Confessional - How Can Artists Confront Death in their Work?

I have two great passions in my life; being a parent and writing fiction. And I will have both snatched away from me at some point in the future (or sooner if Alzheimer's strikes at the core of me). So my passions, my loves, as with anybody's, has death and cessation at the other end of its lens.

We all die, hardly a blinding insight Marc. While that is of course true, I have been stricken with that awareness for virtually all of my life. Most people function fully because they never think of death in their daily lives, until maybe they start approaching it in their old age. Me, I think of it almost every day.

We are all exposed to death, introduced in childhood through the death of pets and grandparents. Me, I had a cat who lived until he was 23 and the first of my grandparents didn't pass until I was 18. So I wasn't prematurely exposed through the customary course of events. 

Young children with plastic imaginations are very suggestible to terrors and assaults on their body's integrity, even if they don't fully understand the ramifications. My own young son given a lesson at school on food health, including dangerous levels of salt intake, consequently went on to develop an eating disorder since he shunned food on the basis of its salt content or sell-by date under his own investigations, as his fearful imagination ran wild. I had a similar experience that instilled in me the awareness of my death and cessation at the age of 6. 

My bedroom abutted my parents' and my Dad always liked to listen to BBC Radio 4 at such a volume I could hear the BBC enunciation clearly through the bedroom walls. At about 10pm the programme he was listening too announced that some people would not be waking up from their night's sleep next morning and - here it gets a bit hazy, I think somehow the actual words got conflated with my own childish imagination - this was because they would have turned into dragons. Terrified of the possibility of never waking up again, I kept myself awake through the rest of the night. Thereby not only catalysing a preternatural awareness of death, but also laying the seeds for a lifetime of insomnia. After all, if you're terrified of surrendering to the great unconsciousness that is death, that also may make it a might trickier to surrender to it even on a temporary basis in the form of the unconsciousness of sleep. 

So I was, and have always been terrified of death. Just to be clear, not the act of passing itself which to me is a minor detail no matter how agonising or supported by loved ones gathered around. (Both of which were the case with the death of my beloved grandmother, as the congestion in her lungs led her to two hours of agitated motion around her hospital bed trying to free up her breathing, wrenching her hands from ours in her distress). No, I'm talking about the eternal cessation, unconsciousness and dreamless sleep that is death's annihilation of the self. *

So how does this black hole awaiting me and all of us actually manifest itself in my daily life? Well it's not every minute of every day as that would clearly reduce me to a gibbering wreck. But I would say the awareness strikes me at least once a day, sometimes more. It can be simply looking at my son and feeling crushed that we will be parted permanently, or something on TV, or even no particularly conscious prompt at all, it just comes upon me. And such an awareness drags you out of your immediate state of consciousness and into another, overwhelming one that blots out all other thought and offers only a single emotion - terror. 

The only way to combat it for me, is to counter blot it out. Not by thinking nice things like flowers or gambolling lambs since they too will inevitably succumb to death, but by sort of overloading my brain with an internally generated white noise. I say white noise because it is not constructed of any rational thoughts, but literally a buzzing interference (are these brainwaves I have no idea?). There is no telling how long these are required to go on for in order to tamp back down the mortal thoughts, but somehow the terror subsides. Using one void to efface another. In such a state, I am fit for nothing else. 

So much for the distinct incidences of mortal awareness. It also pervades so much (if not everything) about my life as a whole. On a mundane level, I don't fly, am not particularly drawn to speed or other activities where your feet leave the ground. Yes I know you can get hit by a car when crossing the road, but then my optician died in a skiing accident... Though I have always written about death a lot in my work, yet as I wax on into my 50's I have found this year to be dominated by writing stories about ageing, infirmity and death. If Picasso had blue and red periods, I seem to be in a literary equivalent, my death period. (It is only interrupted by a body of stories about the wider politics of the world, which the way things are heading represents a global scale of extinction, so form a parallel version in many ways). 

So far so depressing right? I may even be a depressive (there is a family history of quite a spectrum of mental illness and mental conditions). We'll get to the contrary in a moment and even throw in a bit of fun. But if I am a depressive, I must be a reasonably high functioning one, almost never missing a day's work through sickness and having turned out 10 books and been the main child rearer to my twins, including coaching their youth football team for 3 years. Suicide is not an option for me, because I am so terrified of death I could never hasten my appointment with it. I don't mean this flippantly, I cleaned my father's blood off the kitchen floor after his serious suicide attempt that left him hospitalised and strapped to his bed to prevent him repeating the act... 

How do I cope with my own internal terror? Largely through comedy and a sense of the absurd. When the terror of death is your ultimate emotional scalar, most other anxieties abounding in life seem insignificant and indeed I remain imperturbable in the face of most of life's foibles & travails. I can go a stage further, I can derive the absurd about them. I am not ashamed to say that most things we human beings get aerated about I find amusing, including those of my own doing. I can defang most things in life and derive a measure of mental calm accordingly. It is the counterbalance to the deep core of terror that lies just beneath.

However there is also a serious side to absurdity. As stated above, the human condition is absurd: whatever relationships you form and whatever you build or achieve materially, will be sundered from you. Maybe that's more tragic than absurd, but Samuel Beckett seemed to find it the latter. (Indeed tragedy derives from hubris, that is human beings daring to get above themselves and approach the semi-divine, destined to failure because humans can never aspire to the immortal). 

I also find it absurd that more people are not as terrified of death on a daily basis as I am. It should pervade each of us as per our human condition. Now I understand fully why this isn't the case, because it would utterly impair daily functioning. Not to do so is actually a pretty good coping mechanism. But the downside of this is that we are largely left both unprepared and unreconciled (except for the fortunate few of deep faith or those blessed by a 'happy death') for our own demise (or the death of a close loved one). And also we don't necessarily work back from the end point to consider what the purpose/meaning (if any) of life is. Death really ought to preface and put all the rest of life into context. 

So I in addition to the outburst of white noise moments, I have also erected a system of mirrors that keep conceptualisation of death reasonably remote; I write about it and I derive humour around the margins of what it leaves us in life. And contrary to the idea of possibly being depressive, I actually enjoy life and am amused by it. But as I grow old, I seem to have reached a stage where these refractions are unravelling. As you notice slight changes in the body's elasticity, it's harder to keep awareness of sometime impending death at bay. Will my sense of humour continue to immure me against a slowly failing body? I doubt it. You realise it is just a form of misdirection, of your own conscious thought.

I am proud of everything I've written, but literature while it can move us, always retains an intellectual element; that of the material having to be ordered into a narrative, word choice, the rules of grammar, editing etc. And such an intellectual element necessarily introduces a distance no matter how slight. I've written about death a lot so far, but I can't help feeling that the intellectual part of the approach leaves me falling short of really getting to grips with Death. All art metaphoricalises its material, and metaphor is just another refracting mirror so that you're not directly confronting Death, just as we cannot stare directly at the sun. 

And yet to go deeper invites the phenomenon that requires my white noise response to be ongoing throughout the duration of any such writing project. That way lies only madness. Probably. Do I undertake such an endeavour, with the potential risks to mental health attached? I don't feel I have any choice, not that I have a project currently in mind to broach this with. I don't have a choice because the physical process is clearly in motion anyway (I say this as someone who in my 54 years to date has had the incredible fortune/ genes to have never had to spend a single night in a hospital. But the markers of decline, however slow, are evident to me. 

Watch this space...

* Does perhaps technology offer us modes of cheating death? It's a possibility, but uploading one's entire stock of memories to some sort of smart interface does not preserve life. It would solely be an existence as newsreel, that is unreflexive and static; the essential 'you' would have no real relationship to the memories, unable to add to them. I imagine it would be like a form of Alzheimer's, where the active relationship to your memories is split asunder, so that you are cast adrift from them; the memories are preserved, they still exist, but they no longer are 'your' memories, because that 'you' has ceased to exist in any meaningful way.

The Story Of Story - Flash Fiction

With the summer round of book fairs and literary festivals just around the corner, authors rolled up to the storehouse of stories. They checked in their plots that would keep them fermenting throughout the winter cold, executing them beside a roaring fire. In return they took possession of anecdotes and terminological exactitude, blew the dust off them and dialled their agents to inquire of the travel arrangements, itineraries and Green Room riders.

When their literary rambles and belletristic excursiveness were over for the season, they all assembled at the fabled construction and pushed on through the silo doors only to discover every last one of their story stock had disappeared. They were aghast, with their instinctive reactions of placing their professional pen-holding, or keyboard-palpating hands over either eyes, mouth or ears resulting in a series of tableaus vivant of the Three Wise Monkeys. “What, ain’t you lot ever heard of backing up your work then?” chimed in the warehouse’s custodian, who wrote the odd bit of cyberpunk in his spare time but never showed it to anybody.

“This is an utterable, bloody disaster!” expostulated a writer of the old school.  

“Swearing is a sign of a poor vocabulary, or didn’t your mother teach you that bouncing you up and down on her knee?” snarked a writer of erotica. 

“I feel… bereft” sobbed a writer of romances.

“Of course you do dear” smirked the erotician.

“Just because you have no need of a plot in your- I can barely bring myself to call them - stories”.

“Ladies, ladies, come now- who’s that sniggering? I hardly think this is a situation that invites levity. We have all just lost the entire wellspring of stories-“

“All seven of them-”

“- That affects us all”.

“- Not me squire, I write anti-novels”.

“What are you doing here then?”

“My Steampunk writer pal is giving me a lift home from ‘Wilderness’ festival, but he had to stop here to load up his saddlebags”.

“They can’t just have vanished”.

“Recycling’s Tuesdays, so can’t have been carted off in a commercial waste lorry”.

“Not funny”.

“Call this dialogue? It’s bloody rubbish”

“Yes, well we’re rather lacking for stories to hang realistic characterisation on at the moment, aren’t we?”

“Magical Realism bloke, can’t you conjure up something for us here?”

“I got nothing”.

“Christian Fiction guy?”

“I do redemption endings not deus ex machina ones”.

“Pretty simple really. Someone’s nicked them. Half-inched the schemata, hitched up our storylines and had our narratives away on their toes”.

“What on earth are you talking about you ridiculous little woman?”

“Clues me dear. It’s what I deal in. Detective fiction at your service”.

“Well your books can’t be much cop. Our plots haven’t been stolen so much as devoured and consumed. We writers of Police procedurals do things properly. By the book. Anyone here pen forensic science protags?”

“Yeah I do and I see what you mean. There’s insect husks scattered all around here”.

“What are they, boll weevils?”

“I dunno mate. I’m not an entomologist, I’m a writer. I’m the geezer who emails the entomologists when I need some facts”.

“Well here’s a fact for you, boll weevils feed on cotton, not stories. Not paper. Something you’d know if you read my saga on slavery and the Deep South”.

“Oh, I remember that book. When the critic pointed out the infestation that destroyed the crop only happened long after abolition and the Civil War”. 

“Yes, well poetic licence and all that”.

“Historical Fiction, or as we call it, Anachronic-ism”

 “I think you’re all missing the point here. The custodians have a duty of care to our germs of ideas. So we should demand redress. Write a wrong, compensation for lost earnings”.

“Germs of ideas? That’s more Billy Burroughs’ territory. Words as virus”.

“Billy Burroughs? Close personal friend were you?”

“Wasn’t everybody?”

“Plot hole my fictive friend, Burroughs has been dead nigh on two decades. Can’t have been responsible for this”.

“Copycat? Plagiarist?”

“Is no one listening to me?”

“Probably not. Cos no one’s read you I know that much”.

“We should sue the Depository.

“I think you mean sue the Repository?”

“No, I mean Depository”.

“You don’t know what you mean. You don’t know what you’re talking about”.

“You’re splitting hairs”.

“No I’m being pedantic. If they meant exactly the same thing, we wouldn’t need two different words would we?”

“Oh go shove it up your sphincter”.

“He’ll require a suppository then”.

“Fellow writers and Creative Writing Fellows, we can still solve the riddle here. The husks are shed larval skins. Therefore there should be adult insects round here somewhere. We should be able to tell what they are then and what they’ve done with our stories”.

“This might be a clue! This big lump of earth in the corner here!”

“A termite mound! Yes, I’m pretty sure termites eat wood pulp, so paper would fit their diet”.

“Well where the hell does that get us?”

“Into the mound! Our words would be excreted by the insects, so if we can collect them all up, maybe we could reconstruct the plot lines”.

“What are we looking for exactly? What does termite pooh look like?”

“Termite ‘pooh’? What are you, a children’s author?”

“You don’t need to go scrabbling about on the floor. That mound is part earth, part termite faecal matter”.

“I’m an artiste darling, I’m not plunging my hand into a mound of insectile cloaca for literature or anybody”. 

“That’s not true of your last book”.

“That’s not just a mound… that is the literary Omphalos. The font of all story”.

“Who let the prose poet in here?”

“The literary Omphalos, here in Hay-On-Wye, are you sure?”

“Insects, this is all a bit Kafkaesque don’t you think?”

“Kafka’s insects were more metaphorical than literal I would have said”.

“What, insects devouring our words then shitting them back out as pellets and making a tower of them isn’t a metaphor you mean?”

Occam's Wet Razor - Flash Fiction

                                                                                                                 Image from Maggie Chang

You stand at the precipice. Albeit at sea level. Beached. A tsunami of anxiety elevated at your back. An overwhelming welter of nausea bearing down dorsally. A monstrous water-breathing dragon astern. Poised with bated froth for your embrace. The spume laps at your quivering neck. Or maybe it’s a runnel of your own sweat. Salt kissing salt. Siren summons into the bosom of the brine. You can’t bear to turn and face your leviathan. Scylla or Charybdis, one or other has calamitous claim on you. A miasmic ménage à trois. Tears walk the plank from your lacrimal channels. Else it’s artfully piloted spindrift. Bombardier and navigator the twain. Co-piloting your life towards crash-landing in the drink. Charter a gallant on white winged seahorse to come sweep you up off your feet and away to safety. Yet that’s precisely what plunged you into these straits in the first place.  

That older ensign long consigned to the Davy Jones locket at your throat, semaphores how the terror is always more colossal than the reality. You need to clear the opacity of your vision. Conceive of your fear not as a cataract but as a fountain. One you can cup your hand through the spurt and bring some cool refreshing drops up to your lips. -  A font you say? Like a modest spout of mechanically mannered spray? You’re fooling yourself with such a conceit. Just take a look at the dimensions of the roiling qualm. It’s not going to merely drench but drown. No King Canute act is going to hold that at bay. It’s not going to be allayed by three coins in a fountain. It’s a hateful spate effacing all before it. Including the balm of the memory of you. - Mayhap, but you know there is always a place to stand behind a cascade. Safe from the surge. Then you just walk back through. That’s what you have to conjure up in your mind. Where the gush can’t get you. - There is no such haven. A fountain is not a waterfall is not the ocean. - You do realise you yourself are mainly composed of water? So what is there to fear from becoming one with the main? There’s your ballast for you. Air-breathing is not all it’s cracked up to be, especially when you are suffocating inside. From stale, putrid, corrosive air. The second-hand oxygen respired by your lovers. Altitude sickness. They induced this Fata Morgana afore you. Blood is supposed to be thicker than water, but your blood is being curdled and poisoned by those closest to you who would transfuse you their corruption. No no, you don’t have to tell me again. You are in love with both of them. And yet here you stand stranded solitary amidst this quicksand.

King Canute. Damocles’ sword. With something something comes responsibility. Only you do not possess the authority and level of control conferred by a throne. Supposedly conferred. You do not even hold the security clearance to dub yourself “I”. As in, ‘I need the waves to recede’. It currently (!) remains in suspense hindmost over your head. Planar. Primed. It is not a mere parting of the Red Sea ways you supplicate. It’s more elementally primordial than that. You are seeking a recrudescence of the Antediluvian. The Prelapsarian. A period before the ego of I. A time before forces acting on the body, whether at god’s behest or non-denominational gravity’s. Until appetence’s apple sunk them both. Which is where you find yourself today. Here and now. Carnally compromised. You cannot return to the rockpool of your mother’s womb. Even if tiddler you could go back and begin again, higgler you would end up here in this very same place anyway. On the brink of being deluged. Marooned on an isle fast being sepulchered with the tide. Cupidity is your very nature. You’re like the fish that hooks itself twice on the same line. - Greedy you mean? - More… instinctive. All creation seeks after nourishment in order to survive after all. - Oh, hungry… for love. You got that right. - Not, trichotomous love however. You cannot devote the entirety of yourself across a brace of separate swains. - Why, is Poseidon’s own trident not three-spoked? A divine with a pair of consorts of his own. - So just like he, you are not feeling discomposed by the menace of the water then? There can be no ‘we’ betwixt three. And with no ‘we’, the ‘I’ is also submerged. The wave of your fluctuation will break over you. You made your seabed, now lie in it. Take me from your throat and cast me into the deep. - But you are the only one I have ever truly loved. 

Alzheimat - 300 word Flash Fiction

Broadcasts report that my frontal lobe has been overrun. Lesions of the damned occupy my zones. Shock troops and sapper units deplete my forces. Resistance cells, besieged on all sides. Unable to hold the line. Of my failing self. Just a few loyal partisan remnants of me carrying the fight. Former comrades strafe my grey matter. The neural runways pockmarked by bomb craters blocking take off. Interdicting my diction. I can hear Morse code broadcasts outlined inside my skull. Either that or it is a white noise of electrical waves trying to jump across the ruptures. Mudder, I am ravaged and being stripped of my memories, my experiences, my language and my childhood. I am returning to the state of nothing when I was inside you. Please receive me generously.

They expand upwards ever upwards. Seeking the light, in order to eclipse me. The slow accumulation defying gravity. Honing their aculeation, ready to receive me. To impale me on their spikes. A chalky maiden press. This calcification of my mind. Annexing my powers against me. As I squat huddled at the crown. Dripping rusted parts of my being, to further augment their Babel tower. Stalactite me seeding stalagmite them. Narrowing towards one another, the joust of two knights most unchivalric. If we flawlessly align, our whetted points will just abut, dovetailing harmlessly. Michaelangelo’s god infusing pneuma into a recumbent Adam. The handshake of the Red Army with the American 69^th Infantry at the Elbe. But if the pinpoint precision is out by any fraction of a degree, at best we will scrape against one another and send up shower of malignant sparks. At worst they will pierce my mass and fatally gouge my nucleus.

The tragedy, farce, Grand Guignol, Lehrstücke, kitchen sink theatre of my mind has gone dark. 

Glossed In Translation - Friday Flash

The below is an experiment. I took the English paragraph I wrote, put it through Google translate in 6 different languages, copied and pasted the results back into Google translate and thence back into English. The original text inevitably undergoes some mutations in this process. Partly through the vagaries of Google translate itself, as presumably it's a translation programme that works by algorithm and word recognition, so that it will miss nuance and multi-shaded meaning words. While grammar always chops up and reconstitutes word orders. But the piece is also dealing with the metaphorical differences between diverse languages and cultures. Again nuances can wildly diverge between two differing languages. The text I wrote was about an unspecified liberation/terrorist organisation's demands around a captured hostage, denouncing an unspecified occupying/interventionist army in its land. The differences between the texts once put through the translator, hopefully represents a sort of "lost in translation", whether mechanical in source, or metaphorical. Two sides in conflict can rarely understand one another's language because of their wildly differing perspectives. 

Of course, Google Translate's claim to cover the world's language needs instantaneously is also a form of colonialism - as said, it gets things badly wrong in its translations, but also there are many language it overlooks and effectively marginalises by not offering them as part of its functionality. As a side note, MS Word did not allow me to reproduce the Khmer and Tamil scripts for their own language. Blogger wouldn't let me cut and paste the Khmer. Again that arbitrary cut off in action.

 

                                         

Communiqué: We parade this man before the eyes of the world. Your cowardly unmanned drones and bombs from 5 miles up may chop off one of our heads, but two more instantly spring up from the bloodied stump to replace it. You cannot defeat us. You call us a pit of vipers, but you do not possess the anti-venom to counteract us. Yet when we in turn come to behead this man, your populace lose their will to prosecute the fight. Their morale is sapped. Do not complain, what is the so called collateral damage of one man, compared to the computer guided many deaths and maimings you wreak on our innocents? You colonialists reap what you sow. No new head will sprout from his neck. No new head will grow from your decapitated empire. But this is our soil and we thrive and bloom in it, where you wither and perish. Consider the execution of this man as reparations. The truth and reconciliation committee, without the reconciliation. The first downpayment in blood on what we are owed for the rape of our land and people.

Српско-хрватски Communication: We parade the man before the world. Your cowardly unmanned drones and bombs than 5 miles can be cut off one of our heads, and the two immediately spring up from the bloody stump to replace it. They can not win. You call us the pit vipers, but do not have the anti-venom, that we oppose. However, when we came back to cut this man, your people lose their will to prosecute the fight. Their morale is sapped. Do not complain, what is called collateral damage of a man in relation to a computer guided many deaths and maimings are out on our innocent? You colonizers reap what you sow. No new head will emerge from the door. No new head will grow out of the kingdom beheaded. But this is our country and we thrive and flourish in it, which wither and disappear. Consider the execution of this man as odštetu.Komisija Truth and Reconciliation Commission, without pomirenja.Prvi participation in the blood of what is owed to rape our country and people.

中国的 Bulletin: We march in front of this man in the eyes of the world. Maybe you cowardly drones and bombs from five miles cut off our heads one but two sea instant pop from bloodied stump instead. You can not defeat us. You call us a pit of vipers, but you do not have anti-venom offset us. However, when we turn to behead this man, your people have lost their will to prosecute the fight. They have been weakened. Do not complain, what is called collateral damage a person, compared to a computer-guided deaths and maimings you vent on our innocent? Colonialists your choosing. No new head from his neck will germinate. No new growth from the decapitated head of the empire. However, this is our land, we grow, bloom where you wither and perish. Consider implementing this man, as compensation. Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there is no reconciliation. The first initial blood we owe our land and people raped.

العربية Statement: We procession this man in front of the eyes of the world. You have the cowardly drones and bombs from 5 miles to seal may once out of our heads, but two more immediately spring up from the stump of blood to replace him. You can not defeat us. You can contact us pit vipers, but you do not have anti-venom to face us. Even now, when we in turn come to decapitate this man, the masses lose your free will to prosecute the battle. And sapped morale. Do not complain, what is the so-called collateral damage of one man, compared with the computer directed many of the deaths and maiming that wreak on our innocent? I colonists reap what you sow. A new President will not sprout from his neck. A new President will not grow from the Empire decapitated your. But this is our land and we thrive and bloom in it, where you wither and die. Consider the implementation of this man is compensation. To the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, without reconciliation. Advance payment for the first time in the blood on what we owed ​​to rape our land and our people.

தமிழ் Report: The man in front of the eyes of the world, we march. Your cowardly fired from unmanned drones and up to 5 miles with our heads cut off, but instead immediately bloodied by two more in the direction from the spring. You can not defeat us. A pit vipers us to call you, but you do not want to poison us against the opposition. We will behead them when this man, you struggle to prosecute people lose their wishes. Their morale sapped. No complaint, you ruin the computer guidance on what our innocent compared to many deaths and maimings, a man is called collateral damage? What you sow you reap colonialists. The new leadership will sprout from his neck. Empire with your arm grows from the new leadership. But it is our soil, and we will thrive and bloom, where you wither, die. Consider reparations to fulfill this man. Without compromising the truth and reconciliation commission. What do we pay our land mass rape in the blood first downpayment.

Khmer Communiqué: We parade this man before the eyes of the world. Dachahangkear cowardly unmanned and bombs from 5 miles to chop off our heads, but two more immediately spring up from the stump bloodied to replace it. You can not get rid of us. You call us the pit of vipers, but you do not have administrator anti-venom to counteract. Yet when we turn to behead a man of the people lost their will to prosecute the fight. Their morality is sapped., Do not complain is the collateral damage of so-called man nothing compared to the death of many computers to disabled people and wreak on our innocent? colonialists, you reap what you sow. No new shoots from his neck. No new growth from the United Kingdom, decapitated., But this is our land and we grow and bloom in it where you wither and perish. Consider the execution of a man as compensation. Truth and reconciliation committee without karophsaahphsaa_cheate. Blood in the first downpayment on what we are owed for violations of our land and people.

فارسی  Announcement: Our parade him before the eyes of the world. You cowardly drones and drones and bombs than 5 miles until we could chop one head, but two immediately spring from the bloody stump instead. You can defeat us. You give us a pit of vipers, but you do not have to deal with anti-venom. But when we come to turn a man beheaded, people lose their will to pursue the fight. Their morale is sapped. Do not complain, what is a man called Collateral Damage, compared with the computer-driven maimings deaths of many innocent people, our revenge on you? You reap what you sow colonists. No new head sprouting from his neck. You cut any new chief of the empire grow. But this is our land and we grow and blossom in it, where you will wither and perish. Consider the man's death as compensation. Committee truth, no reconciliation. The first payment on the blood of what we owe to rape the land and our people.

Crush - Friday Flash

He arrested his pumping thrust mid-stroke. Stout-hearted oak almost toppled over the card sharper operating on the sidewalk. Nearly induced a cardiac-attack. The man gathered up his ill-gotten gains into a sac and transplanted his procedure elsewhere. Somewhere less congested.

Heart in mouth, bated breath in suspended lungs. Could it possibly be?

His heart missed a beat as he distended his neck to search out his bypassed Miss.

That old throb started tugging at his core. His organ burning in his chest. The blood pulsing around his veins at a rate of knots, tingling agonisingly. His heartstrings tangled like a cats cradle. He shot his shirtsleeves tight over his wrists to try and venesect the pressure. But it was too late. The heart of the matter was indeed his heart. A resuscitated pang for his love. A one woman love infarction. That heart stopper and head turner had just crossed his path again. Encased in a sable stole.

And then the old ticker skipped as did his stride. There she was moving at a cracking lick. It was his heartfelt wish to see her, to talk to her again. He gathered up his pace- making. Heartily, lustily. His ticker hammering away at his ribs like a xylophone with joyous excitement. He put his hand over his chest to see that his fit-to-bursting heart was still contained within. Still in the right place.

The motor was powering his legs like pistons. Systole... as he bounced up in his stride. Diastole on the downstroke, although he felt he was being carried along on a cushion of richly oxygenated air.

She entered the revolving door of a hotel. He followed her directly in the next glass chamber behind. She contracted sight of him and missed her opening into the atrium, instead going round another circuit. Her lashes fluttered and his heart responded in kind. But hers was a double-take quickly followed by a double declutch of her expression. A look more dagger than arrow to the heart. Tricuspid valve slamming shut on him like a tomb, rather than Cupid's airy flight. Furry venous, not Venus in Furs. His heart sunk with displaced hope. Footsore and heartsick. He knew in his heart of hearts that they were never to be heart and soulmates.

Murmuring to himself, he slowed his rate and let her heart-free into the bosom of the lobby. As he re-emerged back into the arteries of the city, the smell of warming cockles from a stall rendered his sclerotic muscle into a ball of wrinkles.

Heartbroken.

from the flash fiction collection, available from Amazon Kindle store free to download 3rd-7th June 2016

Exege(ne)sis - Friday Flash

In the beginning was the word and the word was God

In the beginning was the wor(l)d and the word/world was go(o)d

In the beginning was not the world, because God was supposed to have created it. Not in any procreative, progenerative way, since there was no conjoining of the sexes in reproduction, unless you buy into the male-female polarities of light/darkness, earth/sea, sky/ground.

The word or the world could not be good, since there was no other moral being yet extant to judge and pronounce upon it thus. If the Divinity is pronouncing his own work as good, it's a little unbecomingly arrogant of such a numinous Being to do so. Blowing his own trumpet as it were and we all know where trumpets and the number seven can lead don't we Jerichoans?

In similar vein there could not have been the word in the beginning, sine there was no one around to utter it (other than the Divinity uttering a 'shezam' or similar conjuration word). In certain Far Eastern theologies, there is a primordial sound, the moment of its first striking being the act of creation itself, from which all life and energies with their vibrations stem.

And God said, Let the earth bring the living soul after its kind; the beast and the thing moving itself and the wild animal of the earth after its kind; and it was so.

There is no capitalisation of 'earth' gainsaying the investing of gender in the manner of a Gaia and yet this is followed by an immediate polarity of the (higher) living soul and the (base) beast. 'After its kind' suggests the generations reproduced through sexual procreation and this is of course the (spare) bone of contention in The Garden Of Eden.

The word 'after' has been interpreted as 'according', that is within its delineated phylum, genus and species type. Genetic groupings are demarcated, yet allowing for theological prohibitions on 'pure' and 'unclean' animals that seem to cross several classificatory elements and forms the basis of the Jews' Kashrut dietary laws. They wouldn't eat animals that seemed to diverge from recognised groups in no matter how superficial a manner.

'The thing moving itself' undermines its own theological dialectic. One interpretation has this being worms and other legless creatures crawling along the ground (the snake of course was not thus shaped until God ripped its legs away in Eden). Modern science also suggests the primary existence of single cell creatures, clustering together into slightly larger aggregates. So something that superficially resembled an eye, though of course lacked for a developed retina and cortical and synaptic brain to function as oracular, clumped together with some cells that provided a degree of locomotion across the ground. Incrementally in time, the aggregation grew in sophistication and the eye was able to link up to specialist cells to facilitate it to 'see', the brain and central nervous system wired up the muscles so that the animal could walk and the rest is Natural History.

But what of language? That first word? In the beginning was the word and the word was Gravity. G-Force.

Of course the first enunciated word was nothing as complex and intricate as 'gravity'. Yet without gravity there would in all likelihood have been no first language, no opening gambit, no referential system at all. For as mankind evolved in among that confusing welter of sense experiences in his environment, there were a few things he noticed followed rigid patterns.

rain always fell down on their heads

mountains always pointed upwards

their spears and rocks would always eventually touch down on the ground

as would their urine (men only)

trees grew vertically

while their shed leaves tumbled back down to earth

birds flew higher than men's heads

scorpions crawled at men's feet

avalanches and waterfalls crashed deafeningly descendently

volcanoes belched their fire and smoke ascendantly

Ergo a brace of things man could stake his tongue with. Up was skywards and down was plunging towards their feet. From this they were able to extrapolate words such as here, there, right, left, near, far, under, over. Me and you as in a spatial configuration. Us an them. "My God good, your god no good". Heaven and the abyss. They didn't just admire mountains, now they scaled them through shared language enabling co-operation and teamwork and preparation of resources. Upwards ever upwards. Eventually they would tunnel and mine beneath the earth and quarry metals and powering fuels. And all thanks to gravity establishing a few regular ground rules.

In the beginning was the logos and the logos was G-d.

If the Greek word 'logos' means the unifying principle of the world, then it cannot truly be translated as 'Word'. For words partition, categorise and define. Words undermine the monistic, the belief in the one, for they introduce and encourage relativism.

In the beginning was the end of the world. And the world was begun (conceived) and ended (divided and dissevered) by the word.