’ Seleb thought. That last day she must have felt something; his last words to her he couldn’t remember - or could he? Didn’t she tell him that he was supposed to do something for her? Hadn’t he replied that he already had plans, that he had no time? Was that the day before she died? He found this train of thought confusing. He wondered whether she had given him a clue, that whatever task it was was directly related to her passing.

He turned from the window and looked over to the double-bed, the duvet was rolled back slightly and the pillows were indented. He reached over with his hand, running it across the pillow, and was sure he could feel some heat there. With a sense of alarm he moved round the edge of the bed so that he could get closer, so that he could feel the heat. As he got to the other side he noticed more ripples along the corner of the duvet, he felt that someone had been here, and without thinking he climbed under the duvet and lay in the indentations. With the cover over him all was dark, no one was here but he swore he had felt a palpable heat. It was under the covers that he heard another noise. Something scuttling down the stairs, rattling the bannisters and making a hollow, dense noise when it reached the bottom. Now, he thought, he had definitely heard something. He pulled back the duvet over his round, balloon like head, the thin wisps of hair brushed back,  the grey, silver-flecked beard now revealed. As he swung his legs out of the bed his eyes caught another curious mark - in the corner, on the small pine chest that her mother would usually lay her clothes out on for wearing the next day, a worn dress, cardigan and a pair of shoes were now sitting. They were jumbled up in a pile and Seleb thought, they looked curiously suitable for a funeral. Perhaps, he idly thought, they might be his daughters, but she doesn’t have a key for the house, and these were not the clothes that she was wearing. He noticed that one of the draws on the cabinet next to the chest was slightly open, and pulling it he saw that many of the cardigans inside had been unfolded or pushed to the side. Then the noise again, a closing door this time. The living room door?, he thought. He was certain that he had left it unopened. He exited the room and went back to the stairwell.

Standing at the top of the stairwell he tried to work out the journey that this phantom had took; it must have come down the stairs, took a left and dived into the living room, closing the door behind it. Mustering up the courage he convinced himself to follow the noise, and slowly and cautiously walked down the steps. He noticed that the door was closed, and felt assured that it was this door that had been closed. At the bottom of the stairwell he held guardedly to the banister, pricking his ears to any unnatural sounds. None came, he had to take his move. He walked towards the door, his shoed feet pressing down as lightly as possible, arching up onto his toes to avoid any loud steps, and with an arm outstretched he carefully took hold of the handle. Positioning himself steadily behind the door he firmly turned the handle and opened it, feet clamped into the carpet, ready to see what was lurking beyond. The door opened. The room was dark, but the moonlight had thrown some shadows on the back wall. He reached with his hand to flick the light switch and, upon doing so, jumped back. The room appeared empty, but this scared him further. He walked in, now more curious to end this charade. The whole room was lit-up, he walked around it tentatively making sure that all the hidden areas were checked. No phantoms here. There was only one door to the living room and he was sure that it was this room where the slamming noise had come from. In his bewilderment he sat down on the settee with a slump.

Seleb felt drunk. His light-headedness had been the cause of all this, he reflected. The noises, the mug, the clothes, it was probably just him hearing things, or even, in this state, forgetting about everything he had done this morning, the mug, the clothes, all now a dream. ‘The whole thing is a farce’, he said to himself. ‘It was a joke’, laid out by himself, just to confuse himself, to make him feel like she was still around. The mug, the clothes, the warm bed. Didn’t he just want her to be around looking after him. Now more than ever it would be a comfort for him to have her around, and if that couldn’t happen than this sort of simple trick would easily confuse him, would easily deceive him into believing otherwise. Perhaps he had done this all week, with the sort of careful precision of a man intent on capturing his dream, except that today it appeared that the drink had jolted his consciousness into a state of disbelief, forcing him to disregard the curious parallel universe he had created for himself and shut himself out of it. But then again, he thought, can I really account for what I’ve done in this life?

At this the house seemed to lurch, creaking and shaking wildly before dying down after a few seconds. It sounded again, though heavier this time, wheezing and spluttering, coughing and choking. The walls of the house seemed to sway slightly, the place-mats shook, the television rocked. From his redoubt on the sofa he could see the house retching in tubercular fits, violent and uncontrollable. Seleb grabbed a pillow from behind him and wrapped it tightly around his head before ploughing his shoulders into the arm of the sofa and pulling his knees up to his waist. He lay there for some seconds, counting the giant heartbeats of this aged house until, after one last lengthy cough, a single note tremoloed into a sunken murmur and faded away to blank in-existence. Seleb kept the pillow wrapped around him and stayed there, a million thoughts clouding his mind. He felt like he couldn’t comprehend the curious brutal death that the house had just undergone, he didn’t want to comprehend it, didn’t want to address it. He stayed there passively, still as if he were sleeping, waiting for it all the return to normality. He waited and waited, until at last he felt ready to take it all in. After nearly thirty minutes he moved back to an upright position, returned the pillow to its rightful place and opened his once closed eyes. He felt strangely clear-headed, more sure of himself, more certain, than he had been for a long time. Clarity reigned. And then a strange voice made itself heard from the corner of the room.

“I thought you’d never get up”, it said. He look around, it was his mother. “It is good to see you again my sweet little boy”; he kept staring directly at her, transfixed. “How was the funeral this morning? I do hope there were some nice people there. It would terrible if I didn’t get a nice send-off, what with all I’ve done for the community. I headed the committee for the fete for fifteen years running, what kind of send-off would it be if no-one showed up…. No, it must have been a packed church. Seleb.! Answer me, Seleb.” Her voice ranged from high to low as her sentences ran into each other, partly for emphasis, but partly, Seleb had always thought, because she didn’t know where her sentence would go next. It was a surprise to her, he imagined, and she wasn’t heartless enough to let it be too much of a surprise for her audience. Seleb’s mother stood before him, white in the face, but dressed in a neat cardigan and dress combination that complimented her age and the shlock of grey hair, curled and wirey, that sat upon her head.

Seleb mumbled, “I… I…”, he couldn’t get the words from his throat. Instead, like a baby, merely stared and shook, both consciously and unconsciously, at the woman standing in front of him. She repeated her original question, “How was the funeral?” Seleb still remained mute. “I’m serious Seleb, I want to know, I don’t want to hear that I’ve wasted all that effort. Did anyone at all turn up? What about your daughter? She must have come….” Again her voice paraded circuitously around the pitches, tailing off as she ran out of steam. “I’ve come back to ask you something Seleb, that’s what I’m really doing, but it would be nice if you could tell me how it went. Oh, how rude of me, I haven’t even asked how you are. Are you ok Seleb?”

Seleb muttered back a garbled “I’m fine”, the words still stuck somewhere in his larynx. He pressed on, his mind growing stronger, drawing thoughts into words, until he fumbled a pithy “What are you doing here?” from his mouth. 

“What am I doing here?” His mother said. “It’s still my house, isn’t it?” She stood resolute, waiting for a reply. 

“I mean, you’re not really here though are you?” Is all he could say. 

“Well, if I’m not really here then what am I doing talking to you? I wouldn’t be able to speak to you if I wasn’t here, speaking to you.” 

“I don’t understand.” He rubbed his face with his hands, ran them through his hair and pulled at the ends. “You must just be in my head. That’s it isn’t it? It’s all in my head,” said Seleb. He then qualified this thought, muttering "I really have drank a lot.”

“So, Seleb,” his mother said, “how many people turned up today?” 

Normalising to the situation he remarked “about twenty or thirty. I think you would have been pleased.”

His mother, still standing, her body strong and purposeful, transformed her face from one of leisure to a more spiked and immutable pose. “I have something important for you to do for me. One last thing. I wanted you to do it before I left but, I suspect that you weren’t feeling up to it then. I’ve been around for the last few days and I’ve noticed you slide evermore inwardly. I was always disappointed that you hadn’t made more of yourself, Seleb, but I couldn’t blame you. I know that you are not the same as everyone else. You count yourself different among others” Seleb gave a salutary nod at this remark, all too aware that she was right. “It’s time you did something for someone else.” Seleb’s mother then walked over to the fireplace, grabbed the old high-backed chair that rested next to it and brought it over to the sofa, beside Seleb. “You’ve always been dear to me Seleb. You’re my only son. So I entrust you to do the right thing and help me, now that I’m gone.” Again, Seleb nodded acceptingly. “There is a letter among the my files in the filing-cabinet in the drawing room. It’s right at the top. It’s addressed to your Uncle.It’s very important that you get it to him. He needs it desperately. I would love to tell you what it contains, but to be honest its rather difficult to explain, in any case I'm sure he’ll be able to tell you what its about. He needs it right away. So leave tomorrow morning. Please Seleb, don’t forget.”

Seleb looked at his mother, his mind was running a number of half-remembered questions, things that he had thought about since she died, as well as trying to understand what his mother was telling him. In desperation he coughed and merely said “Yes mother.” “Thank you Seleb. I’ve missed you since I’ve been gone, although truth be told, I missed you when you were alive. You were almost a ghost, what little I heard of you.” And then with her hand stretched out to him she stroked the side of his face. A coldness went through him. “I love you,” she said.

Seleb woke up to the light coming through the windows, the sun piercing in and pricking him to consciousness. He looked at the clock on the wall, it read quarter past 6. He got up slowly from the sofa, warmed by the heated rays, and stood up aching. His head ached too, he rub his cheeks and and forehead with his hands. He couldn’t remember coming in last night. He couldn’t remember why he had woken up on the sofa. The narrative was obscured. He walked to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of cold water and drank it down in one. Then he walked through the kitchen into the drawing room, with its large solid oak table, the bookshelf in one corner, and aged computer on a desk in the other, and there in front of him a thick, steel filing cabinet. He had a curious urge to go over to it. He pulled open the top draw and lying there on a pile of letters, an envelope. Written in black marker was the name Pehn Coldee. No address, just the name. He picked up the envelope and flipped it over. He ran his fingers across the fold, the seal was already closed, a film of sellotape covered the tip. He felt compelled towards it, but any articulation on its purpose did not become clear. Yet, he knew it meant something. Not knowing why he left the drawing room and entered the hall, put on his jacket, fastened his shoes and opened the front door. With envelope in hand he walked out onto the doorstep, a ghost silhouetted in the sunlight, looked down at the wrapped flowers now left caught up among the roses, and stepped cautiously beyond the gate and onto the road.

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

In a Time of Loneliness

From the same collection of poetry as previously, i.e. 'Revelry, again' (unpublished). This poem, a moment of reflection on the urban landscape that surrounds me, kind of relishes in the bleak affection of the place. Pallid, cold, unloving, yet charming in being so. 

And there my home like Hester hides Protruding from the flank of this flayed and Leathered land. Hand beaten, dog-eared peninsula. But my home: strict topography, vertical axis; medulla: Fixed-point framework. Fixed frame windows and little Russet coloured entranceways demarc our outpost Upon the most vertiginous of lands, where tidal sands Run up and down, exposed to nature's whimsy. I like that man has made his mark in such victorious, Sweeping gestures. That geometry, like a fist, Has planted itself firmly in a bind, a lover's tryst.

And in a time of loneliness, I mean those cold, affronted Apartment blocks; mid-seventies built brick and Carton cream facades on semi-detached houses, Half-lived and mostly unloved; wide roads, steep Curbs, incomplete malls that urban designers tacked on But in haste, regretted. That loneliness served up and Belched out by baked-in-the-tin ideas; it is that loneliness That in its time comes, untroubled, and crawls in to bed. Curiously, starved here, loneliness is denied in the good idea, Where whitewashed walls meet solid lines, where Geometry blurs nature's hold, and man comes solid After all.

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

In the garden

So this is strange. A curious prose poem of unfathomable origin. Unknown to me it has swung itself around and now stares me straight in the face. I think I must have written it in a dream. Enjoy, readers.

In the garden and the snaking smoke pearls up, Great plumes hanging from the trees in a pall That pikes up and hooks itself between the leaves Curling in porticos, oh and I don’t know, the waves All reaching out, its curious face letching at me, Looking back and peering at me, unbearably.

In the garden and the smoke is a vertical white shaft Blocking out a stretch of sky and the low-slung sun too. There’s a yellow stitch that runs through the smoke, It’s there in the seam, delicately sewn from moisture Collected in the conifer. But around the fire Thompson Growls. The yellow smoke, he fumes, is tearing at his lungs. He’s firing missives and catching notes on tape, layering Undone fragments into bearable order. The smoke still pierces Down upon me, and I can’t look, it’s face unbearably close. Where the yellow has now blended with the papal white the Furtive features, beady little eyes, wretched skin, horrid taut Smile, all cement for a while and the effect is worse than before.

In the garden and the snaking smoke pearls up, But the unbearable, brackish thing is causing such a din, And what was once white is now darkening and unfolding, A cloud rolls in, the sun dines, the rain tip-taps onto the bench Before launching a sudden storm. A look on Thompson’s face aligns, With the crooked and troubling smile of the cloud and the sudden storm becomes Alive wrestling the stricken air for space in which to permeate and loudly become louder.

And Thompson gets up with a swipe, flinging Smoke filled air into singing rain and optimistically Dispelling the tension as the storm concentrates And I watch the smoke dissipate in the rain.

In the garden and the drenched fire dines On the few scraps of flames left, washed Good and proper, rinsed and wetted, until It’s had its fill and rests. The rain’s gone. The night now.

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

Louis-Ferdinand Celine - Voyage au bout de la nuit

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

I waited at the station

I waited at the station, inspired by more a reflexive, conversation, vernacular approach, a little like spoken word song. Then take that and add some thoughts about the nature of mankind and how she waits for the eternal train, seemingly forever. Again, themes of boredom, apathy, anxiety, the human psyche.

I waited at the station. I waited at the station. I waited at the restaurant. I held the ticket aloft. I fell about laughing. In the time before the clock calls, the waiter comes and brings the soup, And we long for distance covered. The waiter brings the soup and we long for the hand to sound the bell, to motion for us to come and ride away in distances greater than we have known.

I waited at the station. I waited in the hallway. I held the ticket aloft, Clutching the crumpled receipt. I saw Thompson there, I saw Mallory there. I knew that they must have travelled far, But they stood. for a while Mallory sat with me, talking to me. When the clocks count back to before the ticket, before Thompson, before Mallory, before impermeable law sculpted mind, When we stood alone under the starry skies, Was it in beneath our skin? Or alive under the eyes of a millennia of crawling nights. I looked from Mallory to Thompson, and then back again: ‘So the beauty of life is in the distance covered And not the deeds of men, of women, of civilisations?’

I waited at the station. I waited in the line. I looked up at what Hardwick left us, And wondered wearily through time, To clog history with persons, with indiscriminate Weights of joyless mind, and time, and waited To feel for that last fleeting second as if the world, And everything that rushed through it, waited for me.

I waited and I waited, and I waited in line.

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

It's Dark on Death Row

An ode to things I cannot know extant and full-blooded, but only through a processual engagement with reality. A layering up of things known, unknown and re-known, of memes and stereotypes and patterns and poesy, and the life of things as qualia and sense and the what-it-is of experience. In all the face-in-the-dirt of reality, the very dynamic of existence. 

Boredom is my nighttime and I chew the ruddy bit. In the summertime, and the ocean drive Becomes alive, a life to own a wasted night, A tool to own, the boredom comes, Alone a waiting sun alone, a night, Through mountainous terrain, dry and desert like, To wrap a mountain, a valley, the whole expanse, And rest at night, alone, to watch, to watch boredom and visit night.

Oh Thompson, Oh Mallory, Oh timeless sea-farer! Pacific ocean road, A23, hugging me, and valleys too, A river, the hill-top waves silhouette the city sky, And I only felt the pattern of life’s endless cry In the moments between then and now, again, alone at night. Between them, the wild unnatural cry of endless passers-by. The ships go boldly towards the lowering evening. And I, at night, alone. A song of boredom sung, and song of boredom sung alone.

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

Death of British Libraries

A poem on the boundless length of human knowledge, the inestimable mass of things to know that can't be known and the knower's lot thrown in to who know's what and all that's left to be known or thrown or shown to all who know and live low and humble. 

Death of British Libraries:

The old institutions lay in tatters, "A fine mess" history's men will say, A British library, repository of important matters, Now reclined and died today.

I stood up away from the readers’ light, To see the shelves lined with untouched data, To note the unknown author’s plight, And the face of death’s creator.

A hundred thousand unread books, A million volumes left to rot. I wait and watch the philistine crooks Take the library master’s lot.

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

Poetzee in terminus.

Lucy Marsenden could feel the wood cold on her feet, she could feel the pressure generated by her body weight pushing down upon the balanced chair, two of its own feet left dangling in the air, and with fear and desperation she held on; the cord had tightened around her neck and had begun to dig itself into the skin making it hard for her to breath; as she contemplated the last moments before death she heard herself say “in eons past a breathing creature stood, ungainly from the sea to beaten rocks, where history traced its ancient brood, in primal seas and lands anew…”

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

draft 1#

Preface:

The first man and the last man act in sympathy. Their lives run parallel, yet they are cut off by millenia. The first man, of course, was so and is ever thus, his portrait spans thousands of years and his ego lives on in the faint memory traces of the human psyche. But just as the last man knows the indifference of a destiny unbounded, so the first man is touched by the indifference of all that has come before. The last man pays a certain sort of homage to the first in that respect. They will, but are unwilling. In sympathy their most oblique moves are reduced to biology, their most outward excesses, it can be said, are nothing more than physical processes of actions imprinted on them in a genealogy. They are unlike you or I, for they are in most respects truly free of the taint of humanity; their destinys’ being almost entirely out of synch with that prevailing cultural imperative that is the mark of man, viz., one must follow in sequence to those that have gone before. Seleb Mas, the protagonist of this tale, marks the disarticulation of that sequence, acting in his part as the last man. In this story Seleb loses his mother and comes to adopt that curious unknown future that is the mark of the last man. Having been free from the life that others wished upon him, not through courage but by an insouciance of feeling, Seleb has become a wanderer and his detached reality has now, with his mother’s death, become at once more real and yet less real.

‘

Body:

Are we all dying, just flecks of life flaking away, from the time we’re born to the time we die?’ Seleb Mas felt the pangs of death’s proximity after his mother’s passing. The skin on his face no longer felt young, his hands looked older, his body more wrinkled and flabby than ever. At this he realised that, with the nearness of death, the whole world comes closer. Seleb tested his hypothesis neatly; he stared into the bathroom mirror and jabbed at his cheeks, feeling the loose skin on his finger-tips. He concluded that the vividness of the image of his slack skin slowly rebounding with each prod was enough to prove this. The world had become closer; he had stared into the mirror and it had shown him that life was speeding up. His cadaveric shell was in the process of discolouration, the skin was in degradation, he was being buried under time.

In his panic he left the toilets and ordered another drink. He drank that alone, rested against the bar, and then ordered himself another. For most of his life he had never really consumed alcohol. He would remember its bitter taste whenever someone asked if he wanted one, and, instead of relenting, would often find some curious excuse to pass it up. Now, with his mother gone and with the funeral out of the way, he suddenly found reason to drink; perhaps he even wanted to taste this bitterness, to have it on his tongue, and so, on a whim, had made his way to the local pub. The ale tickled his throat and hung on the end of his moustache, he licked it off and giggled into the glass. The bitterness stung initially, but the taste grew more familiar and accepting with each gulp. Upon drinking the second pint he felt an odd lightness in his stomach which found a partner in his head. This lightness felt almost new to him, sure he had been drunk a few times before, but it had been so long ago he couldn’t quite tell if the memory was real or not - like all things, Seleb thought, once so great a distance between the event’s occurrence and the present date has passed, one can hardly begin to know the truth of the matter. So with his body enjoying itself so much in this new childish state, he decided to try another to see if it would, perhaps, make him feel better - of course ‘better’ used here, would not be exact to describe Seleb’s psychological disposition. What he knew was true were certain rather trite facts regarding his mother, but he could hardly say that he really knew his mother. She was a woman and like all women, in fact like all people, she was aloof to him. He could not entirely bring himself to know other people, and despite living with his mother for so many years he could not really know her either. And so perhaps, what ‘better’ would mean to Seleb, was that in some way such a lightness would bring him to her: to finally know his mother, in some small or interesting way.

At nine thirty, and with one final drink drank, he left the pub and sauntered out into the darkening June evening. Although the blue sky was still hanging around, the sun was dripping down over autumnal hedgerows, wet and dry both at once, and was quickening towards dusk. Time was running away. Seleb pottered off down the lane, past the last few houses at the edge of the village, and continued onto the narrow road in the falling light. It would only be another few minutes until he reached his house. He filled that time in contemplation: he thought of his mother alone on that last night, her whole eighty-nine years soon to be a dream left behind her, imagining what he thought she would imagine; her only child, the father long dead, the many countries she had visited, her career, or perhaps individual moments crystallised in memory; her first love? Her wedding? Childhood memories of truancy, of having her parents reprimanded by the school master, of disappointing her dad? He didn’t know. He didn’t know whether these were real or not. He asked himself if they weren’t just illusions? He thought he had heard of these occasions somewhere in his distant past. But were they not just some part of a narrative that only meant something to Seleb and to no one else but him, as if he himself invented them? That could be it. In comparison, he picked apart his own mysterious life; his own child, his ex-wife, his farm (well, his father’s farm). All of this as much an illusion as anyone else’s cryptic existence. He thought of his child again, a girl, now in her thirties. He tried to attach significance to moments in her life that somehow could be linked back to him, but his memory was too loose and disparate. Thinly constructed memories rushed in and out of his consciousness, bits of childhood and intermittent conversations appeared, yet his search was in vain. He could picture her face and once or twice distant memories came closer, but he couldn’t grasp hold of them. He thought to himself that this was unusual, significant, almost, in its nature, for he could often find some old memory that would dig its roots in, somewhere deep inside of him. Presently such a lightness had uprooted him, he was now a dog with no master, detached from the reality of the everyday. As his mind pondered the day itself he thought about the few people congregated at the funeral and realised that these people connected him to his mother, that there were indeed friends, relatives, family, that those were tangible, functioning people, and that that experience wasn’t the fungible dispensation of some idiosyncratic dreaming. It was the real thing. Seleb Mas must have been connected to people at some point. Then he reflected again. His wife had left him - understandably, he thought, not because she had got some more attractive offer, but because of some quality of his own - and his daughter had become distant too, simply because he wasn’t there. He thought again, he simply was never fully there. He repeated it to himself again and again, to try and make it stick, to give some reality to the words. How could he offer her any of the quantities of love and happiness that people require when he couldn’t even provide it to himself?

He ran his finger across his neighbour’s fence giving each pole a long, thick thwack,  and letting that finger accumulate enough spring to rebound upon the next pole, one after the other sounding in joyous ill-harmony. As he reached the last post he turned to face the fence that opened to the path as it wittered down to his front door.  He stood for a moment and recognised that the walk had seem a kind of blur to him, he suspected the pints of ale, but could it not also be this deeper, alienated feeling resonating from within. Feeling grainy and clouded over he took one long look over the farm cottage: he had always lived here, on the farm, even when married, even after his father died when he became more of a burden on his mother than before - what with her having to look after him more than he after her. His marriage was obviously strained; in reality he had no certain idea as to why she married him; his aloofness, he thought, it must be that. Perhaps some people find it alluring. To be so disconnected all the time. Assuredly some one could enjoy being with that, it might even be considered an aid to romance. Yet, he could not remember; just a vague flicker of romance stained his impression of that loving time. He reckoned it was the isolation that did it - being so detached always made him forget, and always being detached had wrenched apart the real from the fantasy. Now with the drink in him too he was positively gnomic, his mind floating on a cloud, yet his senses confirmed that the ground was still there, that the fence was still there, that gate was still there. Seleb pushed open the gate and walked down the steps towards the farm cottage. He noticed that there were flowers by the front door, he thought that it was probably his daughter.

He had enjoyed, in his time, an estranged relationship with his daughter. Before his mother died he had not spoken to her for at least a year, and now today he had spoken to her only sparingly. It wasn’t, he felt, because he had nothing to say to her, only that he did not know how to say it. He had never known how to say things; he liked her enough, thought that she was a good person, that she would love him despite himself. But that, that was just part of what it was to be Seleb. This problem, this psychology deficiency, had been with him throughout his life, though more pronounced since his divorce, and had been the main factor in his aloofness. Sure he was aloof before, but now it seemed to drive this alienated sense of being just as much as his alienation drove his aloofness. And so relationships had become strained, he rarely spoke to people now, and would spend most of his time in the drawing room reading his father’s books and not thinking beyond himself. His mother had long since contracted out the farm work and so now his own real priority, if he thought about it as a priority at all, was on keeping above a minimum level of subsistence for himself. The rest, he thought, would take care of itself.

Today, as he had stood in the face of death earlier that day, he had become consumed by a new reality. Where previously only subsistence caused worry, today, with his memories of the past so cloudy, the present smelt uneasily like the end of a long, half-remembered narrative. The strings of the pasts now so faint and unclear were no longer held in the present, but had been severed at some point earlier that day, causing his previously troubled mind to feel incredibly laden and heavy. With that, he thought of a calendar with each day an event unfolding its mystery, the blank box being slowly filled, but whereas before he might have conceived of events of the past retaining some of their significance, now everything was a blank space - past and present. Worse, the events of the past had actually faded from view entirely. The difficulties of his life, the aching boredom of his own loneliness, had now come to a perfect fruition. He had always felt a sense of grand meaningless; that he felt within himself a sort of ethereal worthlessness like that of a ghost lost between worlds, stinking in purgatory, and now he knew the truth of it. His was the life of an empty calendar, simply counting time, not events, nor even memories, but like a clock uniformly marking out spaces in time. One day the clock would tick and his body would drop dead and he would no longer exist. From one second to the next; from birth to death. With nothing in-between. But what of the story?

**The last man is the fatal consumer of time, eating it up and erasing the past. His mantra becomes the last philosophical declaration: “it’s all meaningless; it was so and is ever thus.”**

Seleb opened the gate and walked down the steps towards the farm-house with the sun now descending behind its roof. He picked up the flowers and read the message: “Dear Seleb, I know today has been hard on you, your family is here for you. I tried to call for you but you weren’t in. I’ll come back tomorrow morning with Alice. Maybe we can go for lunch somewhere? I love you, if you need me you know where I am. Sam, xxx.” It was his daughter, in his current state he smiled and caressed the flowers, putting them back down on by the flower bed, still in its wrapping. Opening the door Seleb made for the front room, he sat down on the sofa, its warmth still retained from the sunlight piercing the window at the back end of the living room. He looked around and felt a certain sort of comfort, a homeliness that was casual and easy. But after a few minutes staring blankly towards the fireplace something disturbed him. He noticed that, by the television, his mother’s mug sat on a placemat. He was sure that he had not put it there. In fact, he reflected, no one else had been inside the house in the week since his mother had passed. He stood up and made his way over to the television. The light was now dimming quite rapidly turning the room a greyish blue. He picked up the mug and noticed that it had been used, a residue of tea remained at the bottom, it was still slightly warm from use. In a panic Seleb ran to the back door, his short, stubby legs making speed difficult. He checked the door, noting that it was still locked and then made for the adjacent kitchen. He felt the kettle, it was still warm. He moved from the kitchen to the drawing room and checked the windows. Everything was locked and had remained in the same state as he had left it this morning. Thinking that he had heard some noise from upstairs he pushed his way through the drawing room to the hallway door, opened it and peered up the stairwell. He could see nothing. He then made his way up the stairs to the landing. By this time the light had almost completely gone, the sun now far below the hills on the other side of the valley. On the landing he walked into the separate bedrooms opening and shutting wardrobes and closets, peering out of windows, checking for intruders. The final room, the last room on the corridor, was his mothers, it had remained closed since her death - he had found no reason to enter it. He walked in and took to undertaking the peremptory checks before he made his way to the window. He found himself looking into the darkness for a few minutes in reflective repose. He wondered what it would feel like for her to die. It had been on this very bed, the one directly behind him. She had quietly found death in the night, passed peacefully in her sleep. But what would be it be like for the brain to just shut off? Would she have known? Did her body not give her some warning signs, some way of telling her that the light will remain no longer? He imagined how that might have happened, like a clock tick-tocking until it decided to sound no longer. Her regulatory heart beats monitoring her lifeline, and then nothing. But in some way, perhaps it was more like a process, with each stage a system that slowly drops off or declines until the whole thing cannot retain its basic functions and just has to stop with it. A machine that, with dates and times set for the shut-off of certains programmes, finally ends the last programme in a controlled and measured way, perhaps known in advance. ‘How could she not know her time of death?’ Seleb thought. That last day she must have felt something; his last words to her he couldn’t remember - or could he? Didn’t she tell him that he was supposed to do something for her? Hadn’t he replied that he already had plans, that he had no time? Was that the day before she died? He found this train of thought confusing. He wondered whether she had given him a clue, that whatever task it was was directly related to her passing.

He turned from the window and looked over to the double-bed, the duvet was rolled back slightly and the pillows were indented. He reached over with his hand, running it across the pillow, and was sure he could feel some heat there. With a sense of alarm he moved round the edge of the bed so that he could get closer, so that he could feel the heat. As he got to the other side he noticed more ripples along the corner of the duvet, he felt that someone had been here, and without thinking he climbed under the duvet and lay in the indentations. With the cover over him all was dark, no one was here but he swore he had felt a palpable heat. It was under the covers that he heard another noise. Something scuttling down the stairs, rattling the bannisters and making a hollow, dense noise when it reached the bottom. Now, he thought, he had definitely heard something. He pulled back the duvet over his round, balloon like head, the thin wisps of hair brushed back,  the grey, silver-flecked beard now revealed. As he swung his legs out of the bed his eyes caught another curious mark - in the corner, on the small pine chest that her mother would usually lay her clothes out on for wearing the next day, a worn dress, cardigan and a pair of shoes were now sitting. They were jumbled up in a pile and looked worn, in fact, Seleb thought, they looked curiously suitable for a funeral. Perhaps, he thought, they might be his daughters. But she doesn’t have a key for the house, and these were not the clothes that she was wearing. He noticed that one of the draws on the cabinet next to the chest was slightly open, and pulling it slightly he saw that many of the cardigans inside had been unfolded or pushed to the side. Then the noise again, a closing door this time. ‘The living room door?’, he thought. He was certain that he had left it unopen. He left the room and went back to the stairwell.

Standing at the top of the stairwell he tried to work out the journey that this phantom had took; it must have come down the stairs, took a left and dived into the living room, closing the door behind it. Mustering up the courage he convinced himself to follow the noise, and slowly and cautiously walked down the steps. He noticed that the door was closed, and felt assured that this was the door that had been closed. At the bottom of the stairwell he held guardedly to the banister, pricking his ears to any unnatural sounds. None came, he had to take his move. He walked towards the door, his shoed feet pressing down as lightly as possible, arching up onto his toes to avoid any loud steps, and with an arm outstretched he carefully took hold of the handle. Positioning himself steadily behind the door he firmly turned the handle and opened it, feet pressing into the carpet, ready to see what was lurking beyond. The door opened. The room was dark, but the moonlight had thrown some shadows on the back wall. He reached with his hand to flick the light switch and, upon doing so, jumped back. The room appeared empty, but this scared him further. He walked in, now more curious to end this charade. The whole room was lit-up, he walked around it tentatively making sure that all the hidden areas were checked. No phantoms here. There was only one door to the living room and he was sure that it was this room where the slamming noise had come from. In his bewilderment he sat down on the settee with a slump.

Seleb felt drunk. His light-headedness had been the cause of all this, he reflected. The noises, the mug, the clothes, it was probably just him hearing things, or even, in this state, forgetting about everything he had done this morning, the mug, the clothes, all now a dream. ‘The whole thing is a farce’, he said to himself. ‘It was a joke’, laid out by himself, just to confuse himself, to make him feel like she was still around. The mug, the clothes, the warm bed. Didn’t he just want her to be around looking after him. Now more than ever it would be a comfort for him to have her around, and if that couldn’t happen than this sort of simple trick would easily confuse him, would easily deceive him into believing otherwise. Perhaps he had done this all week, with the sort of careful precision of a man intent on capturing his dream, except that today it appeared that the drink had jolted his consciousness into a state of disbelief, forcing him to disregard the curious parallel universe he had created for himself and shut himself out of it. ‘But then again’, he thought, ‘can I really account for what I’ve done in this life?’

At this the house seemed to lurch, creaking and shaking wildly before dying down after a few seconds. It sounded again, though heavier this time, wheezing and spluttering, coughing and choking. The walls of the house seemed to sway slightly, the placemats shook, the television rocked. From his redoubt on the sofa he could see the house retching in tubercula fits, violent and uncontrollable. Seleb grabbed a pillow from behind him and wrapped it tightly around his head before ploughing his shoulders into the arm of the sofa and pulling his knees up to his waist. He lay there for some seconds, counting the giant heartbeats of this aged house until, after one last lengthy cough, a single note tremoloed into a sunken murmur and faded away to blank in-existence. Seleb kept the pillow wrapped around him and stayed there, a million thoughts clouding his mind. He felt like he couldn’t comprehend the curious brutal death that the house had just undergone, he didn’t want to comprehend it, didn’t want to address it. He stayed there passively, still as if he were sleeping, waiting for it all the return to normality. He waited and waited, until at last he felt ready to take it all in. After nearly thirty minutes he moved back to an upright position, returned the pillow to its rightful place and opened his once closed eyes. He felt strangely clear-headed, more sure of himself, more certain, than he had been for a long time. Clarity reigned once again. And then a strange voice made itself heard from the corner of the room.

“I thought you’d never get up”, it said. He look around, it was his mother. “It is good to see you again my boy”; he kept staring directly at her, transfixed. “How was the funeral this morning? I do hope there were some nice people there. It would terrible if I didn’t get a nice send-off, what with all I’ve done for the community. I headed the committee for the fete for fifteen years running, what kind of send-off would it be if no-one showed up…. No, it must have been a packed church. Seleb! Answer me, Seleb.” Her voice ranged from high to low as her sentences ran into each other, partly for emphasis, but partly, Seleb had always thought, because she didn’t know where her sentence would go next. It was a surprise to her, he imagined, and she wasn’t heartless enough to let it be too much of a surprise for her audience. Seleb’s mother stood before him, white in the face, but dressed in a neat cardigan and dress combination that complimented her age and the shlock of grey hair, curled and wirey, that sat upon her head.

Seleb mumbled, “I… I…”, he couldn’t get the words from his throat. Instead, like a baby, merely stared and shook, both consciously and unconsciously, at the woman standing in front of him. She repeated her original question, “How was the funeral?” Seleb still remained mute. “I’m serious Seleb, I want to know, I don’t want to hear that I’ve wasted all that effort. Did anyone at all turn up? What about your daughter? She must have come….” Again her voice paraded circuitously around the pitches, tailing off as she ran out of steam. “I’ve come back to ask you something Seleb, that’s what I’m really doing, but it would be nice if you could tell me how it went. Oh, how rude of me, I haven’t even asked how you are. Are you ok Seleb?”

Seleb muttered back a garbled “I’m fine”, the words still stuck somewhere in his larynx. He pressed on, his mind growing stronger, drawing thoughts into words, until he fumbled a pithy “What are you doing here?” from his mouth.

“What am I doing here?” His mother said. “It’s still my house, isn’t it?” She stood resolute, waiting for a reply.

“I mean, you’re not really here though are you?” Is all he could say.

“Well, if I’m not really here then what am I doing talking to you? I wouldn’t be able to speak to you if I wasn’t here, speaking to you.”

“I don’t understand.” He rubbed his face with his hands, ran them through his hair and pulled at the ends. “You must just be in my head. That’s it isn’t it? It’s all in my head,” said Seleb. He then qualified this thought, muttering “I really have drank.”

“So, Seleb,” his mother said, “how many people turned up today?”

Normalising to the situation he remarked “About twenty or thirty. I think you would have been pleased.”

His mother, still standing, her body strong and purposeful, transformed her face from one of leisure to a more spiked and immutable pose. “I have something important for you to do for me. One last thing. I wanted you to do it before I left but, I suspect that you weren’t feeling up to it then. I’ve been around for the last few days and I’ve noticed you slide evermore inwardly. I was always disappointed that you hadn’t made more of yourself, Seleb, but I couldn’t blame you. I know that you are not the same as everyone else. You count yourself different among others” Seleb nodded a salutary nod at this remark, all too aware that she was right. “It’s time you did something for someone else.” Seleb’s mother then walked over to the fireplace, grabbed the old high-backed chair that rested next to it and brought it over to the sofa, beside Seleb. “You’ve always been dear to me Seleb. You’re my only son. So I entrust you to do the right thing and help me, now that I’m gone.” Again, Seleb nodded acceptingly. “There is a letter among the my files in the filing-cabinet in the drawing room. It’s right at the top. It’s addressed to your Uncle, Dr. Peter Landowsky. It’s very important that you get it to him. He needs it desperately. I would love to tell you what it contains, but to be honest its rather difficult to explain, in any case I’m sure he’ll be able to tell you what its about. He needs it right away. So leave tomorrow morning. Please Seleb, don’t forget.”

Seleb looked at his mother, his mind was running a number of half-remembered questions, things that he had thought about since she died, as well as trying to understand what his mother was telling him. In desperation he coughed and merely said “Yes mother.”

“Thank you Seleb. I’ve missed you since I’ve been gone, although truth be told, I missed you when you were alive. You were almost a ghost, what little I heard of you.” And then with her hand stretched out to him she stroked the side of his face. A coldness went through him. “I love you,” she said.

Seleb woke up to the light coming through the windows, the sun piercing in and pricking him to consciousness. He looked at the clock on the wall, it read quarter past 6. He got up slowly from the sofa, warmed by the heated rays, and stood up aching. His head ached too, he rub his cheeks and and forehead with his hands. He couldn’t remember coming in last night. He couldn’t remember why he had woken up on the sofa. The narrative was obscured. He walked to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of cold water and drank it down in one. Then he walked through the kitchen into the drawing room, with its large solid oak table, the bookshelf in one corner, and aged computer on a desk in the other, and there in front of him a thick, steel filing cabinet. He had a curious urge to go over to it. He pulled open the top draw and lying there on a pile of letters, an envelope. Written in black marker was his uncle’s name “Dr Peter Landowsky”. No address, just the name. He picked up the envelope and flipped it over. He ran his fingers across the fold, the seal was already closed, a film of sellotape covered the tip. He felt compelled towards it, but any articulation on its purpose did not become clear. Yet, he knew it meant something. Not knowing why he left the drawing room and entered the hall, put on his jacket, fastened his shoes and opened the front door. With envelope in hand he walked out onto the doorstep, a ghost silhouetted in the sunlight, looked down at the wrapped flowers now left caught up among the roses, and stepped cautiously beyond the gate and onto the road.

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

The end will never come

"Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again", said Bertolt Brecht. Aye, and the crooked cycle of humanity turns round again. God, if you're listening, you're doing a terrible job. 

[journeytothecentreofthenight]

the clockwork bird

"to be honest I’m a little relieved you’re going, you can be a leetch, you know that…" Ridiculous, how could I be a leetch. Take this for example, an ode to the metronomic standards of time. Tick, tock, tick, tock… repetition… just like always. I am like the clockwork bird, counting midday flowers, only ever have I been stirred, by ancient funeral pyres, and in amongst those saddened crowds, a man who’d lost his way, standing now in covered shroud, in history’s last day, he laid himself on to the pyre and lit the spark by hand, where upon, consumed by fire, he returned back to the land.