A Bubble of Despair

It may, of course, have something to do with what happened to her as a child. Or, perhaps, to do with the more recent traumatic event that ended, as part of the rehabilitation process (as she called it), with a deep familiarity with the writings of Sting. That is, the lyrics of Sting. She said, to barely concealed hilarity: I don’t know, it’s something about him, about what his music says to me. She is currently, as you may imagine, nursing a giant-sized oil-painting of no particular reason or bent. She has much to say.

Such as on the subject of betrayal. And how to bounce back from betrayal and, you know, become all the stronger from the experience. To be happier, even. How to learn to wear those scars with pride, like they say.

In gala force, tonight, the players of stage and screen. Light they may be, but heavy their tread on the carpet. They preferred it though, as they never tire of telling us, when they were happier in their anonymity, playing to crowds of three, tiny gangs of four. They know what becomes of art when you spread it too wide, when you take it too far.

And of craftsmanship. What can one say that hasn’t already been said?

How gently goes that long walk into the.

Into the what? The unexplored dark reality of night time and fog where your artistic blatherings are all of an accord with the whispers in the scrubs? Somebody, you feel, should turn on the lights. As the popular indie magazine Crudup has it (circulation 300): there are leading lights this year who will be up while last year’s leading lights will be down. It is to this year’s winners, this year’s leading lights, that you should be making your overtures. But quick. The magazine is called Trait, obviously, not Crudup.

There are the telephone calls, the submissions, the grant applications, the corners of desks ringed with coffee cups and the memories of when you used to smoke. A leather chair and, for measure, an Olivetti typewriter next to the computer in the corner. Postcards. Half a bottle of whiskey. Blasts of old stuff, the rip of new stuff. A long lingering look when, in the evening, you lock the door and leave just moments after turning off the light. How sweet the scent of the air this evening.

So what happened to her as a child?

As a child, I was six, seven, I was a very what you might call these days precocious child, very solitary and bookish and, you know, shy and nervous with few friends except for my friendship with books who kept me, even at that age, from the edge. My mother was a what I suppose can only be described as a socialite, very beautiful and popular and very proper, very aloof even, distant, maybe not cold as such but not what you would call warm. My father was of a similar nature, from the same sort of background, and I saw him even less as he was often away on business or somesuch while my mother entertained at home. My basic needs, such as they were, were catered to by a nanny who my mother had hired seemingly in foresight of the moment when all of her world crashed down around her head and we spat, nanny and I, all over her as she writhed in the flaming acrimony and projected fire and bile that was her due, I wanted her dead and cared nothing for her as she lay dying, felt absolutely nothing, as the months of agony caused her to reach out for her daughter but too late, too late, as she finally died in front of me, sort of in my arms, and all I could do was laugh, giggle, telling my father when he returned home that I wished that he too were dead, dead like my mother, so I could bury them both in the garden and dance on their graves, my reach for the dramatic in those days as acute as it still is now, and my father disowning me, no more distant than he’d always been, packing me off to an aunt in Yorkshire whose outrageous lesbianism and commitment to the betterment of the working-classes provided me with a cliché of embarrassments that was intoxicating, in many ways, for one so young. Oh, I thrived there, oh how I thrived.

And what of the brother who told her, years later, that their mother had, in fact, lived, had created the whole death scenario in order to get her daughter removed from her? The brother who had been loved and cherished by her mother in a way that she had never been loved and cherished? How much damage did this revelation, all those years later, do to her? What did Sting say?

After the rain has fallen,
After the tears have washed your eyes,
You'll find that I've taken nothing, that,
Love can't replace in the blink of an eye.

Said Sting.

And her brother, as he was about to leave, commented on the small sketch of a face, the face of her old lover that she had knocked from the wall in her anger, in her pain. Here, he said, you should do something with this, with your talent. What else could she do but believe him? Her poetry too, great old gobs of verse that spilled from her, from deep inside, the words literally scorching the paper upon which she laid them and bade them to do their worst.

Which, of course, they did.

With Nobody In It

Cold-blooded in the moonlight, as it streamed in through the pantry window. By any definition: two men staring at a door. Waiting by the door. Nattily turned out in thick, tree-lined jumpers, they stood and waited, blew into each others’ ears - thoroughly enjoyed themselves in the process. You know, said the first, this could be our chance to make amends. How do you mean? asked the second. Minutes passed, the silence held them. Until, finally: Well, said the first, we could walk away from staring at this door and amuse ourselves in other fashions, perhaps somehow relating to all that business of blowing into each others’ ears. Hmm, said the second, let me ponder it and let me get back to you.

Later, hours later, the door long stared at, came the reply from the second: We could, I suppose, make amends as you say - but what would become of that door with no-one to stare at it? You mean, asked the first, as in sort of relating to that old philosophical conundrum of what if a tree falls and there is no-one around to hear it? Yes, said the second. Well, rejoined the first, the door would not cease to exist nor lose its essence of doorness, so to speak, on account of us, or anyone, not staring at it. Are you sure? asked the second. I am, replied the first.

They turned their stares then, for the first time in many a day, to each other. At which point, of course, the door disappeared.

Luminous Tendril of Celestial Wish

The modern voices of cosmology are bent out of shape, twisted into heliocentricish patterns that, quite literally, make no sense. Thus, as an example, the bird-like warblings of Janus Durkharden and his absurd postulations about the form and nature of the fourth universe. Plus, also, the kind of intuitive grasping that is carried out in the absence of cablis firma and is, at the least, part of the suppression of the desire to be part of what used to be called the bigger picture. As a result, it has recently been felt by the cosmological community that it (the cosmological community) and its attendant offshoots would benefit greatly from an attempt at extrapolation that takes into account some of the more neglected areas of study: metaphysical eschatology, universe denial theory, spiritual cornering, cosmogony barks, andro-physics.

The Moon.
Okay, the moon. It is the receptacle for all manner of devices and thingies, aimed from below out of the poor tired hearts of young lovers and old lovers. And, of course, these days also from the hearts of poofers and other derivations thereof: lesbians and stuff. The moon, sure of its glow, hangs there still, inviting salutations and worships that would, quite frankly, be rather vulgar were they aimed at some of our more spectacular heavenly bodies. You wouldn’t, for instance, see Sirius basking in such ersatz warmth.

Celestial Cracks and Thunder Bolts.
Captains of the Clouds and Thor-like thunder Gods are a common sight above the common where they play out their ritual pitch battles in preparation for the true test of whatsit, Ragnarok. But for now, sited somewhere between Midgard and the old school playground, these monster gods are a scene for all eyes. But beware, Mjolnir has been known to slay even the innocent.

Divinity Dry Puss.
A: This is the way here, yes. To the back. In the corner over there, beneath the small table. This the kitty you look for. Yes?
B: Yes. My Divinity Dry Puss who, possessed of nine tenths of the universe’s evil, is enough to destroy us all here. Except for you, of course, our underworldish guide who has led us here in the best of all good faith.
A: Yes, all good faith.

The Big Bang.
As the universe rapidly expanded in less than the lessest blink you can barely imagine, all of it was there, as is, formed and fantastic and much more than the likes of you could possibly comprehend. Before the existence of the universe there was merely emptiness and nothing, and much less even than the nothing that resides inside your head. Less than the nothing that dwells within your barren loins. The universe gave birth to a monster and the monster’s name was you. I mean, the monster was you.

Human Naturists.
And God said: I will strip you from out of the earth and airbrush you out of the bigger picture. I will teach you not to hide the loveliness that I have created and that is my whim to gaze at whenever I deem.
And man said: Fine. Pass me my pants.

Ghosts #1.
Apparitions at the bottom of the stone steps. I fetched my torch to them and they scattered. Later, as I slept, my wife was carried from her bed by unknown hands and placed upon the kitchen table. Her screams when she woke were enough, as they say, to raise the dead. Gone before I could reach them, the hideous things seemed to match the description of my stone stepped apparitions. Years later, after my wife had passed, I discovered that the house had been built upon the site of a former Victorian workhouse. Whoooh.

Ghosts #2.
My wife is prone to all manner of silliness.

Cups That Brimmeth Over.
They are either half full or half empty, depending on how you look at the world. It’s either a clean glass or a dirty glass, depending on who you’re trying to impress. (In The Road to Utopia, Bob Hope adds the following line to his request for a glass of lemonade in order to give the impression that he is, in fact, someone to be reckoned with: “In a dirty glass!”. He wants, in fact, to be thought of as Sperry. Or McGurk. I forget which.)

The Fourth Universe.
Paralleled, somehow, to our own universe (the first universe), the fourth universe is either a huge cosmic gamble or a metaphysical kick in the teeth. Containing fully functioning mirror replicas of all aspects of our own universe, it exists – if it exists at all – as a kind of astronomical yardstick by which we can measure and, moreover, better ourselves. Do you see the ‘you’ over there, caring for the sick and the disabled, discovering the cure for cancer? It could be you here. If we only had the know-how. If you only had the brains.

Immortality Plays.
When the Big Bang banged, I was there. When the universe implodes/explodes, I will also be there.

Fragments of a Rainy Season.
The water falls and all bodies not yet wet avoid the drops through careful mapping and lightning speed. Why they would want to avoid the water is anyone’s guess.

Heathens in Heaven.
You can catch the canticles at broadcast and, you know, spirits would lift you as you trod the clouds and bounced the celestial sphere, where would it take you, where would you go outside the Pearly Gates where Peter waits you on call with a list of your past sins and outside games the way you touched people badly and presented yourself as other to what you really were, did you imagine you could make the escape with all this horror and hatred stacked against you?

The History of the World.
From when it began in Roman times and even well before, the world was a seething hot ball of filth, badness and evil. In time, over two thousand millennia, man walked the earth and bade the fearsome forest before him a stately goodbye. Thus scythed and burned, man proceeded gingerly through the remnants of wood and fossil, picking apart the past and making himself a tool of history. Soon, hamlets and villages, gatherings on the banks of rivers. Then cities and civilisations. Come the kings and their bad queens, ruling nations and people, taking their crowds by the hand through the twists of philosophers, artists, architects, musicians, writers, computer technicians, landlords, illusionists, medicals, scientists and tailors. And then, the whole world at man’s feet as he took on the skyways and rode the celestial mechanics higher, higher until the very stars. Goodbye cruel world, so long!

Wisps.
I see faces in the sky, I see faces rolling by.

The Time Lords Make It.
We are trapped, all of us, within this realm of uncertainty. There is forwards and there is backwards. There is right here. Movement is possible. But not recommended.

Ex-planetary Notes.
They left, the last race, boarded their ships and left. Neither trace nor hair. The planet’s surface as smooth as the surface of a ping pong ball. Rocky terrains and deepest undulations rendered irrelevant by the sheer terror of scale. As their ship sped on, as the residents looked back, the palpable waves of regret enveloped them. By the time they reached us they were stone from pain.

Cars and Planes.
Man crawls, walks and drives. He flies. He flies higher and further than the birds.

The Coming of the Climate.
Over a period of twelve thousand billion years the earth’s temperature will rise to nine months above the lateral sea level of carbon footprint dating and analysis. Which is to say that if we don’t stop using tea bags and breathing out too quickly we will very soon reduce the planet to a nothing mess of ash and fire. Or, alternatively, it may be reduced instead to a ball of yellow ice as cold and as impersonable as those piss ice cubes in my freezer. If we don’t get a grip and return to our caves, become one with mud and rediscover our affinity with all the noble thingies that can barely crawl, that have been the victims of our greed and oppression, we will perish like the pissant, backward-looking drones we truly are. See the stars? Fuck them. Fuck them good.

Money Makes The World Go Around.
Or does it? There was a report the other day that suggested that what, in fact, makes the world go around is young men and their sexually frustrated fuelled aggression. By 2010 it is reckoned that there will be 30 million young Chinese men who, by sheer force of mathematics, will be without partners, sexual or otherwise. And all that negative energy, they say, will have to go somewhere. But where? As for the rest of the planet’s young men, they will surely continue in their time-honoured fashion of not only committing violence and other bad things but also creating the very best of the very best that has ever been written, made, thought or said. Young men? Please fuck them good.

Tiny Tears.
Visible even from space.

How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’.
I was sitting down at the table, sipping my first coffee of the morning, when I, Jack Cole, came up with the idea of Plastic Man, an ex-baddie who, by dint of his new-found super powers, decides to become a superhero. A flawed superhero. An insane superhero, of sorts. Immeasurably powerful. Will go on and on until the end of time. His powers: the ability to become anything he wants by stretching and manipulating his endlessly pliable body. And you would think, wouldn’t you, that the name Plastic Man would be easy for people to recall? Not at all.

The Sun.
Life giving. Hot. Yellow. Avuncular. Round. Afire. The centre of all the known universe. The thing that burns the back of your neck. Hides behind clouds. Once got into a competition with the wind to see who could get the man to take his coat off. Sometimes puts his hat on. Is a symbol of goodness, of happiness, of purity, of life. Is worshipped by all sorts - from the backward retards in the jungles and the deserts, to the city-slickered sophisticates who make our capital metropoles so great. Rises in the day time, sinks at night.

Ghosts #3.
A ghost descends the stair case. The assembled throng see it yet see right through it. The room goes cold. Somebody falls dead. Caskets are unearthed and centuries of family history are pored over. Who could it be?

The Rich, Their Money and Why They Are Cunts.
The rich have the spoils of all at the expense of decent working men and women and would grind you and your children to dust for the mere sake of making even more obscene amounts of money in order to keep their stupid fat faces ever-filled and grinning. They hate you more than you hate them. We have one life and they have it. Take it from them. Take it from them now.

Science.
In yes and the arts are all but diminished save for the remnants of art. The power of art: absolutely no good.

Religion.
Religion is the refuge of backward pea-brains such as birds and worms. Religion is a cool comfort to fiery-tempered bigots and sex-obsessed lunatics. Religion is where hearts are cut open and eyes are blinded. Religion is where you could go at any time to have yourself reduced.

Poetry.
Through the ages of man, a word here, some music there. No rhymes though, please.

The Triumph of Death.
It flirts, death, with life. That is, it plays at the edges of life, encroaching enough to remind us that the paths we travel will one day come to an end. Ah, some kind of keep off the grass analogy. Maybe another mention of the scythe. The bitter end.

A Caravan of Falling Stars

There is the flat screen, the media, the engagement with the processes. The point is that we are all connected, plugged in, to this wider frame of matrix basics and science fiction crap. The trick is to disengage, to stop using terms like engage and disengage, to stop imagining such things as processes.

Odd things burning in the background there, in front of the three red suns that bob above the horizon. Behind the village, full of cloth-eared trolls and hairy beasts, there is the familiar collection of gleaming super structures and flying gizmos. Robots maybe. Maybe it’s a robot society. A hybrid human-robot society that frames the village below, in front, to get across the differences between the two modes of living. Which would you sooner be: a mud skimming, shit-kicking, flea-ridden pisser living off rats and peas, or a highly evolved future sentinel who has long since transcended all notions of perfection?

For instance, she said, we don’t do niggers up here, as our elevator descent carried us down, down through the stars. Below, before we could crush them, a collection of the outside trolls, brandishing banners, scattered into the open ducts, the airways and the gutters. As I said, she said, we don’t do niggers up here.

In the rockets, their blasts heard from even up here, great gangs of people out for some kind of salvation. A rocket ride wasn’t cheap, not even back then, and now, as they make their moves through space, they must surely be rueing the day they forked out. The society we have here is of monkeys, robots, ethereal wisp things, life forms that can only be understood as thoughts, spider-like encasements, blobs of energy, organic tree forms, rays of desire, computer codes, gender-free humanoids, little fat possessors of wisdom, birds, splashes of water, giant rocks and small torches of hatred. Those people in the rockets, we wouldn’t know what to do with them except, maybe, to eat them. Or, rather, to avail them of themselves and send them back empty, husks.

As envoy for StarFleet Extran-Plauno 7, it is my duty to report back at intervals that I deem to be timely. Ten thousand years or so, give or take a century. I am, it has to be said, showing signs of wear. And of weariness. There is something inside me, sometimes, that longs to be hairy. And I ache from a longing to breathe the air. Even though it would kill me. I have certain forbidden dreams of tomorrow.

Here is the story: I am an envoy from a distant planet that is distant in terms that are neither measured by time nor space but rather by attitude. My seven hundred thousand years here have so far been, relatively, short. I am here to study the differences between the two societies that sort of co-exist but only through various processes of ignorance. Neither society, until (relatively) recently, has engaged with the other. My mission, such as it is, is to bring them in contact with one another. It was I who smuggled in the trolls, who gave them an awareness of all they had been missing. I, if you like, gave them fire. And soon I will be punished for it. Yes, punished like Prometheus. But between myself and the trolls there is something more than scientific curiosity and cosmic meddling. And what do you think? I discover humanity, the last vestiges of it, outside, in the shit and the mud, lurking within these troll things, these dirt poolers, these wilderness grubbers. Not within, not inside with these silver robot types who pose as gods. Salvation comes to me, at the last moment. But is it too late? Will I regenerate?

My distant rocket, fashioned from the wires and bits surrounding the gleaming liquid towers, carries me out into the deepest of space. I have left behind the surrounds of protection. I have relinquished my immortality and have chosen to live with the troll things. With one in particular, my wife, who, as we see when we pull out into space, is radiant with our child. Within them both lies hope. And behind lies further hope in the shape of rockets full of blackies, glad now that they’d forked out for their fare.

A Substance in a Cushion

How my nice middle class life began, I cannot say. Or will not say. One thing, however, is for sure: I do, oh boy, enjoy my nice middle class life. I would have to be a mooncalf not to.

My nice middle class life is an entail of first thing in the morning to last thing at night. I begin with a light breakfast of fancies and canapés and end the day on a grouse or a pheasant or something that is, you know, quite particular. I did, of course, say middle class. Which is why I would like to revise my menu to, first of all, something organic and healthy like orange juice and natural yoghurt plus cereal and, lastly, with a slice of something also organic, like pate and maybe a dark chocolate of some kind, additionally a red wine. It begins and ends that way with many nibbled diversions that are both tasty and wholesome and leave me under no illusions as to who I am and what I, as they say, stand for. And yesterday, while lunching at that vegan café, The Greenhouse (where they also sell books and a whole raft of hilarious anti-American postcards), I sat, quite by accident, next to the delightful Mr Adrian Ramsay of local Green Party fame and fortune. Hence my foregrounding of food and the mention of the organic treats that I have mentioned here today.

In time as my existence is all about, I also, naturally, harbour children and bring them up the best I can and how to behave as best as they can and, mostly, how not to, as I tell them, give myself and them also a bad name. There are two of them: Freddie and Freya, we liked the alliteration. They are both young enough still that we can put off yet the struggle we are sure to have on whether they should go to public (that is, private) school or whether we should send them around the corner to the local school that is, of course – given who we are and where we live – perfectly adequate. But, you know. They, my children, have all of the books and oh God, are we truly as awfully ill-drawn here to state our preferences vis a vis the Harry Potter books not being quite good enough now that they’re so popular, we prefer Phillip Pullman, plus choice entries such as Where The Wild Things Are and that gorgeous book about the sisters, what was it called? The Three Incestuous Sisters, with its wonderful illustrations although, you know, we wouldn’t really approve of comics, this book really is quite something else. We also like, myself and the children, those fridge magnets that are words, that enable us to form sentences that, in our minds at least, are a kind of poetry. We also send them to and demand: piano and dance lessons, plus pottery, horse-riding and to book clubs: children’s’ book clubs. I would love to tell you all about it, as I’m sure that they would too one day, when they’re grown.

Anyway, my politics are as you might imagine. I won’t dwell on it too much here except to say that I never miss an episode of Robert Fisk and regard that angel of light Mr Noam Chomsky as a kind of easier to swallow antidote (is antidote right?) to the vulgar buffoonery of Michael Moore, as correct as he may be in many, many things, especially about American foreign policy and all things, you know, arrogantly western. I read a letter in today’s local newspaper that said that after hanging Saddam perhaps we shouldn’t be too hasty in our judgments especially when we have in our midst a man who, along with his puppet or poodle Tony, is not only a kind of monkey but is also the world’s greatest living terrorist and the world’s greatest threat to world peace, the American president of course, I cannot even bear to say his name. I shed tears I do. Real tears. For all the children.

We have here in our little pad, as we like to call it, a range of scented cushions and pillows that have, at one time or other, held soft the tight backsides of the floppy fringed cabaret marks who make up the latest current crop of bright hopes in the firmament world of acting, in drama and big on the screen. They are young, perfect complexioned and nattily jumpered, with sleeves and cuff links and an air of cool that you just can’t learn on the stage although that is, of course, precisely where they learned it. My husband, you see, is a director or photographer or media beat who, in good fortune through his father, landed this job – through his own talent and skills, of course – whereby he meets and entertains all kinds of new marks, actors like I say, who, on occasion, are here with us here in our town pad, as we like to call it, where I feed them organic and dote on them in a kind of motherly fashion although Justin, my husband, of course, is always telling me off and telling me to leave them alone, stop fussing you silly old thing. But if you’ve seen them in the style pages or in the end of year profiles you will see that they all look somehow the same and smell the same, where do they come from? We know where they come from. In their jumpers and rolled-up sleeves, wrapped in their scarves and teetering atop those perfect pointy shoes.

Our travels take us abroadish mostly where we indulge through happenings: wine picking and grape stamping, carolling and big cavorting, watersports and ski lodges, nesting, barrow boys, curling and drag. Where the sun travels we travel too, except when we pack deep into the snow. Brrr. Luckily the winter warmers and the fireside glow. At Christmas, in particular, we rise.

In cinemas we are last to arrive, impatient for the starts. As we claw, that’s the word, through the hushing throng we are at least comforted by our superiority in matters of this. That is, we would not dream of shushing and sighing were the boot, so to speak, on the other foot. Time means little to us. Or, rather, on time means little to us. We can’t always be there when we have to be here. If you know what I mean. So that the waiters and hoteliers who, in converse, treat us with that respect lacking towards others who, for instance, keep clock or make much of the fact of being waited on. Waiters, in particular, can smell this, can seek out those for whom being waited on is something of a treat and therefore a rarity and therefore then something that is not, if you like, within them, part of them. They are, it has to be said, little that is much worth attending to. No wonder their bitterness, their shouldered chips.

When to visit the library, when to smoke the cheese, when to curl up to the rabbits, when to tend to the graves, when to cobble the stones? These are, and we know this to be true, the questions that hold us fast here in our nice middle class life that has so much more to give and so much more to say for itself than you would find here with the easy mocking tone and the easy kicks. As Justin said, on first proofs: any fool could do that. Before he jet-skied into the horizon and rose, some days later, a whirligig of Martinis and dolly-birds. What about the children? I asked. What about them, darling? he replied.