Parsing Fantasy - Friday Flash

At first I thought you might be casing the joint. But returning day after day after day, I realised you were studying me. What could you possibly want with me? What in my life, my being, is of such interest that you devote all this attention to me? Don’t you have a life of your own? Patently not if you can waste this amount of time rubbernecking. 

What do you imagine observing my actions through the window pane? It must be like watching a mime show? Or the frustration of witnessing someone else on the telephone, hearing their responses but not those of their inquisitor down the line? I’ve no idea what your bag is, dogging my every move. I won’t yield you whatever it is you’re after. Not that I actually merit any such scrutiny. You must have noticed that I lead an utterly unremarkable life.

I know you’re there. I’ve caught glimpses of movement in my peripheral vision. When I’m stood at my sink washing up, I see flashes of you reflected in the glass. You constantly walk through my mind. Trespassing. Leaving your trail. The spoor of you. The same as you do outside. The lawn grass trodden down, although there is no footprint. Each time I hear the leaves rustle, but there isn’t any wind. That confoundedly perennial clicking. You probably know my name, while I don’t know yours, but I shall christen you ‘Russell’. Since that is the sound I associate with your presence. That and your susurrations. I honestly believe I hear you licking your lips. But you’d have to be virtually stood with your mouth pressed to my ear for me to hear that.

No matter how careful you are, you’ll end up revealing yourself to me. Funny, I have no idea what you look like, yet I have a highly developed mental image of you. I may not know your exact motives, but your character’s coming through loud and clear to me. For all your surveying of me, I reckon I know more about you than you do about me. Not that I want to. Just you are more transparent than me. And I aim to maintain my opacity to you.

The chair’s moved! Infinitesimally but it’s definitely moved off its spot. You’ve been in here haven’t you? Sat there at my table, while I was out. Availing yourself of my, well I’m not sure quite what. But you took up an invitation that was never made to you. It’s all a fantasy in your head. Whatever you conceive of me, I am a figment of your imagination, even if unfortunately you are not one in mine. 

So you’ve been in here, had a good look around. Sniffed the air and then the surfaces. You’ve clocked my clothes. Had a nosey in my bathroom medicine cabinet. I bet you scoured the plughole for stray hairs. If you were a policeman you’d be collecting evidence on me. But you’re on the other side of the law, so you’re probably using it to make a voodoo doll impression of me. Well you don’t require any poppet. Your mere presence acts as a needle jabbed into my flesh. I will not cede you any part of me. Not a single piece. You’ve got me collecting up all my parings and offcuts. So they don’t come into your possession. Your fixation can’t be anything based on desire. Since I look an absolute fright. Though I suppose you might celebrate that. The effect you’ve visited on me.

You are little more than a shadow, yet you loom outsized in my imagination. You supposedly have no dimensionality, yet as I shrink and wither under your creeping assault, it is I who lack dimension and you appear to inhabit everything everywhere. My flights of fancy run amok. I dream up way more terrifying persecutions than you could ever inflict on me. Your sickness has infected me, made me take leave of my senses.

Time to shut the curtains on you. Regular as clockwork. A creature of habit. You I mean, not me. I really need a blackout lining sewn into them. Instead of this flimsy tiffany. Anyone could look straight through them and into the heart of this room. Veiling nothing, actually only helping frame everything I do in here. Making me utterly conspicuous for anyone who chooses to gaze in. Like you. Yet no one else seemingly feels the compunction to do it. You force me to sit in the dark with the lights off. But then the colours from the TV screen wash the room and floodlights me further for you. So now I don’t even watch TV anymore. Instead your shadow dances across the blank screen. Maybe I’ll get wooden shutters fitted, a good solid wooden block on you.

What goes on in that head of yours? No you know something, I shouldn’t ask. Or speculate. After all you know nothing about what goes on in my head. And that’s just the way I want to keep it. So the corollary is I inquire or know nothing about you. Seems a fair and reasonable non-exchange. Only there’s nothing fair about this whatsoever. The power is completely lopsided. I’ve changed absolutely everything about my daily routine. Not just to throw you off the scent, but also as I try and work out what it is about me that you’re pursuing. I’ve broken down every facet of my behaviour. I’ve made lists. And then set fire to them. To stop them falling into your hands. 

You think you make me march to your tune. Like some marionette you control and manipulate. But in reality you’re a lousy puppet master. You got me all snagged. Snared in my own lines so I can hardly move. So snarled I can’t dance for you. I won’t dance for you. I barely make it out from my bed anymore. No, damn, I don’t want you to be aware of that. But you probably know already don’t you? 

You’ve made me install a whole battery of detection devices. Motion sensors and lights. Alarms and tripwires. Closed circuit cameras to close off my house to you. In order to capture any perturbation at all. All to catch you in the act of watching. I may not be able to look you in the eye and face up to you, but all these lenses here can do it on my behalf. While you track every one of my movements, my devices only need to freeze a single one of yours. Get you put behind bars where your goose will be cooked. Roasted in the red glow of my laser cameras.

The triplights constantly illuminating my house like a Christmas tree. Shining a light on to every aspect of my life for you. Having me up and down at every beam like a jack-in-the box. My face lit up in the rays as I pulled back the curtain to see if it was you. Putting myself in the spotlight. In your crosshairs and marked the ‘X’ for you. No not a spotlight, a flaming strobelight. Freezing me in place. Sending me into convulsions. I disconnected the contraptions inside the rooms. Ripped the cabling from their sockets. The wiring is still exposed, drooping from the brackets like jungle tendrils and creepers. Like snakes. The disorder of my formerly orderly house. Of my life. I’m sure you’ve monitored the change. Made full mental note. Recorded in your stalker log. Every time I look up at the ceiling now, I encounter how tangled my mind is. And how you the predator lies in wait above.

Finally a clue in which you announced yourself. You committed your thoughts about me on paper. Well virtually. On a book review site. Not a very flattering impression. And then I realise why you have been stationed in my life, trespassing inside my head. Your sickness means you are so deluded as to regard me as a fictional character constructed from words rather than flesh. That anything you do to me has no effect because it’s not real. I’ll get an injunction. A restraining order against you. Set a precedent. The book which bans readers.

Marc Nash In Da House - Friday Flash

"Marc Nash in da house people!"

Who?

marc nash is in his house, sat at his writing station. That place where more often than not, marc nash is to be located.

"Marc Nash, license to illeism."

marc nash isn't ill. marc nash is in the pink actually. And in the writing zone, on a real word tear-up.

"No, 'illeism'. I thought you were a master of words?"

marc nash credited you were using hip-hop speech. marc nash would suggest this points up the difference between the oral and the written word. Idiomashupsticks.

"So, why does Marc Nash constantly refer to himself in the third person?"

marc nash does no such thing.

"You don't say."

marc nash does say.

"Ipso facto ipseity"

marc nash proposes that just sounds like meaningless insufflation. It suggests a string of words, but scratch under the surface of noise and there is nothing there.

"Yes, better off leaving that sort of thing to the master. Tell me, referring to yourself in the third person is usually symptomatic of a deluded sense of self-importance is it not?"

Like any writer, marc nash's significance in the world is to be measured by the number of autographs and size of royalty payments. marc nash states here and now that these amount to none and pin money. Although clearly marc nash hopes that this will rise in number. But for the purposes of this intellectual exercise, therefore marc nash is not full of jumped-up self-importance. If only you could see marc nash's words written down, rather than vaporising through the microphone, you'd see that marc nash is always stated in lower case. marc nash has no presumptions above his station. marc nash's station remains that of the humble writing desk.

"Well that's another side of illeism, that it represents a sort of modesty, of not laying claim to yourself as an 'I' as somehow not meriting it."

marc nash would always start with the etymological root of any conception such as this. 'Modesty' is related to moderate, stemming from the Latin for both 'measure' and 'mode'. marc nash's writing is not 'measured' in any sense. Nor is it confined to mere modes of writing or genre.

"Oh but then surely Marc Nash must acknowledge the Structuralist argument that the writer is entirely a product of his own circumstances of upbringing, education and experiences and therefore has no free will in what he writes?"

marc nash rejects that conceit by the simple statement that marc nash has eschewed both his upbringing and inherited value system.

"Oh come on, what could be more tramlined than rejecting the values of your parents? Rebellion is utterly defined by what it is set up in opposition to. You have no say in what you create, maybe that's why you cannot lay claim to a first person identity with any surety? Or maybe it's a residual shame at what that first person represents and trying to distance yourself from it however vainly."

If marc nash may be permitted to take your argument to its logical conclusion, he finds only reductio ad absurdum there. Since you seem to be saying marc nash is merely some sort of automated word Turing machine, with a finite word store in memory laid down during his development, and a set of imbibed texts from other writers which he then proceeds to spin round like a washing machine word cycle to spew out 'new' texts of his own non devising?

"Well you are a self-confessed huge fan of music and isn't that what musicians do? Stand on the shoulders of their recent ancestors, armed only with a box full of records and reference and cut up and create afresh? But the idiom is finite."

marc nash offers that although words have rhythms, they are not closed mathematical systems. The possibilities for word combinations is endless.

"Is Marc Nash seriously having us believe that he refers to himself in the third person because it confers some sort of objectivity? That the subjective voice of Marc Nash thereby naturally feeds into a more universal truth?"

It is not for marc nash to say what is truth or not. It will be the verdict of the readers of marc nash texts.

"Which you've already conceded are few and far between. Perhaps this third person thing is more about trying to establish a brand? The need for self-promotion has hollowed you out away from your texts and into just the commodity of your name."

Who says marc nash is his real name?

"It's the names on the spines of your books."

marc nash books exist only on the ether in e-readers. They have no spines. The books of marc nash are fictional bodies.

"That sounds like dissociation to me. That Marc Nash is so cut off from reality and other people indeed, that he has wholly dissociated himself from the normal frames of reference, including how we address ourselves to others. You may be worryingly psychotic."

marc nash creates fictional beings on virtual paper. This does not make him schizoid, merely imaginatively creative. However, the fiction is enhanced because clearly these characters are representative of the mind of marc nash. marc nash is spilling the seed of himself into texts, but they are refracted versions of himself, therefore not quite fully-fledged first-person iterations. marc nash accordingly refers to them as 'he' or even 'she'. These characters are more important than the author marc nash, therefore the author marc nash cannot accrue more status than his characters. Ergo marc nash can only be third person like them, for to be first person would overwhelm and diminish them. Added to that is that marc nash (author) is not even marc nash's real name, but merely a nom de plume. In that sense, marc nash is truly a third person to whoever the first person "I" is that lies behind the persona conjuring up 'marc nash'.

"Well that makes two of us then, since I'm not a real radio DJ and this 'interview' is merely an idle daydream on your part as you both procrastinate and leap ahead to the ridiculous fancy that you will attain such status as to engender radio interviews."

marc nash has left his house and is on route for the pub.

"This next one is a dedication, De La Soul's, 'Me, Myself and I'."