Eat The Knowledge That Grew In Clay

He became, first after filth, a tiny wallow in the miseries and splendours of this so far sad century. He believed, moreover, that this wallow somehow guaranteed him a place inside a rich, full life. He was, as he often told his friends, a right-handed writer who wrote like a left-handed writer. This meant, apparently, that although the right side of his brain had wrestled the controls, it was operating in a kind of delusional, rocky state where nervousness and fear were the truly dominant drivers. He held on to this state by way of a high-level monkeying around.

As the sun broke, the horizon emptied. He threw himself into the tender mercy of the blue sky. But an unexpected regret hit him, on his way down. He wished to live long enough to kick himself over the rashness of this moment.

(His collective mass of organs and bones whistling down tubes, through the moistest pulls of fleshy gruel. How he manages to stand is a mystery to everyone who knows him. Translucent, his blue pipes are merely an advert for his mechanability. See him wobble. Run when he staggers.)

The monkeying around, at the higher level, was enough to lift him past the vulgar notion of splat. Not for him the rough landing on the bonnet of a car. Not for him the indignity of his trousers around his ankles, the shit caking his arse. Neither for him his chin in his chest, his eyes in the back of his head. Mid-air, like a cartoon rabbit, he stepped off a glass ledge and trod softly to the ground. Terra firma clasped him tight.

My own connection to him was something of a shift. I watched him from behind closed curtains. I used eyeglass peepers that could see so far. I had him down even as he went down. You would have thought, given our distance, that we were passing strangers or mortal enemies playing out on a wider stage. The truth, however, is that we were the firmest of friends.

At the landing pad and carried aloft by various supporters and sponsors, he reached down to the hand of my wife who was there also to greet him. My wife, who was there to greet him as a friend, allowed herself to be pulled up and carried also aloft along with this survivor of fall who was once also my friend. Riding together, those two, they looked so natural together, those two, and even I, spying behind curtains, was moved to some small degree by their adulterous antics as they kissed in the rain, sheltering from the spittle of those certain angry gods. Those two up there, the crowd of nothing below them, what rainment could have been a fit for them? What crowns of diamond could they have worn for appropriate glow? What swish of finery, all spun gold and delicate gossamer, could have been a match for the crepuscular push that led them into the fade from my sight? None. Nothing.

His creativity knew no bounds, it was often said. The right side of his brain and the assist from the nervy fear of the driver. He pushed his pen just to watch it go. He shook from the sheer exhaustion of it all.

What the I am on about is that this creator of fancy dawdles and inexplicable moonbattery - replete with all his fancy poetry and prose - was a fucker of my wife. Up she rose and down she went. She later said, to me, on a dusty park bench in Mablethorpe: I loved the way he survived and how the racing loom of the concrete did nothing to deter the very best of his mind. We watched, the two of us, as we spoke of him, our arms disappear beneath a blanket of ladybirds. It was one of those days.

Organs and bones they pulled from the river. They laid them end to end. A certain McIntyre, a constable, said: If we pulled him thin and laid him out and spread him from end to end, we would, in a matter of days, touch our feet upon the moon. Look, his teeth, said my wife, as she sorted through his ruins.

Because that’s what you do, she said. You look out at the rain.