Meditation Ex-Cathedra : Flash Fiction

When the levee of my mother’s natal waters broke; when the champagne bottle was dashed against her cervix and started my baby hull moving down the rollers of the birth canal; when HMS neonate me was launched into the world, it had no concept of its future obsolescence and scrappage. Of its down the line replacement by another in the lineage fleet, bearing the same name but managing only to serve in effacing the uniqueness of its memory.

It spent its early days all at sea trying to cohere the view through the telescope provided by the visual cortex and processing chip of a brain. These cozening forces of ordinate and abscissa, plotting the flat earth co-ordinates of reality as fixed and immutable. Freud of course would have it that one is also unwittingly consumed by the perspective rendered extant by the sextant; your personal parental poles of latitude and longingtude. From the antipodes of father and mother, when there is a whole host of the rest of the world to explore and chart. Further palimpsested by majusculed school and prescriptive religion. Establishing a moral foundation erected like a hollow Gaudi edifice, with the dislocating wind blowing up a maelstrom through the upright interstices. 

Of the heritable venerable three questions for man, ‘Who am I?’, ‘Why am I here?’ and ‘What have I done?’, most who bother to interrogate themselves only get as far as grappling with the first one. The last is a matter for consideration solely on death beds and the second is forsaken because they fail to supply the context of their inevitable death through which all explorations would necessarily be refracted. They remain steadfastly progressively forward looking, rather than applying the singular teleological certitude to their thought processes. So inevitably they come to focus on their identities. The person they are during their brief sojourn on earth. Yet what is the point fixating on something that is ultimately perishable? They also reify love’s existence in order that they will not spend their sojourn alone, but again why would I devote contemplation on something equally fugacious? 

Author I took the antipodal approach. Placed myself in the full-length mirror. Over time studied the maculations of the skin, burst blood vessels, the ossific curvature, the protuberances and the loss of sinewy definition. No looking glass could reflect the loss of suppleness, the fitful sleep, the arthritic joints. The physicians had diagnosed my corporeal failings, I was now trying to diagnose myself for my readers. To offer them a speculum into their own being. But stood there in the mirror, pressing and pinching the flesh to see if the nevus had regular contours or not, scrotal bobbins cupped in my hand feeling the spindle for noduled swelling, I have no idea of whether I am of any assistance to my readers. As my words are released, I scrutinise them for their effect, but the letters are reversed in the mirror and illegible to me. The audience remains invisible, occluded by my eidolon therein the glass. The author dies twice over; once at the end of his life, the other every day in isolation. 

Contingency - Drabble

The terminally ill child bears her fate with far greater acceptance and equanimity than her mother, who after all, has spent her longer lifespan neglecting the import of her own attendant mortality. The child has had less time to become beholden to the reasons for life, or make the deals with herself as to why it might be held to be valuable. Her thread is not as extended as that of adults. Her sense of permanence less entrenched. Her mother had calculated to plug the void of meaning, by rearing a child. And now that stratagem was collapsing around her.

The Bestiary Of You - Friday Flash

What’s your favourite colour? – Death – Do you mean black? – No, Death. Any colour represents the runt of the litter, those wavelengths not absorbed by host objects but spat back out into our beggarly, misappropriating eyes. But Death, Death is incontrovertible. There are no shades. Not a jot of any filtering out. Death is the absence of everything, not least all colour.

What’s your lucky number? – Don’t have one. Human behaviour on one mundane level is highly predictable, but as to its minutiae utterly inconstant. Beyond algorithm and stochastically unpermutational. Like infinity itself.

It was only when interrogated on your favourite fauna that you entered the game, if not entirely engaged in its whimsical spirit. You offered five specimens, uncountable on the missing fingers of your right hand, unable to fix upon an apex animal. The full quartet were untamed, non-caged. Predators, most beasts are one supposes, but typically none of your selections were so classically trite as the leonine.

Your first was the shark. You liked that it lidded its eyes when executing its attack. Like lovers who close their eyes when kissing, for what is a kiss but near kin of a bite? Consanguine kithing cousins. Also possessed of the best immune system in Nature. Sharks never get ill, they just get hunted by man deludedly seeking the elixir recessed deep in its cells.

Your second, not truly a predator it ought to be pointed out, the vulture. You were taken with its functionally ugly evolutionary determination, for glabrous pate and featherless scruff. Can’t reach its own bonce to preen the blood transfer off see. Which given that it cleans its legs by pissing on them, just means the bird is not a fan of golden showers. The vulture’s stomach acids resist all proxy chemical warfare that god throws their way with his pestilential carrion.

Your third meditative identification was the jellyfish. Serenely floating wherever the pull of the tides took it, a passive predator much like yourself you claim. Indolent energy saver, doesn’t breathe for itself and even its food is swept up for it in the dragnet of its filaments. It also offers the key to immortality, since it can regress from its diving bell mature form to the fully sedentary polyp and preserve itself intact.

Your fourth was the Biblical locus of evil. The snake with its panoply of adaptations. Snakes that spit, engorge, sidewind, play dead. The constrictors that squeeze and suffocate the very air. The sporting rattlesnake which gives you fair warning. The black mamba which uniquely of serpents will not duck a fight with humans, but turn and pursue at pace. The Taipan whose single bite contains enough venom to smite a hundred humans, but with only a single mouth containing just two fangs, it remains moot as to how it could bring about such a decimation squared, but you appreciate its commitment to overkill all the same. You married your own Medusa and quickly devoured her whole and took on her ophidian attributes. She had an Ouroborus tattoo across her spine. You have your fingers crossed that it proves prognostically auspicious. The fingers of one hand that is. 

Your fifth was the one that accounted for your fingers. The only creature you have actually met in the flesh, fur, scales, plumes, mesoglea. The tarantula also has an impressive array of weapons. You ignored its cascade of propelled hairs launched towards your eyes, brought tears to them. And while you floundered around temporarily denied of sight, overbalancing and unseeing of forest floor hazards, you toppled and fell. That human reflex derived from the apes of putting out a limb to break the fall, threw your hand back within the bailiwick of the tarantula who upgraded from its arsenal and sank its fangs into a couple of your fingers. You could have sought help, but you had been introduced to prodrome  Death. You were keen to watch its unfurling. The swelling, discolouration and blistering. The gaseous pressure from within the vesicles. The gangrene and putrefaction. Only when the fingers couldn't be saved did you go in for treatment to preserve the rest of you. You were grateful to the arachnid for smoothing your fears for Death lest the other four fail to deliver you perpetuity. 

The Idea Of A Man - Friday Flash

The mummified remains from the peat bog looked both like a man and yet very alien at the same time. The chemicals had preserved his body whole, but had tanned it like leather. It looked like one of Van Hagen's plasticised human art exhibits. His clothes were only preserved as shredded rags in places, but the bindings that shackled his hands behind his back were intact for all to see. Who was this man? Who had he been?

The detail of the fetters pricked people's imagination, as conclusions were drawn that the man had been executed as a prisoner. Or offered as a sacrifice. Science could analyse what the man's last supper had been. The remains of his clothes, or their accessories to be more accurate, suggested tantalising glimpses of his social status. His tattoos were felt to yield him a personal narrative depicted on his skin. The wear and erosion of his X-Rayed bones was interpreted for the way that he had walked and that he was left-handed. A profile of this man was built up and accordingly a name was conferred upon him so that everyone imagined they knew who he was. We conjured a full idea of who he had been. Had he known himself as much as we purported to know him? Had he looked inside himself as deeply as our forensic instruments?

There were queues snaking round the museum. A glass case, like a Damien Hirst bisected animal exhibit, contained the lithified remains of a man. A citizen of Pompeii, cured and petrified beneath volcanic ash. Who was this man? Who had he been?

No one of course, since his essence had long vaporised into the air. The ash had formed a perfect mould of his body, and the hollow mould had been cast with plaster of Paris to bring out his ghostly essence now on display behind glass. The idea and outline of a man. Slightly shrunken compared to our own contemporary well-nourished corpulence, his body bent into the unnatural angles of death. Hands protecting his featureless face, or perhaps clasped there in final prayer. Or maybe just blotting out the sight of impending oblivion. This sleeping man persecuted by unimaginably agonised dreams for eternity. Tourists travel to Herculaneum to see the lewd mosaics and graffiti, in order to transpose Pompeii's victims to the clues here about their lives. The wine coolers. The baths and water plumbing. They never saw it coming, but we have a pretty good picture. We fleshed him out, gave him a back story and inducted him into our collective history. This hollow man was now full of substance. Ornamentally displayed there under glass. Cast as an impure idea of a man who once might have been. Fired not in flesh but in gypsum. His body pockmarked with air bubbles and tiny gouges in the grain of his second skin. Turned inside out, like a death mask viewed from within. Glazed with our projections colouring him. Fusing him to our sensibilities rather than any he may have once held.

The TV channels had deemed that we couldn't view deep fried crispy human, but squashed flat as a pancake man was entirely palatable. Hence the cameras didn't zoom in on retreating armies burned in the cabins of their trucks and seared to the steering wheels by the heat of high explosive. However, the soldier who had presumably tried to flee from the troop carrier once the planes had been detected overhead, but ended up beneath the caterpillar tracks of his armoured vehicle, was fit for human goggle-box consumption. Who was this man? Who had he been?

He had been filleted, his vertebrae crushed beneath the multi-tonned vehicle, permitting the triumphant news crews of the victors to pun about his spinelessness. But his body had merged with the hardened banks of mud under the tracks, so that he was the same colour as the soil. It wasn't possible to determine if he was an unwilling conscript into this war, wrenched from his family, or a fervent defender of the motherland. Either way he was regarded as an implacable foe. Both sides could legitimately claim him as their kill. Whether he had perished underneath the tracks, a victim of friendly fire, or killed from above and his lifeless corpse tangled up in the desperately grinding caterpillar tracks, neither would be determined through any forensic autopsy, since this was reputedly not a crime scene. Despite the helpless turkey shoot it had turned out to be for the pilots and bombardiers.

He was scarce a man anymore, more of a caterpillar track. A skid mark. Fastened to mother earth, part of her topography, a contour of the local terrain. The war for the land, or more accurately the minerals and ores contained within it, had absorbed him into its maw. His bones pulverised, once again embosomed he could suckle toothlessly at the motherland's dried up-breast. An etiolated baby she offered up in her begging of favours from the victorious armies.

These men we never knew when they were alive. I'd say we only injected them with humanity posthumously, but posthumous etymologically speaking implies they were buried in soil, when of course two were merely shrouded by their murderous surroundings, while the third was blended into them. They were ashes to ashes, dust to dust on contact with their reaper. The only fleeting corporeality they evidenced was that they had died and ceased to be. That is the only pure idea of these men we were entitled to hold. Their quietus the sole element these mortal beings ever shared with us.

 

Reflections On A Funeral

Had to attend a funeral this weekend. Been to plenty before, so not a new experience. But there was something about this one...

It was of a close friend of my parents, whom I remember vividly from my childhood, but I hadn't seen for 25 years or so. Nor had I seen his sons in that time. We had played together because our parents' friendship brought us together on numerous occasions. That neither they nor I had chosen to perpetuate the relationship once we stepped on to our different launchpads into adulthood, was judgement enough on the depth of that friendship.

The deceased parental friend formed part of my parents' 'Card Crowd' circle. Every month for 40+ years, a card evening was hosted in a different home, with drinks, nibbles, poker & cigars for the men, Kalouki and chat for the women who sometimes didn't bother breaking open the deck of cards. In all that time the group suffered their statistical share of divorces, child troubles and illness, but they were of an age where if one of the partners dies, they were young enough to remarry. Same thing with divorces, though that always prompted a tricky issue of which of the man or the woman would be invited to the social evenings. In my father's case, he just spurned the card gathering and saw the odd male outside of such a gathering. I ought to add he is a compulsive gambler so surrendering the card games was actually part of his recovery programme. Before he quit the circle, he did use to attend and just watch and chat. But I think that just became impossible for all concerned.

That's the background. Two things struck me about the gathering at the funeral yesterday. A minor point was that I saw the sons for the first time in 25 years and of course they had all grown into men (as I suppose have I). They were instantly recognisable and yet I still couldn't but see them as frozen in time 25 years ago. The conflicted input of reality and memory were really hard to reconcile and hold in focus. If I don't see them again, will they forever be held in my recollection as children, having edited out this one contradicting image of them? In their religion, they maintain a house of mourning for a week, where prayers are said and people are encouraged to drop round not only to pay respects, but to provide support, company and shared recollections. As a part of the coping process, it works rather well. Having initially concluded that I'd paid my respects to the deceased at the graveside, I have now decided to go to a prayer session later this week. Partly to help fix a new image of them in my head and to purge the frozen one I retain. Inevitably we will catch up, however superficially, with 25 years of life about which we know nothing of one another, apart from what our (proud?) parents may have leaked in that period. But then it will be strange to beat a retreat from the door and probably never see them again in the future? I don't know, but there is a tug to attend all the same. It must have something to do with that suspended state of childhood we all bury under maturation and development. Time to disinter it, even for a fleeting moment.

But the major impression relates back at the funeral. It was packed. I was almost crowd surfed into the hall, such was the pressure of people trying to enter. I am average height, 5'9", yet everyone there seemed smaller than me. Hunched. Old. Grey. Leathered. And it struck me that this time there will be no more remarriages when there is a passing over. On show was a proto-generational cull, waiting in the atrium of the grim reaper. Just a grouping of people who had all reached an age, where they would really begin to be required to attend more and more of these rituals and mark off another one of their peers on five bar gates of death. That was a scary perception and not one limited just to my parents being included, but as I say, that whole generation. And then of course, further down the line, such a similar cull confronts my generation.

The night I've plumped for attending the house of mourning is my birthday. Seemed appropriate somehow.

Death Notices...

nothing. When you're dead you're dead. That's why I don't quite buy the writing for posterity argument. Yes you may still be minting royalties for your heirs, but other than that what benefit redounds to you decomposing away there in your clod and loam? (decomposing, is there a more apt word to describe the status of an ex-writer?) Mind you, the same could be said of why bother to have offspring at all, now that our species is no longer tied to seasonal reproduction? Might brighten up your life while you're compos mentis, but when your compost lettuce, just what are the benefits?

Okay, so writing can't preserve more than your name and the words you bequeath. Even then you've got to be a damn good writer; John Le Carre and Ian Fleming (to name two from outside my genre) are more likely to be read and remembered down the line, than say Hammond Innes and Alistair McLean. In the same way that eventually every living relative who knew you in the flesh, themselves go the way of all things mortal, so that there is no one left to place fresh flowers on your grave; there will be no readers left to place bouquets on Innes and McLean's memory and their books remain permanently out of print.

But what are Le Carre and Fleming yielding to the generations that come after them? Well great stories and central protagonists certainly. But I think Literary Fiction writers might crave for more of a legacy than that. I think they yearn to contribute to the great debate. To furnish some ideas for the great pool of human knowledge. To create a meme in the current parlance. If it can't render them any benefit from beyond the grave, at least it might serve humanity into the future. We still live by the notions of virtue portrayed in Greek Tragedies. Shakespeare left us plenty to ponder on the condition and make up of man. Nick Hornby gave us the insight about running an independent music store. Mind you, it's all a bit wooly this conceptual inheritance thing. Maybe if you help instigate a paradigm shift in the thought of all mankind, as you can argue that the Impressionist painters achieved, rather than just a trend shift as say the Beats or the Bloomsbury Circle, then it moves us all forwards. To put it in perspective, such creative impulse throwing tiny conceptual pebbles, is hard to hold up to comparison with the creativity of a bridge builder whose artistry solves a practical problem.

So here's the thing. As altruistic as it was of Sophocles and the Bard to leave us these testimonies for us to reflect on hundreds/thousand years down the line, (funny sort of altruism that has a sadistic element to it through contemplation of the ineffably ambiguous, but still), I'm not convinced it was just to help us all along a millennium hence. They didn't have the media to project their fame much beyond their local geography, so don't think they were about celebrity status either. Okay they got decent working wages out of the writing gig so that's not to be sniffed at. But I reckon they were driven to consider the human condition out of an awareness/fear of their own mortality. In fact I believe all artists, consciously or unconcsciously have the same drive.

This becomes more so as the myth of Heaven/God/The afterlife recedes from ever greater numbers of the populace. There is no useful posterity to be had. So rather than look ahead to the hereafter, now artists look to their immediate lives. We may all celebrate birthdays, but the artist calibrates back from his imagined death day, in order to make sense of his purpose here on earth. He knows he's going to pass over, so what is the best way to make use of the time in the here and now? Well justifying it, explaining it, deconstructing it, might all be fair uses of his time. And that means not only telling his own story, but locating it within the cosmic tragedy/comedy of its inevitable full stop. We already know how this story is ultimately going to end. Therefore that is not really where the interest in it lies. Steve Tesich, who died tragically young, wrote the funniest novel I have ever read called "Karoo" Tesich's protagonist Saul Karoo, a fixer up of failing movie scripts, explains away his need to write: "from the constant need to narrate my existence". For as much as we cease to exist after death, now the nagging inquiry is that we may not purposefully exist all that much in life.

Writers may just be aware of this hollowness and in addition to probing it in their own being, also tug urgently at everybody else's sleeves to alert them to this fact. Even celebrants of Eros who write escapist fantasy books, are still driven by a need to have their voice heard (despite choosing to neglect examining the motives behind that impulse). Thanatos lies behind all contemporary literature. It is merely up to the individual author whether he doffs his hat at the spectral cortege as it passes over his future grave.