“ – the dangerous words, the padlocked words, the words that do not belong to the dictionary,
for if they were written there, written out and not maintained by ellipses,
they would utter too fast the suffocating misery of a solitude …”
Jean Genet
Introduction to “Soledad Brother – The Prison Letters of George Jackson”
Writers often get asked where they get their ideas from. And if like me you write short stories and flash fiction, you have to come up with a whole host of ideas to feed all your stories. I get most of my ideas just by keeping my eyes open in daily life, especially when commuting and observing my fellow passengers; or from items on the news.
But when I was approached to become part of the Mind's Eye third collection of stories all in response to photos, that was a bit different for me. Because I'd had no prior relationship with the image I was presented with, I had to react to someone else's artistic sensibilities, that being the person who took the photo. (Mind's Eye 1 and Mind's Eye 2)
Even more interestingly, the participating writers were sharing the same images. The collection is called "Triptychs" because each image will have three different stories from three different writers. I haven't seen the stories yet, so I'm really excited to see what the other writers did with the images I was asked to create from.
Before I give the cover reveal for this collection and before I show the two images I was asked to riff off, I just want to give the blurb for the whole project:
Now this notion of three different angles on the same image is exactly what I love doing in my flash. I've always described it as like turning a gemstone to reflect the light in different ways from all its facets. In such a way I believe you can show all the subtleties and nuances of things in a way that is very condensed and compact, unlike in a novel when things like character perspective may limit just how many different angles you can show, or the effect is diluted through the sheer length of the story.
So, now the two images I was asked to create stories from.
credit: Martin David Porter credit: Helle Gade
Now, one was an absolute breeze, I was struck by an idea instantly (can you guess which one?) But the other, well I was racking my brains for months on end. The setting sun was the instant one, such a beautiful image. The only teaser I'll give you is the title, "Cloud Animals". But the teapot on a barge with some swans swimming by... Man I was struggling with that, as those who know me I tend not to write pastorals! And eventually that was my way into a story, to try and come up with something utterly opposite the tone of stillness and grace conjured up by the image. So I did! Don't think the title is much of a clue for this one, but it's called "Water Fugue In C-Minor". "Cloud Animals" is a flash story at under 1,000 words. "Water Fugue..." is a short story at 2,350 words.
So that only leaves the cover reveal for this inspiring project. I give you - "Triptychs"
My blind lover reached out to light upon me. I stayed as still and as silent as I could, suspending my breath so as to provide him with no cues. I coveted the way he foraged to locate me. Without sound and motion, he zeroed in on my heat. The temperature of my blood. The cadence of my heart, audible only to him. Watching him search only further raised it, pulsing like a beacon. Thus we mutely reinforced one another’s avidity. In time, though our anticipatory senses had in actuality dismantled all incremental chronology between us, he attained the monolith of me. He clasped my face in his hand, gently dabbed his fingers to triangulate my mouth, before bombardiering his own lips to mine.
My eyeless lover did more than cup, contain and compass me. He carved me and hewed me from my block. His expert, unjudgemental hands moved to plot me, each a deliberate motion reforming the configuration of me. Wilfully I shifted and writhed so that my flesh would never settle in the same aspect. Making each handhold of my body a fresh exposure. My contours scaled and duly honoured, not as some milepost or waystation, but a sacred destination in and of itself. Even with my eyes open, tracking his parabolas over my skin, I could not feel myself as he graved me. As he raised the siege of me.
My sightless lover became my eyes for me. For in no other possible way could I grasp my own outlines. My eyes were shut as he revealed me to myself. I enveloped his hands with mine and let him guide me over the unknown terrain of me.
Taken from the flash fiction collection "Extra-Curricular" available from Amazon, I-Tunes and Createspace.
My new wife laid my freshly ironed shirt on the newly made bed. She had folded the sleeves to lie on the shirt's body, cuff resting on cuff, rather than stretched out to the sides.
Like a supplicant
Like a meditative
Like a straitjacket
Like a burial shroud
Like a police chalk outline that had been filled in
London Mayor Boris Johnson, who has never hidden his ambitions to be Britain's Prime Minister some day, this week shared his analysis of the psyche of homegrown Jihadis. Claiming the evidence of psychological profiling, he pronounces Jihadists to be losers rejected by women and "obsessed with pornography". While the psychosexual makeup is a contributory element of the overall mindset, it's worth pointing out that many Western Muslims regard our societies as over-sexualised, with what they deem as pornography being far to prevalent within society.
In my novel "Not In My Name", I give what i hope, is a rather more detailed and sophisticated analysis of the journey to radicalism undertaken by Jihadis. It's not enough to just put it down to "brainwashing", you need to understand what processes are employed in order to tackle it. Here is a sample from my novel.
"The bottom line sees the human spirit remarkably tenacious at preserving itself. The body is stockpiled with a whole battery of reflexes to resist its own cessation and death. Its default setting is for life. So mental illness aside, the only way for this to be overridden, is by brainwashing. An abstergent, yielding a blank screen upon which any message can be projected. Including graduation from a human being, into a human bomb. The knack, is to change the bomber’s desires from embracing life, into a hankering after death.
Interview after interview, I was presented with similar, reedily intoned versions of how this was brought about. One strand had them sat drooling at the feet of some hierophant in a madrassa, as he categorically untangles the frayed threads of life, while they scratch their carpet-fluff beards and nod accordance. I’ll tell you something, if I was promised myriad virgins in the Afterlife, I’d probably enlist myself. Blissfully blow myself to Kingdom Come. Presumably, it’s one virgin to tend each bit of the body atomised by high-explosive. Of course, rather than nubile women, why couldn’t it equally be the ghosts of the 72 camels slain for Fatima’s wedding? That’s the drawback with numerical symbolism. It’s open to double counting.
Alternatively, they paraded before a paramilitary hawk, sharpening the recruit’s claws on his steel gauntlet. The logic he advances, is that the mission should be beyond fear, for no other soldier has such certainty of whether he will return alive or dead from his next action. Whereas the suicide bomber knows to the precise minute. What a boon.
By whichever method, these fellows are striking a deal with their egos. They don’t shut them off, rather they believe they are swapping a pretty squalid life not for death, but for another, improved life up in the clouds. A literal leap of faith. Trouble is, when their heads are blown upwards off their body towards Heaven, sure as hell it hurtles back down to earth under the prosaic ministrations of gravity. Does each bomber actually possess the finer shades of understanding, exactly what the Holy Text suggests is in store for them? Ultimately, they remain just teenagers on the most extreme and ugly of promises. And as to the secularist bombers, they too are left in no uncertain terms that they will become pin-up poster boys on the walls of Gaza and Baghdad. This is the poor man’s version of celebrity. A pension from Iran or Syria will see that their family is well provided for, a sort of posthumous dower. Or a divorce settlement.
When one of the plump-bellied commanders or hierophants squeezes into a belt, rather than a whey-faced waif; when one of those educated-in-the-universities-of-their-foes strategists puts his own body on the line, then I’ll afford them credence that they’re not just exploiting and manipulating these bomb mules. Winding up the key of taut and tutored desperation in their backs and setting them off towards mayhem. See, the thing with successful missions as the Japanese kamikazes demonstrated, is that you cull your elite talent. No such thing as a suicide veteran. You need a constant stream of fresh volunteers. But unlike Iraq, where Jihadists are crossing over the borders all the time, Palestine is sealed off. So the quality of the bomber pool declines. They started sending children and simpletons. I saw them in the prisons too, though I didn’t abuse them any further by requesting to interview them. Even those with the slightest sympathy for the strength of will of the suicide bomber, ought to be repulsed by this abasement. Bad strategic decision.
So I return to these prompters, these whisperers from offstage. The puppet master, pedlars of death. What these men do so successfully, is to take the everyday currency of death in their blighted land and raise it to the ultimate value. The reward they offer, confirmed as instantly as a scratch-card, is the status of martyr. They market death as a lifestyle. Conferring an off the peg posterity. Of soldier; freedom fighter; liberator; hero; martyr; patriot; bomber. When life circumstances have prevented the volunteer from being secure in the roles of lover, father, son, worker, provider, man of leisure. Such appeals strike at the very core of anxiety and neurosis. Become a sapper rather than merely sapped.
These manipulators, these programmers, are marketing geniuses. For being able to turn death around like that and make it an attractive option. An aspirational choice. They ought to be employed in Soho and Madison Avenue, having their work plastered across giant hoardings and on TV. Then they’d be earning enough money to send back to revive their homeland economy. But these mavens of destruction would presumably baulk at the job title of ‘Creative Director’."
1) Pere Ubu - "30 Seconds Over Tokyo"
A song about the dropping of a nuclear bomb, even though neither of the two that were dropped were over Tokyo. Still, unnerving sounds for an uncomfortable track.
2) Mickey Dread - "World War Three"
I grew up in an era when we did talk about the possibility of a third world war with due seriousness and dread. But somehow, when transposed in a reggae idiom, it doesn't quite seem as apocalyptic.
3) DOA - "War In The East"
White man reggae, so yes the threat and menace are back in it. Still I like the almost jaunty rise in timbre of the line "War only brings destruction".
4) Dead Kennedys - "Chemical Warfare"
So you steal some chemical agent and who do you target with it? Only the Country Club Sunday golfers!
5) Minutemen - "Dream Told By Moto"
Yes we really did think about what would you do with the 4 minutes left of life before the bombs hit. And this seemed to be the unfailing response. Typical male perspective, 4 minutes being sufficient.
6) The Pogues - "The Battle Of Brisbane"
In which Shane Macgowan accompanies himself by beating a tin tray against his head.
7) The Clash - "Washington Bullets"
The Clash sing about Latin American politics, of the American government's interdiction against anything faintly Marxist on the continent and the murky world of drugs, guns and money deals.
8) Fund-a-mental - "Sbrebrenica Massacre"
From an album called "All is War", one of the angriest albums you will ever hear as they catalogue the West's campaigns against Muslim states. This is haunting.
9) Black Sabbath - "War Pigs"
Ozzy and Co po-faced for once rather than camping it up.
10) Flipper - "Sacrifice"
There is something primal and primeval about Flipper's basic sound and that seems to fit perfectly for this song.
11) Rage Against The Machine - "Killing In The Name Of"
I was never really into them, so this is about the only one of their songs I know and that really only from the crowdbombing campaign to get it to the Christmas Number One instead of some TV Talent show dreck.
12) Gang Of Four - "Armalite Rifle"
This was only ever a B-Side on a single, but demonstrates their political aesthetic which informed all their early songs.
13) Stiff Little Fingers - "Wasted Life"
The band from which I was the most spoiled for choice for songs about war, hardly surprising that they came from Belfast, but they managed throughout it all to remain pretty non-aligned, quite an achievement in that community torn by strife.
14) Ian Brown - "Illegal Attacks"
Ian Brown the spokesman for Britain's illegal invasion of Iraq with America, based on a fictitious report into Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons capability. It's a long way from Madchester's non-stop party vibe.
15) Discharge - "Visions of War"
Discharge, the band that would be invited to soundtrack the apocalypse.
