Semiotinks - Flash Fiction

Synaesthesia

• I want to lick you all over
• Be my guest
• I said I want to… but I can’t
• Why ever not?
• There’s a part of you that forever remains apart from you
• What part? What are you talking about?
• Your shoulder blade. It’s been colonised by someone else
• The tattoo? That’s more a part of me than any other part. That… is the ultimate expression of me, who I am
• That… is your signature under another artist’s work
• Oh no no no no no. That’s all my own design. Utterly unique to me, you won’t see this in any tattooist’s window or catalogue
• Did you take the tattooist in a drawing?
• Well no. I knew what I wanted and described it to him. He sketched it out, but only to my specification
• But he still put his own vision on it. The final rendering was all his and his alone
• Not a bit of it. I determined the dimensions, the colour, every nib stroke…
• But he is the artist that has to work with the marble
• What marble?
• The marble of your body. The contour of your muscle, the grain of your skin, the flow of your veins just beneath the surface. That is the true you
• The sculpted me, yes, and I worked damn hard for this. But not as hard as you’re making me work now
• That is what I want to possess in every topographical detail. But someone else has been in that quadrant before me and planted their flag
• I’ve had other lovers, they’ve been in every ‘quadrant’ of me before you as well
• But they have relinquished you. To me. The indelible ink has not and never will
• Are you seriously expecting me to have it removed? I’m telling you, that is my own stamp of who I am
• Cogito ergo sum? 
• Say the sum of what now? 
• ‘I think therefore I am’. You credit that with this branding, somehow you link up your physical body with how you conceive yourself mentally? 
• That’s about the size of it yes
• That how you are in the world, how you think and feel with your physical body is insufficient, you have to exteriorise it, put the construction of your inner life on permanent display
• It’s not on permanent display. Most of the time it’s submerged beneath clothing
• So what’s the point of it then?
• I know it’s there. Radiating like a second heartbeat
• Precisely. Two hearts beating. Both of them yours. Mine would make it three and three’s a dissonant crowd
• It’s not a real person!
• You posited it was your golem. Your spirit at large
• What that ugly wee fellah in “Lord Of The Rings”? 
• No… It’s only the two of us get to strip you of your raiment to reveal your skin. And you have tainted it with this… doodle
• Doodle?
• Alright, this self-rendered stigmata 
• Stigmata? That’s proper over the top!
• You’re quite right of course. More like a… palimpsest. To suggest there’s something hidden underneath. When there’s actually nothing. You could have let me circumnavigate you. All of you. Through taste and smell. Mapping my version of you over time. Instead you have predetermined yourself as to what I, or any future explorer of your flesh, will discover. You have already declared your mappa incognito in the name of your own King and unfurled your standard there
• Well just don’t lick that part then, unlock the unknown parts of the rest of me
• I can’t. When I taste I see pictures. When I smell I hear sounds. Your daub interferes with all of that. If I lick it, I would only taste the granular ink, while the picture has already been filled in for me
• Just turn out the lights then. We can do it in the dark!
• I don’t have to. The darkness of your soul eclipses all light
• No Babe, come back… It’s me wants to lick you all over… 

*

Gematria

Mosaic Law forbids the application of ink to the skin (Leviticus 19:28). Were the Germans at Auschwitz aware of this proscription, seeing it as yet further tribulation to wreak on the prisoners if they thought they might be denied entry to heaven through an ink profaned body? More likely it was merely part of the Nazi bureaucratic system of processing humans. Inventories and job lots and serial numbers. Cattle brands for the human kine who emerged from the cattle trucks.

The prohibition on marking the body in any way, stems from the human form being a gift from G-d that must not be altered in any way, shape or form, for to do so would be to criticise the perfection, genius and beneficence of G-d. Or more pertinently, to downright disobey Him and turn from his righteous way. For burial, the Jewish body must be unspoiled, well as much as death can leave a body in mint condition. Of course, these bodies were not in receipt of Jewish funeral rites.

Jewish faith works in three ways. Things are truth because it is the word of G-d. They are true because through study and exegesis they can be proven to be true through human ratiocination. And finally through the gematria, whereby the mathematical values ascribed to letters of the Hebrew alphabet provide mathematical proof by ‘adding up’ to the correct answer. But stare at them as they might, the Auschwitz inmates could not make the numbers on their wrists add up to a demonstration of G-d’s love.

*

Parade

They met at the Edinburgh Tattoo, having unwittingly landed there during their European tour on the day of the military parade. They proceeded to compare their inks, the imagery telling its own story since the deafening beat of the military drums drowned out any verbal communication they might essay. As they discovered a myriad of mutualities expressed in pictograms, a love blossomed (perhaps already foretold by both having inked efflorescence, she lilies and orchids, he an hibiscus). As the soldiers marched past their faraway eyes, they were unable to see that most of these men too shared their predilection for marking the skin. Although formal dress uniforms did their best to cover up what was still seen as unsightly and ill-disciplined by the top brass, but which they had caved into permitting through the sheer preponderance among those queuing up for recruitment. While many of the soldiers’ designs involved skulls, the young lovers-to-be both eschewed such morbid imagery. Who wants to make love only to get an eyeful of memento mori plastered on your soul mate’s flesh? An indication that one day they will be snatched away from you.

*

Angelina Jolie’s Tattoo

The water buffalo pulled the harrow to prick the earth, while in its turned wake the farmer disseminated the rice seedlings. When the Khmer Rouge came, they unyoked the buffalo and attached their enemies to the harrow. They chose anyone who wore glasses, possessed books among their meagre positions hauled with them from the cities, or bore tattoos. Anything that suggested literacy which unutterably betrayed their bourgeoise nature. The buffalo stood around the fields redundant, until it too, like the bourgeois Khmer people, disappeared. The cadres said it had seized its freedom under Angkar and wandered off. We suspected they had under cover of night killed it and cut it up for a luxuriant meal denied the rest of us. 

A few of us managed to escape into the borderland mountains. We formed resistance battalions, secured hold of some guns and swore an oath to free our nation benighted by the godless. Monks had not even been put into the fields to work until they dropped, they were taken away and slaughtered from the very outset. Fortunately one had made it to the mountains with us and he was versed in the knowledge of protective tattoos. He didn’t have access to ink, so he improvised using battery fluid, mixed with the sap of some mountain tree unknown to me as a species. As long as our hearts were pure, his tattoos would deflect bullets and prevent landmines from being tripped under our feet. We couldn’t read our skin’s texts, not because we were illiterates, but because they weren’t written in Khmer but in scriptural Pali. We knew we had to trigger their magic by reciting the mantras each time we went out in the field. Neither the clean skinned Khmer Rouge nor the filthy criminal Vietnamese would stand a chance in the face of the peaceful Buddha’s loving protection of us. 

*

Blood Ink

My self-styled stylus isn’t disposed with its own reservoir of ink. Instead it relies on its incised strokes to be infilled by the upsurge of blood. My improvised fountain pen spraying the gist of me. But it’s impossible to control such red ink swell. The blood blotter smear of self. So it is only once the flow has clotted and the skin cicatrised, that such graphic calligraphy can be anatomised. The straight edge of the razor makes it hard to curlicue any flesh inscription (made worse when the unhanded side has to grave the more favoured limb, ‘favoured’ in the sense of bias, not in my affections, for I don’t favour a single cell of my body). So inevitably my chirography resembles little more than cuneiform. The Rosetta Stone of me. The medium, the chalky, cracked parchment of my skin, is the message. Can’t you decipher it you illiterates? Why, it’s not as if I hide my verbiage encased behind dust jacket sleeves. Here, I’ll re-carve it. A palimpsest whose abiding runes are imperishable, but the surface scar tissue is recast once again. I aim for a blue vein, but the ink still emerges the unsparing red of the hyper-critical inner-editor. I have no words, but I do have profuse red ink flow to share with you.

Nebenstimme - Flash Fiction

At night he composed his musical scores amid the discomposed and the decomposing. That mound of bodies heaped in the camp’s “Pathology Department”. Where the deceased were harvested for chimerical medical trials, their flesh sown for decorative ornaments to give as gifts to Nazi Frauen. Even the Germans didn’t dare enter this human tannery past sunset. For fear of ghosts. Though he took up residence there, precisely because all was unutterably still for him to pen his movements. For he couldn't concentrate in this concentration camp. To hear the music in his head, he needed to be away from the diminuendo outside. Of groans, gurgling stomachs consuming their hosts and relentless recitations of the mourners’ Kaddish. The only ghosts to be had, were the shuffling wraiths of the still living skeletons. 

Emerging from the charnel room with the dawn, he would clutch a new tune inscribed on the toilet sheets he’d solemnised from the dysentery sufferers. Dodging the sleepy sentries, he slipped his latest opus to the conductor of the camp orchestra during the shambling gathering for roll call and any unused candle tallow. Their neighbours in the file rounded on them both. 

- In this place music is an affront. Your orchestra an abomination - My friend, music lifts the spirit. It offers hope there is still beauty and refinement in the world - Modest ain't he? You’re no better than parasites. Like our Rabbis, you were only ever provided any means through the generosity of patrons, people who toiled for their money and who you cozened funds from, in the myth it would redeem their souls - Ah, good to see the art versus business dichotomy still rages on in a place where neither hold much in the way of currency - So you admit it? Besides, how can your music have anything to do with refinement, when you lock yourself up in that heinous room of all rooms to write your notes? It can only but be permeated with the benighted spirits of the departed there. Your dead muses. I bet they light your way at night, it’s their fat you use for those candles isn’t it? - No sir, absolutely not. How could something so profane be associated with the making of noble art? - You are still nothing but a ghoul - No sir, a golem. To uplift our hearts in order to conduct us into survival - To conduct us into the afterlife more like. Die Totentänze. Do you expect us to dance a muzurka as we work in the quarries? Or perhaps demand that we waltz on into the ovens to your accompaniment? A little chamber music as tribute to our three-to-a-bunk barracks? Or maybe you have written a march for our victorious host to parade triumphantly out of this camp as we overthrow our captors? - Those with art and beauty in their hearts will stand more chance of enduring through the greatest hardship than those without - Oh really, will your uplifted soul float above the gas in the chambers and preserve you pure air to breathe? - No, but it will help preserve pure air for those that come after us to breathe. To know that from such an abyss, the human spirit could still soar. 

Extra-Mural Studies - Flash Fiction

It was old-style graffiti. Before it became an art form. If you can call a canvas solely consisting of the artist’s signature, his brand, his logo, his spoor, ’art’. This was spray painting as a tool of communication. Mural messaging. Words rather than calligraphy. Plaintive or outlandish. 

Walls have always provided a surface begging inscription. Whether thrown up to keep others out, keep your own in, or just to hoist up numinous edifices inviting God in. In the atrium to God’s chamber, Jews write their messages and prayers on paper, rolling them up and inserting them into the mortar of the Wailing Wall rather than profaning it directly. The Wailing Wall, one of just four retaining walls retained. A remnant. Yet each ersatz prayer scroll mulcts a wisp of that mortar, so that at some point of critical mass of the entreaties of a people, the Wall will collapse. Not from weight, but from lack of coherence.

Closer to home is another wall, that is currently being dismantled brick by brick beneath sledgehammers brought from home. A people united. Families gleefully repatriating themselves into the bosom of loved ones not seen for a couple of generations. One side of this wall was directly graved upon by ink and the blood of those shot trying to scale it. The other was inscribed with graffiti, an expression of freedom of speech and a plaintive plea against conflict, division and injustice. After the initial flurry, I returned nightly to secrete away a couple of the bricks and add to my burgeoning collection. Only those with graffiti on, hopefully none with captioning blood. Few of the bricks were intact. Words sawn off by a hammer blow. 

Du kannst den Bruder nicht vom Bruder teilen. Es macht uns mehr entschlossen zu arbeiten, um diese Mauer zu zerreißen. Um unsere Brüder frei zu machen. (You cannot divide brother from brother. It makes us more resolved to work to tear down this wall. To set our brothers free).

I moved around the pieces in my collection. Trying to form new words from the serrated letters. Coalescing new slogans. Reminded of my toy letter bricks as a child. Though there, each brick was only stamped with a single letter per face. Multiple bricks stacked in order to construct a word. A word that could be subverted, simply but turning another face of the brick to face front. Surprising words when the edifice was read as an acrostic. But these fragments were not hewn smooth enough to sit on top of one another without cascading back down. 

I made mosaics of the bricks. Moved them around one another to form blotches of colour. My wall was spelling out the new freedoms. Or perhaps the new repressions. When a dividing wall comes down, somewhere on the earth another one goes up. I hear Mexico is to have one. And of course, the Wailing Wall has its modern accompaniment all around the biblical borders of the nation that last existed when the Wailing Wall was intact. Strange geographies. Anomalous echoes from history.

arbeit macht frei

For every wall, there always have to be wall builders. 

*

Some wall themed songs

Pink Floyd - "Another Brick In The Wall"

Mickey Dread - "Break Down The Walls" 

The Style Council - "Walls Come Tumbling Down"

Tom Robinson Band - "Up Against The Wall"

From the Berlin Wall

What have they got in common?

Apart from the geometry, what do these images all have in common?

They all feature in the flash fiction story "Overpass", one of the tales in the flash fiction collection "Extra-Curricular" out now in paperback and e-version.


The story progresses as these images, from the sedate to the sinister and the title "Overpass" is reversed by the tale's end to "Passover"

 

Available from Amazon and I-Tunes

Overpass - Flash Fiction

As the barge puttered towards the bridge, those pedestrians stood upon it waved inanely at the pilot, who steadfastly refused to acknowledge their existence in any way. 

The men found the capes and cloaks of their fancy dress inhibitive as they tried to unfurl their protest banner and attach it to the railings of the bridge over the motorway. They had neither rights, nor a sufficiently sound grasp of physics, since none had calculated that the velocity of any travelling vehicles would prohibit the drivers from being able to read the words of their message.  

Stationed in the air within the glass observation deck, he espied the luggage cart plumb bisecting beneath him on its course towards the aircraft that was destined to carry away his daughter to the other side of the world. He fell forward and braced his arm against the glass to halt his stumble. A final perpendicularity, as his body buckled into his future unbuttressed loneliness.

The three boys had been bent double as they hauled the concrete slab up the metal stairs of the overhead footbridge. They resembled Macbeth’s three witches huddled over their cauldron as they cast for their augury. But now that the slab was balanced up on the guardrail, they straightened their backs and peered over the railway tracks. The slab would foretoken an exact future for the fate of the next train to come down the line. 

The Guards watched the prisoners expressionlessly from the ramparts as they filed underneath their steel gangways towards the gas chambers. The Jewish prisoners wondered how their god could just watch impassively from heaven’s cloud gantry; how instead of passing over their marked houses and sparing them as in ancient Egypt, now he seemed to be zeroing in on those barrack huts marked with the yellow star.