A wild slim alien

Tag Archives: Lipogram


by 7 Comments

The comical hotch-potch, or the alphabet turn’d posture-master: on writing lipograms (an afterword to Missing letters)

The comical hotch-potch

I’ve just completed a series of stories called Missing letters. Together they make up an alphabet of lipograms, a lipogram being a piece of writing composed entirely without a particular letter (or group of letters). I’m relieved to have finished, and now that I have, I thought it might be interesting to write about the experience of writing lipograms.

While I was working on the first letter in the series, I came across an article by Jonathan Franzen in which he contended the following:

‘My work represents an active campaign against the values I dislike: sentimentality, weak narrative, overly lyrical prose, solipsism, self-indulgence, misogyny and other parochialisms, sterile game-playing, overt didacticism, moral simplicity, unnecessary difficulty, informational fetishes, and so on. Indeed, much of what might be called actual “influence” is negative: I don’t want to be like this writer or that writer.’

Obviously there are some items in that list which most if not all of us would sign up to, but others – well, ouch. I can’t help feeling Franzen is being more than a touch prescriptive about his approach to writing.  He himself is guilty of at least a couple of the items with that very statement, let alone the essay as a whole. I loved The corrections, but ‘negative’ is the word here. We all come to writing from different places with differing intentions and motives. It’s not hard to imagine that Franzen has no truck with or time for the Oulipians. That’s authors like Georges Perec, Italo Calvino and Harry Matthews, who provided themselves with constraints which inspired the works they then went on to create. Perec it was who wrote La Disparition entirely without the letter ‘e’; not the first lipogrammatic novel, but probably the most famous, along with Ernest Vincent Wright’s novel Gadsby. Perec’s masterpiece, Life A User’s Manual, written with a full complement of letters, has a complex set of structural constraints based on a chess knight’s tour around a 10 x 10 grid, the squares of which represent rooms in flats in a Parisian apartment block. What the constraint serves to render is a beautiful book full of very human stories, some simple and sorrowful, others humorously fantastical or extreme. Life A User’s Manual or Calvino’s Invisible cities are just two answers to Franzen’s reductive critique.

Perec thrived on the challenges he set himself. You can impose rules on yourself and deliver something which you might not have achieved in any other way. When Franzen dies and is honoured with a sinecure in literary heaven, perhaps he’ll seek out Perec to debate the issue. And Perec might well wave a Gauloises in his face and say that it’s not a trick for trick’s sake. Likewise, though my stories might have been written another way with a different set of rules or a complete set of twenty-six letters, the resulting fiction still has depth of meaning. Playing a game doesn’t necessarily make the way the work unfolds any less emotionally true.

Would my stories have been better for being written unencumbered? The point is that they might not exist but for the constraint. From the choice of title onwards, the constraint shaped the stories and the stories fought the constraint. There are scores of different ways of saying roughly the same thing, and each of them has its own nuances. You choose the nuance which most closely resembles the truth of the fiction you have in your head. The constraint has also served to make me think that much harder about how to avoid the ease and restraint of clichés.

While Perec was the background inspiration for these 27 pieces of mine (I wrote a second story for U, suggested to do so by how the first unfolded), the immediate inspiration came from being reminded of and reading a more recent novel, Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea.  Forbiddingly subtitled ‘a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable’, in fact it is as whimsical as it is clever in following the troubles of islanders who successively lose the use of letters of the alphabet, as a result of the irrational authoritarianism of the island’s elders.  The islanders themselves battle back as flexibly as Dunn negotiates the ever-increasing constraint, and in so doing reinvents the English language:

‘Such a beguiling sight – your long auburn tresses falling as cataract in shimmering filamentous pool upon the table top, gathering in swirl upon your note paper – obscuring? framing? your toil.’

I can’t make such claims for myself, of course, but the commoner the letter, the more I found I had to bend the language, and come up with alternative ways of saying what I wanted to say, which often turned out to be better than the sentence I might otherwise have written. Each letter presented a different challenge. For some, conjunctions and definite articles were out; for others, participles and past tenses.  Every grammatical construct was at one point or another unavailable to me. But language, like water, can find a way around each obstacle it faces. And there is definitely a creative tension between the story-telling and the being one fork short of a full picnic set.

How Perec managed in the age before computers and word processors, I will never know. When I finished drafting a story, I habitually ran a ‘Find’ search on the letter which was supposed to be missing, only to discover there were often several and sometimes even tens of the little blighters highlighted in fluorescent yellow. S was the only story where none of the letter in question got through the net of my finished draft.  I guess it tends to stand out in a sentence.

Along the way, I had a wonderful comment from Lunar Camel Co., which got to the heart of what I was trying to do, and how I viewed the challenge:

‘I’m always interested to see, reading these, whether I’m aware of the missing letter — whether I’m noticing the writerly things you’re doing (not unlike tumbling) or whether I’m too caught up in the narrative to be conscious on that level. Often it’s a mixture of both, but I got too caught up in this one to think for a moment about who, what, wildcats, etc.’

The set of 27 is far from perfect. I only slowly realised that the lipograms were becoming predominantly fictional, and so a few are riddles or non-fiction, and maybe one of these days I’ll have another pass at those letters. Probably some of the narratives need a little more room to breathe, and perhaps if they were appearing in book form rather than here, they would get that.

To which letter would I direct you, if you wanted to sample one in particular? That’s hard. Ironically the last letter of the alphabet is possibly the best story, about a woman leaving a relationship as a result of an ant invasion – but that too would not have come into being but for the suggestion of the missing letter.  Combining Perec and Calvino in a two-headed Hydra for U – imagining first an alien poaching and eating her eggs in The reader [u] and then a talking horse in The horseshoe [u] – gave me most satisfaction and fun. On one occasion a single lipogram wasn’t enough to contain a character’s story so she returned in another – I [b]’s anthropologist is a lone survivor on another planet, until she meets her end in We [r]. Another memorialised a pub in my home town – The Cupola House [q] – which sadly burnt down last year. There was a lot of life, death and meaning in these stories.

But if you forced me to settle on just one, perhaps I would suggest the playful love story that is CK & U [F].  That’s what it all probably comes down to. That I am playing with letters, with words, for the sheer joy of it.  Perhaps it’s what I like to do most of all.  Jonathan Franzen too, I suspect.

And now? I’m not sure what the writing future holds in store. But I am certainly looking forward to being able to use the alphabet’s full range, without constantly double-checking myself for a letter which ought to be missing.

Image of Carington Bowles’ The comical hotch-potch, or the alphabet turn’d posture-master, 1782 via Granger Art on Demand.


by 1 Comment

The horseshoe [u]

In a remote hamlet many moons ago there lived a farrier whose air of charm had allowed him to make a marriage above his station to a similarly charming woman, the stripe of whose character he had not bothered to ascertain before the banns.  He liked the way she felt in his arms, against his chest, and at that time of his life, little else mattered to him.

His new wife placed great store on the lore and traditions of their part of the world.  One of these was to hang a horseshoe above the door of the dwelling place, in order to catch all goodness and keep evil at bay.  The farrier however scorned the old ways, and to assert his word over both his wife and the whole of his domain, he nailed their horseshoe to hang from its loop rather than its arms.  When she saw what he had done, his wife told him that any milk and honey with which their coming together had been blessed was now as good as spilled.  The farrier scowled, and said as if to himself, ‘Next she’ll be telling me that horses talk!’  In the coldest tones of their marriage so far, his wife replied, ‘Mark my words, we will pay a price for this.’  The very next day the farrier was kicked into the following week by an irritable stallion whose hooves he had been overlong in shoeing.  He had only a dim notion of how close he had come to being kicked into the afterlife.

On his first day back in the smithy, he hammered the index finger of his left hand broken.  The following week having been called to a job, he stepped inside for a drop of the local elixir, and emerged to find that his tools had been stolen.  He began to get a name for mishaps befalling him.  Many who had once come to him with their beasts looked elsewhere, fearing that he was more bother than he was worth.  Some work however still came his way, and soon he began tentatively to remark that the ill-winds which had been blowing his way now seemed to be howling over someone else.  ‘Told ye so’ passed his lips all too often.  His wife bit back her chidings.  Had he considered why, he might have realised that her silence meant something; sense, let alone wisdom, had not yet been knocked into the farrier’s head.

What the silence meant was soon revealed.  Walking one afternoon into the stables of the richest man in the district – the man who provided him with the majority of his work – he froze to see his wife bent over a bale of hay while his lord and master made close inspection of parts of her anatomy that till then he had fancied marriage had rendered to him alone.

The shine the lord of the manor had taken to the farrier’s wife went beyond worrying what serfs and vassals made of him, let alone God, and soon after being discovered in flagrante delicto, he arranged for an accident to befall the farrier while on his way to a distant farmstead.  Left for dead in a ditch, the farrier crawled his way to the road’s edge, where a passing tinker added him to his collection of scraps, trinkets and ironmongery, and took him on his way.  In a town a great distance from the only place he had ever called home, he slowly began to recover his wits and his senses, cared for by the tinker’s wife.

The tinker liked to shoe his own horses, and had the wherewithal to allow the farrier once he was better to renew his trade in the town to which horse and cart had carried him barely alive.  Soon he was able to afford his own premises, above the door of which he nailed a horseshoe with its arms pointing to the sky.  He did not really believe that fate had anything to do with the chapter of accidents which had befallen him; however, he wasn’t going to take any chances.  His heart was clear.  He bore his wife no ill will yet neither was he of a mind to take or win her back from the lord of the manor.

One morning he was close to finishing trimming a fine sorrel mare which belonged to a rich landowner whose patronage he had gained.  As well as the elegance of her coat, the mare was notable for the two silver bangles which circled one of her forelegs.  When he had asked the owner what was their significance, he had been peremptorily told to remember his place.  Now amid the blows of his hammer, he was staggered to hear the horse speak.  ‘No hands have ever handled my hooves as gently as this farrier’s have.’  So great was his shock that he only narrowly averted another broken finger.  The voice was half-neigh, half-maiden, and came to his ears as it might in a dream.  ‘I am going mad with overwork.  Did this mare really speak to me?’  A silence followed his words; then once again he heard the same strong yet honeyed voice.  ‘Yes, it was I who spoke.  I believe I have finally met with the man for whom I have long been looking, the one I will make mine if he makes me his, for I can hear in his words and his mind that he has taken blows at the hands of fate as have I.’

Speechless, the farrier stood before the mare and waited for more.  ‘Ride me to the head of the great river, and once I have taken a drink there, kiss my nose and rotate the bangles on my foreleg three times each.’  ‘And then?’  ‘And then see once more how life can change from bottom to top in the space of moments.’  Amazed at what the mare was saying more than at the fact that he was talking to a horse, the farrier said, ‘If I steal a horse, I can never come back to this town.’  ‘It is not stealing to ride a horse if the horse herself was stolen in the first place and she asks a good man to free her.’

He was being asked to leave behind his restored good name and a life renewed on the say-so of a talking horse.  The farrier realised he was at the mercy of another twist of fate; it was clear to him that he had to follow the path laid down for him.  ‘I have remade my life from scratch once before; I can do so again if need be.’  He sent word to the tinker and his wife that he had been obliged to leave immediately, thanking them for all they had done.  Then he bestrode the mare, settling into a leather saddle of a fineness beyond his own means.  Letting the reins fall, he allowed the mare to carry him across the borders of many wapentakes, following the river back to the spring from which it began.  Few words passed between man and beast, yet with each mile he felt the connection growing between them.

When they reached the head of the river, the farrier let the mare wander into the water to drink.  As soon as she had finished, he kissed her nose and rotated the bangles three times each.  So swiftly that he was never clear how it came to be, the horse transformed into a maiden-spirit asleep on the wet meadow grass by the water, naked save for the two silver bangles on her right arm, and so lovely that the like of it can only be told in tales, and yet is neither to be imagined nor divined.  He planted another kiss on her lips, and freed at last from enchantment, she awoke into his arms.  At no great distance from the head of the river, the farrier and the horse-maiden began their life together.  Children who had the power to transform at will into foals and back into children followed.  And the teller of the tale let them all live happily ever after.


by 2 Comments

The reader [u]

The writer can’t help imagining the reader of these words.  He hopes it’s not ill-mannered of him to poke his nose and the imagination which lies behind it into affairs which are none of his concern.  In his mind sirens call and he finds himself irresistibly drawn into another attempt to replicate a three-dimensional life from scratch, from nothing more than the cross a finely sharpened pencil might make on a map; a world from a grain of sand.

So he imagines her, or certainly alternately it might be a him… perhaps it might be safer in terms of not antagonising half his readership to think of this archetypal one as a non-gender-specific alien.  Yes, a race which doesn’t have sexes.  However, they do have sex; it’s the best of both worlds.  When they decide it’s time, they pass the calcified egg between them and go half and half on the rearing, like Emperor or King Aptenodytes.  In most other respects however they are like earthlings.  They enjoy a good breakfast, for example.  Poached eggs – they’re not averse to eating a reptile’s or bird’s – on wholemeal toast, with a pot of coffee.

So he imagines it in its kitchen.  Wait a moment; alien or otherwise, he doesn’t want to label his reader an ‘it’.  Perhaps it’s better after all if he says ‘she’.  Call it an attempt to redress the balance of the ages when it comes to denoting species as a whole by the male gender alone.  Earthlings and aliens in possession of the defining male characteristic will have to forgive him, and place their mind temporarily inside that of a female of the species.

So he imagines his reader first thing in the morning, scratching the scales of her nose with one set of highly developed fascicled toes, and with another clicking her way to this page on her technological device of choice; or perhaps if these stories ever find their way into a hard copy format she will simply take the bookmark from the book which at night resides on her bedside chest of drawers, and there at the kitchen table begin reading the next in the collection, namely this one.  Slowly, with the dawn, the realisation may arise that it concerns her, and the writer hopes that far from giving her a fright, this might make her smile.  As well as the poached eggs – which need exactly 180 seconds, as determined by the special perfect poached egg app on her technological device – she has the toast and coffee on the go, and these moments of waiting to sit at her kitchen table reading.  Really she only needs the app for its stopwatch; she’s cooked dozens and dozens of poached eggs in her time and knows to whisk the sea-salted, boiling water till it resembles a whirlpool before dropping the egg into the centre of the vortex, and that if it isn’t freshly laid, to crack the egg into a ramekin containing a drop of vinegar to aid the congealing process.

The coffee’s percolations travel in scented arabican loops to her nose as this very paragraph is scanned and despite the many tasks she has on the go, her mind’s eye feels it has settled into the rhythm of the writer’s prose.  At the ding of the app, however, she stops reading to plate and begolden the toast, fish the eggs (she’s having two) from the pan with a slotted spoon, and decant herself some coffee.  With the plate before her, she slits the two snowy ovals with her knife and watches with keen appreciation as gooey yolk pools on the toast.  Her tail swishes between the rods which form the back of the wooden chair on which she sits, spiralling one of them in what is evidently a characteristic expression of content.

As she wipes a smear of yellow from her reptilian lips, the writer imagines – especially if she is reading the story on the web where it may be less apparent that it is constrained than he imagines will be the case with a printed version – that the reader has been paying close attention and is in on the raison d’être of these stories.  She knows, for example, that as well as each story missing a letter, each takes its lead from the title, and attempts to tease as it skirts employing typically chosen words, preferring instead less common, lipogrammatically permissible forms.  Paradoxically he also hopes that at the same time as she is aware of it, she is also not noticing that the letter highlighted by brackets in the title has been temporarily excised from written English.  For he hopes that these stories work either way, with the knowledge or in its absence.

Having imagined it, the writer himself can smell the coffee now.  She likes it strong, and he wishes he might have even a thimble of it to keep his brain sharp as he strives to avoid the letter which it is necessary to avoid.  Idly he wonders if she has read anything of the sort before, broadly speaking.  He imagines she is a well-read alien, and will at least know of If on a winter’s night a traveller and Ella Minnow Pea and La disparition – translated as A void – even if she has not read all of them.

It’s a spring morning after a long winter, and the alien carries her device to the back door to keep on reading as she opens it to the day and lets light warm her scales.  Blooms are beginning to appear on the wisteria, and the tips of its stems are starting to seek something to hold onto.  Once again she will smile, he thinks, as she sits down with her second coffee on one of the ironwork chairs at the filigree garden table to carry on reading, over all this metafictional nonsense.  He allows himself to imagine that she likes writers who play with words, who love making them dance to their satisfaction and that of their readers.  However, now that his shaggy alien tale is nearly at an end, he stops to wonder whether she might in fact have preferred a good old-fashioned proper story, and in a flash decides to see if he can incorporate one.  Had he gone down that path rather than this, he might have written something with the title ‘The horseshoe’ and had the aim of transferring to his reader something of the felicity that went into the writing of it.  In the shire where the writer spent his formative years, it was traditional to position a horseshoe over the door of a dwelling place, so as to catch all goodness and keep evil at bay.  From this detail, he begins to fashion a fairy story, one which describes the mishaps which befall a careless farrier who pooh-poohs old wives’ tales and deliberately challenges the Fates, and that’s what part two of this lipogrammatic clash of postmodernism and traditional narrative is going to relate, a click or a leafing of the page away from here.


by 3 Comments

We [r]

Anna lay dying.  The disease against which she thought she had immunity had at last eaten its way deep into a body unable to fend it off.  Not long dead themselves, the colleagues she had lost had now become ghosts alongside the people whom she had left behind at home.  They moonwalked the modules of the silo, and leant down to pillow level to speak quietly unsettling sentences about joining them into Anna’s pinnae.  She hadn’t sufficient pep now to close the blinds, and watched the days pass double quick, two against each slow one back home.  The leafy giantwoods outside cast shadows which sundialled the walls of the sleeping pod like speeded-up film.  She had the sense that time was scuttling to a point, and existence likewise – the full stop following which it would not be possible to say, I think, so I am.  She would not be thinking, she would be dead, although life on this odd planet would still go its seemingly infinite way.  No-one was left to put Anna in a box and the box in the soil, and eulogise beside the gaping hole.  But then millennia would see to it that Anna’s skeletal body was slowly compacted into a seam of fossil fuel which some subsequent colonising species might use to heat living spaces whose design she could only dimly imagine.

These thoughts came in clipped pulses, and between them – as she phased in and out of consciousness – was white space onto which the annals of Anna’s mind flashed a slideshow of images.  Times past, landscapes she had walked.  A balloon against a sunset.  A dog and its dancing shadow as it jumped in a meadow with a deep blue sky above.  A pumpkin, its jagged teeth, nose and eyes alight with menace.  A headland and below it a beach, glistening wet in the sun.  A cove on the same wild and wind-smashed coastline.  A white sand beach and two caves; placed between them, Anna’s own walking boots.  She felt the feeling of naked feet and toes in sand as she stood in one of the two caves looking out; a keyhole of light doubled at the bottom by a pool left behind as the tide ebbed.  A snowscape with stone walls.  A small wooden shed in a lush, sloping field; the angles of the hillsides led the eye to that little building clinging to one of them.  A goat standing atop a dusty bank next to a stack of baled hay, upon which the animal was feasting.  At the goat she laughed, and the sound she made, so unlike a laugh, shocked Anna into consciousness again.

Then above the wind, a sonic boom.  In the last gasp of depleted faculties, Anna knew it must be the salvage mission.  Salvage, because they wouldn’t be expecting to find anyone left alive.  A blast of synaptic agitation emitted itself deep within a mind which had once been fine and difficult to shake.  Why now, just as she was about to die?  Couldn’t they have waited, have given these final moments the peace she wished them to have?  She didn’t want to be found mouth open and spit hanging and with clothes which smelt of shit and piss.  Would that she was instead simply a skeletal boo!  She thought of the duck-billed platypus in its glass case; Anton’s find, his joy on display.  Yes, that was what she now wanted to be.  With Anton, back home.

The noise should have faded as the ship touched down, but instead the tail of its descent seemed to be met with the exclamation point of an explosion.  It jolted Anna’s mind alive, and she had now one final chance to validate the Cogito.  But it was not so much thoughts as images which began assembling.  Again Anton came to mind, and without a shadow of doubt she knew he was on that flaming ship, come to save his one-time love.

Images of what they had seen hand in hand flooded Anna’s mind, as if they might be unspooling in his quaking consciousness and telepathically passed to Anna’s.  Six silhouetted ponies on a beach with the tide out.  Yes, that day!  A boy had been unseated and the spooked pony had bolted into the town, causing havoc.  If telepathy was somehow possible, then Anna could conceivably pass images back to Anton.  So she sent him jumping into the Blue Lagoon, focussing especially on those pulse-heightened moments in advance of stepping off the cliff.  He sent Anna an image snapped by his mind while they had stood high on the cliff above looking down on the lagoon.  This was like magic!  She sent him the moonscape of limestone paving they had once visited at the end of a solid day’s walking.  He came back with dunes in which they had made love, the lapping sea to the east, the flat of cultivated, quiet land and a distant temple to the west.  Next she gave him a mountain top, an island and the lapis lazuli in which it was set like a piece of jade.  The palette of this image must have made Anton think of that peacock, defiant atop the gable of an old stone building.  Then what about the peacock and peahen they had seen sitting face to face on a fence, effectively kissing?  She sent him that, and saw his smiling face.  Anna smiled too, but now the end was close.  She wanted – needed – to see these scenes again, to have new sights to hold in common.  It was so unjust; she wasn’t done yet.  She wanted obstinately to live, tight to the point at which she and Anton simultaneously died.


by 2 Comments

[w] and a memory of childhood

Only after she joined Circus Alekan did Marion learn to ride.  One spring morning, the trainer offered her lessons; at a loose end, she said yes, thinking nothing of it other than the chance to indulge the fascination horses had held for her since girlhood; the chance too to see life from saddleback height.  Besides that, she could not have simply articulated the hold they had on her.  Perhaps she loved them because they seemed at once unfettered and gently docile; free and excitable and dangerous yet all-embracing in their comfort and sugary amiability.  Once she had finished the course of lessons, the trainer revealed his thinking – that she had it in her to perform her acrobatics from the platform of the horse’s back.  She laughed him off but eventually he persuaded her, buttering her into an affirmative through saying he had never seen as natural a first-time rider.  That, added to her gifts as an acrobat, not to mention her petite beauty…

Flying through the air on a trapeze had not been her ambition till late in her childhood. She had been something of a dreamer, scorning colouring books and pens – these could not match the colours generated by letters and phrases as she spoke them out loud or in her mind.  Out of fairy tales she span lengthier yarns featuring herself as their core character.  Her ever-extending vocabulary paraded across endless skies and each item in it competed for the most vibrant colours, or at violet hour the most delicate, the palest.  Because of her size, because she often seemed lost on a planet far from others, she fell subject to being labelled an oddity.  She didn’t care, for happiness came from perceiving ‘fingertips’ as silver, ‘horse’ as butterscotch and ‘leaf’ as an amber, autumnal hue; ‘star’ burned sapphire and ‘field’ revealed itself as an undulating sea of flax.  Soon she thought she might like to be a poet, only she fretted that the poems could never be as colourful to others as to their author.

Routinely the young Marion hid herself beneath the curtain-like tresses of a Salix Chrysocoma, there to dream and bring colours into being.  Besides nature only the circus could match the richness of the colours she perceived in her head.  It had begun the year they first pitched their tent nearby her home.  The red and the blue of the big top, the ginger spraying from the sides of the auguste’s face, the silver sequinned costume of the Russian funambulist sparkling in the spotlight as he danced the length of the tightrope eliciting intakes of breath.  From then on she had only one undeclared object in mind.  Circus skill training not being an option, she settled for gymnastics and spent all her unscheduled hours tumbling.

It started then, the living of a double life, the life all live to a greater or lesser extent – a double one, that of the interior and the exterior.  But hers by any measure had been an extreme case of the dominance of the interior.  If she looked back along the path her life had taken, she could see she had been happiest at those moments of conjunction – lighthouse flashes of love for another human being, the expressive movement of her handsprung body through the air, the age-old gliding of a bird of prey above a hillside hanger.  But rarely did she share anything of that interior life.  Her synaesthesia seemed itself a perfect conjunction of art and science, of magical colour and a predictable exactitude, yet instinctively she felt no-one could understand its meaning, except perhaps another poetic synaesthete, and she never met one of those.  She moved through her life either in languorous, ethereal motion or as a blur of elusive colour.  The others largely avoided her.

In the circus ring Marion and her horse Quicksilver spiralled the air into a life-affirming breeze.  The music and gasps and applause from the audience came as from afar, much like the rhythms of her heart – she heard them as a series of pulses on top of the galloping horse’s hooves, such familiar sounds that by them she could set her tempo as she performed near-miraculous feats.

She had been the horse trainer’s since the day he first picked her up all covered in bruises from the floor of the ring.  But though she loved the man he didn’t complete her and she felt obliged to look beyond him.  For a time she admired the taut muscles of the strong man, but he never made her heart sing.  The auguste brought forth music and made her laugh, but theirs could only ever be a brief encounter.  Then there had been the impalement artist; in the end she had cut him more deeply than he had her.  The day the lion tamer joined the circus, the horse trainer finally had his hegemony seriously challenged.  She had never felt such a thrust through her heart as in the moment Isaac first set his eyes on her.  Mute, she stood transfixed, oblivious to all else.  He carried his difference about him; instinctively she could see that he too had once been scorned and labelled a freak but had risen above it.  Livid red streaks scarred one side of his face; the result of flashing talons on the one and only occasion he had been careless.  Never before had she been attracted so magnetically.  And so the living of a different kind of double life began, one lived in both the interior and the exterior, conjoining them at last.  She tamed the lion tamer, and in so doing set him free, and vice versa.  Both in its command and spectrum of colours, Isaac’s strong, deep, accented voice thrilled her.  In an outlying caravan in the depths of the night, he became her horse and she his lion and together they merged the grace of acrobatic flight and the anticipation of formal strictures.

You could never be certain about the future, but time gave Marion to understand that Isaac loved her more than his lions.  He too had an interior like hers, and since he did, regardless of separation or loss, she could no longer envisage dying of a broken heart.  ‘Broken heart’ – she heard that phrase as the intermingled colours of a bruise.  ‘Heart’ by itself – a different matter.  One night in the caravan she told Isaac its colour as she perceived it and never loved her lion tamer more than for his immediate reply – ‘may your heart stay vermillion forever’.


by 2 Comments

CK & U [F]

Theirs was an Anglo-Gallic connection, with a little Czech thrown in.  Strangers seated together on a late night Eurostar, Christophe-Karel and Ursula bonded instantly – not over anything in particular, simply through personality’s give and take.  The one mapped onto the other, like overlaying diagrams or the sky blanketing landscape and landscape rising to meet sky.  Had the train’s guard set his stopwatch on their love, he would have recorded that within the ninety minutes subsequent to meeting, they had become Chunnel club members.  On entering the tunnel, CK whispered in her ear and rose, not daring to look behind him, knowing his whole world depended upon what happened next.  Thirty seconds later Ursula made her way along the aisle too.  The impatient knocking on the toilet door they only incorporated into their urgent, appetent rhythms.

In the days and weeks to come they were insatiable, comme des lapins, or cockerel and hen.  They had sex whenever and wherever they could.  At each other’s workplaces, on beaches, in restaurant toilets, gardens and parks, cemeteries and countryside declivities, cars and cinemas, hotels and tents, and naturally at CK’s apartment in Belleville and Ursula’s in Bow.  Neither were intimate acquaintances’ spare bedrooms spared.  Their coupling might be violently quick one moment, languorously slow the next.  Each place in which they made love suggested a rhythm and a manner.

But as well as being highly sexed, CK and Ursula were also incurable romantics, and decided to do what Parisian lovers do – engrave their ampersanded names into a padlock’s brushed metal sheen, and ceremonially go to the Pont des Arts to lock it into place on the railings there.  But they did not deposit the keys into the Seine, as tradition dictated.  Instead each would wear theirs around their necks; should circumstances change, and one or the other wished to take down the padlock, either to throw it in the river or simply pocket it, they remained entirely at liberty to do so.

Sorbonne-educated, CK was somewhat theoretical in his outlook, and as they dined that night at Les Ombres – in darkness Gustave’s tower sparkles on the hour – he ventured a somewhat dubious lock and key metaphor.  His cock, he said, had unlocked her cunt; it was the key to her mechanism.  But – and he was quick to stress this – it wasn’t as simple as that, it wasn’t all down to the key; because the mechanism was a complex thing; it chose when to give, and to whom.  She laughed, and said, more keys have worked on my lock than just yours, you know; but seeing his crest droop a little, she made it and his key stand tall by going on to tell him that no-one had ever unlocked her as completely as him, personne.  And it was true – simply his voice, the way he said cock and lock and mechanism and cunt was enough to render her entirely oiled and open to him.

And because theirs was an Anglo-Gallic connection, they hit upon the idea that they should also have a love-lock in London, and hang not one but two keys around their necks.  There were wires stretching the Millennium Bridge’s length which could take a padlock.  Theirs was the maiden lock.  Go there now and there are thousands upon thousands.  Initially the Trust which owns the bridge sheared away CK & U’s padlock along with the others.  But as well as being incurable romantics, they were also a bloody-minded pair, and so secured another, and then another.  Soon the phenomenon grew wings, and men armed with bolt cutters began to be jeered as they went about their business.  The public outcry obliged the Mayor to request a moratorium on both locking and cutting while a long-term policy was hammered out.  But lovers aren’t as easily dissuaded as corporate maintenance, and the remaining gaps on the wires soon disappeared.

London seemed evenly split over the padlocks.  Hard-hearted heritage protectors decried the damage done to the city’s most recent bridge, but to lovers the city is a playground, and they played on, oblivious to their detractors.  The issue was debated in the London Assembly, and when it came down to it, the Mayor – not unhappy with his own reputation as a Casanova – gave the padlocks his backing.  He liked the idea that London might displace Paris as Europe’s romantic capital, and had an unlikely ally in the bridge’s original engineers, who discovered that the padlocks helped dampen the bridge’s synchronous lateral excitation, or wobble, so notoriously troublesome when it originally opened.  The mayor correctly judged that the hard-hearted traditionalists in his own party weren’t numerous enough to carry the day; the vote was narrowly won, and the padlocks were granted a reprieve, CK & U’s latest among them.

Though they continue to lead separate lives, CK in Paris and Ursula in London, they still give each other synchronous lateral excitation whenever they can, and to this day both lovers wear two coupled, jangling keys around their necks.


by 2 Comments

XTC [e]

I’m having to pick my way artfully through this topic, as I pair notions with songs to match. Sgt. Rock is going to aid my stab at this most difficult of lipogrammatical tasks, but I’m still touching a rabbit’s foot for luck prior to starting in on it.

So it’s touch, sight, olfactory bulb and tract, all that acts synaptically on that muscular mass for tasting in your mouth, all that’s audibly born through air too, working in common to impact amazingly on your brain, as MDMA might do, in a club, with 4/4 rhythms insisting that you consign your mind and gift your body to music’s structural flow. On occasion grass or laughing gas might work similarly, allowing you a stony high or making you stupidly happy.

It’s also a singular kind of thrill, which works maximally with coupling parts locking in sinuous gratification. It’s both an armchair holding your body and zaps of almost painful joy acupuncturing your mind. It has you burning with flaming optimism, blowing rooks away, and can unfrost any snowman in an instant. It’s yachts dancing, ladybirds loving, dog day cauldrons of knock-out punch and a wish you had which abruptly blooms. It’s fluvial orchids and dictionary minds. Pink things and fruit nuts. Brown guitars and radios in motion. Stars twinkling as fairy lights do at Christmas and a full moon’s glow. Rain and sun skylarking to form a rainbow. It is, to sum up, your own palatial Nonsuch in which any wondrous thing might occur.

This kind of thrill scorns cash; it can run on nothing much at all – a farmboy’s salary, say. Follow such a boy and his girl walking arm in arm through high swaying corn, making plans and passing hours carving wood and daubing paint. As dark falls, should Thor blast lightning from his tool and so crack monstrous sound simply out of sky, watch on still as our pair hold fast in sugary bliss; mark how two minds can lay upon a solitary pillow. Caution though; as participant or fly on a wall you might incur its risk and cost – its morbid Midas touch.

It scorns status too – Argonaut or navvy or blacksmith or mayor of a small town, it’s of no account, all can act as king and consort for a day. It’s no ball and chain, and usually though not always it balks at chains of command. Nor is it for somnambulists – waking up is what it’s all about. But with luck a runaway and a vanishing girl might find lasting comfort in its clutch.

My final thoughts: always avoid a void. Day in day out. Last thing you want is that sound of a scissor man snipping, coming for you. Raging against dying light and any fat lady’s song, that’s what I’m advising. And without a doubt Sgt. Rock thinks so too.


by 2 Comments

The Cupola House [q]

It was a building more suited to the south of Italy than to its actual location, set into a terrace along one of the cobbled streets of an old English market town.  Like the rest of the house, the zenith – the octagonal cupola itself – was now a mess of peeling stucco.  But its bell still tolled the hours, albeit at some degree of variation from the metronomic chiming of St. Edmund’s.  For three hundred years the two bells had carried on their conversation, and for that same number of years, the townsfolk had been happy to eavesdrop upon it.

Built by a prosperous apothecary who had been three times mayor of the town, the Cupola House was the kind of informal institution from which every place of its size benefits.  For a building with an Italianate exterior, inside it was rather a spit and sawdust kind of place; no-one seemed to know how it had resisted the tide of gentrification that had swept the rest of the town, save for the landlords’ stubborn refusal to listen to offers.  The couple could see their customers liked it as it was, no frills save for a bar lined with the best beers that they could source; and so they kept the cracked flags and the stained tables and the wall above the roaring fire somewhat blackened by years of wood smoke.  It was lived in, and snug, like a cardigan worn for comfort rather than style.  Which is not to say that the Cupola’s customers lacked style, but that comfort was interpreted individually by each and every one of them without much regard for the fashions of the day.

Though a bastion of the non-conventional, the welcome was as warm as you’d get anywhere.  The landlord and lady strove not to preside over their domain like monarchs at court; they saw themselves more as servants of the mood, and the mood came from the customers and the longevity of their custom.  The drinkers relaxed into the Cupola’s unforgiving wooden chairs as if they were the plush leather sofas in the lounge bar of the grandest hotel in town.  In a nook of the Cupola’s rather more democratically open living room was a woman whose broad, immediate smile and mass of curling russet hair ensured she stood out even when she would prefer to observe rather than be observed.  A regular from down the years and across the week, she might be said to be House royalty.  Hers was a regal name, too – Charlotte.  Not that she affected airs, or found herself deferred to; in fact the reverse was true.  From the first sip of her opening drink, she exuded the warmth you saw in her face; a striking face whose attraction was in part that it was open to life, to the scenes that she witnessed as she went about her working day, and to the people milling about the pub, so many of whom seemed to take a chance at some point or other in the evening to engage her in conversation, like bees buzzing about an apian monarch.

As was the case with that earlier red-headed regnant, Elizabeth I, it was hard for a newcomer to gauge who her consort might be; but the outsider would swiftly divine that such a woman would not be walking through life alone; and on closer inspection, he or she would spot the man sat across the table from her, arguing the toss with a logic so unbending and rigorous that in its glint the observer would deduce the beginnings and sustention of their attraction.

The evening we see her embarked upon, this was the evening of her mock-coronation, for it was between the third and fourth pints that she let slip the news that the (cross-dressing) younger of her two sons had recently become the singer in a Parisian electro swing band called Princesse.  A wag nearby suggested that if her son was une princesse, then she was la reine – la reine Charlotte of the Cupola House!

But all was not what it seemed.  Charlotte’s life was two intertwined spirals.  As one helix spiralled up among the pints of ale and glasses of wine and shouted conversations and gusts of laughter, the other spiralled down on into the stillest part of herself, from which detachment sprang words, swimming upwards for their life, breaking the meniscus of the lake at the centre of the forest of noise around her with the sudden grace and surprise of a landlocked dolphin.  The words that rose mused on her fellow drinkers, on herself and her lot; and on the nature of existence.  They were beguiling words as they broke the surface of that pool in her mind and Charlotte knew she really ought to catch them before they lost their buoyancy and disappeared, very possibly forever.  But more often than not the stories and the images held in them sank from view as the whirl of the evening and the first of those two intertwined spirals scooped her up in its arms and bought her another drink.  Sometimes, however, when she got home in the early hours, or waking sore-headed in the morning after a broken night’s sleep, the words would still be there, bobbing like apples or corks or waterfowl, and she would net them or feed them bread and then once more she had language in the palm of her hand.  She didn’t care much if anyone read what she wrote; what was important was to name the nameless and numberless feelings and thoughts and images teeming up and down the two spirals, leaping from one across to the other and back again.  To do this was to achieve a moment of measurement, of graceful balance, in the see-saw of life, a life whose chief certainty was that the helter-skelter whirl of another night at the Cupola would be upon her again before she knew it.

*

Both spirals were silent – the one rendered speechless, the other wordless – the day she turned the corner and saw that the Cupola House, that beautiful building with its long history and its warm welcome, had been gutted by a fire.  Its bell tumbled, its cupola gone.

When the words came back, she would ensure that its memory was kept very much alive.


by 6 Comments

Sleeping [z]

It was the ants who told her to leave.

Sunday morning he lay wasted in bed and she rose early to find a foraging column making its way to and fro between the back door and the pile of sugar he had spilt in the early hours but neglected to clear up. Each departing ant had in its clutches as many of the fine, translucent-white grains as it could carry. While the outgoing line descended from the worktop down the face of the fridge, the incoming ants ascended. The two broadly parallel lines stretched away across the floor, disappearing into and appearing from the gap under the door, a gap visible to both the human and the formic eye. Beyond were a couple of concrete steps, in the crevices of which the nest had been created and the colony lodged.

Feeling like his mother, if she had told him once about the sugar, she had told him a thousand times, but he. Never. Bloody. Listened. Away from the columns of ants – it wasn’t their fault – she smashed his Dunfermline Athletic mug on the floor tiles. The dregs splashed on her bare feet.

She wanted to go home. He didn’t want to; ‘Not just yet, hen.’ She wanted air that carried on it the scent of the sea or the heather over which it had blown rather than a single day and night more of kebabs and grimy heat and petrol fumes. Recently too she had been dreaming of feet kicking at her tummy from the inside, kicking her so hard that she would wake from sleep. She had told him the dream, but she could tell he didn’t want to; ‘Not just yet, hen.’ So she slept while he lived life as an urban ghoul. She needed to wake up, to snap out of it, to do what she wanted to do, be where she wanted to be. For too long she had clung to the belief that he had to get all this out of his system, and then he would be ready. But she knew now he would never be ready. He would always spill the sugar.

As a girl she had been fascinated by ants. The singular way they formed their collective, she supposed. They seemed so driven and determined. She crouched on the floor tiles as she might once have done to get a better view of them. Even here crawling across the theoretically hygienic space of the kitchen, they didn’t make her skin crawl. She watched them scurry, able to move off in any direction as curiosity or the surface over which they were passing required, always returning to the strength of the line.

She opened the back door, and there were the first flyers of the year, spreading their wings; or rather, rising as cavalierly and as uncertainly into the air as the pioneers of human aviation must have. She had refused to let him kill the ants, either with powder or boiling water. In that sense she was to blame for the problem as much as him. In all probability they were doomed from the beginning; perhaps she should have asked him back then what his position on ants was, or insects in general. Filtered out his mass murdering tendencies.

She stood up, stepped back over the ant lines, and added what sugar remained in the bowl to the spillage on the worktop. To her eye this did not create a sufficiently impressive mountain, so she opened the store cupboard, found the rest of the pack of sugar and emptied that out too, followed by healthy measures of demerara, caster and icing sugar. The ants deserved the lot, and he could walk for his afternoon cup of tea, or drink it unsugared for once.

She packed her suitcase to the rhythm of his snoring. He remained oblivious as she moved quickly and quietly around the bedroom. There seemed no point leaving a note; the sugar mountain was eloquent enough, and if he didn’t understand its message, then there really had never been any hope.


by 11 Comments

Birds [j]

I don’t remember when in my life I first became aware of birds.  Do any of us?  And yet they are a common experience to us all, rich or poor, city or countryside, north, south, east or west.  We must as children simply take them for granted, their chorus at dawn, the chatter through the day, their hush at night, broken only by the hooting of owls.  Perhaps we were fascinated by the hopping and pecking of sparrows, or wary of the gulls when they got too close for comfort on a beach.  Maybe our sense of wonder matched David Attenborough’s as he presented us with the extraordinary wattle of Temminck’s tragopan, or our imaginations were caught up in Tippi Hedren’s panic and terror as the birds gathered around her in Hitchcock’s film.  Or perhaps we simply had a father or a mother who liked to point out the birds in our garden and tell us what they were.

I didn’t have that, but I suppose my daughter does.  She’ll engage or roll her eyes, according to mood.  She likes to see them feed from the half-coconuts outside the kitchen window.  Dead birds are definitely interesting.  A tit beheaded by a sparrowhawk or a siskin’s neck snapped through collision with a window.  Both of those we buried.  Like the seemingly innate ruthlessness of the cuckoo, the sparrowhawk shows us that they have no scruples, that survival instinct rather than morals is what binds nests or flocks of them together.  But how hard it is not to think nature is inherently good when you wake to a dawn chorus.  In Cormac McCarthy’s The road, as much as anything else it is the absence of birdlife which renders his post-apocalyptic world terrible.

How then did I make my way to birds?  It was a small hop from the trees, I suppose.  Originally, from words, words printed on paper made from the wood of the selfsame trees.  From wanting to be a writer and believing that a writer should be able to describe the world, should be able to say which flowers are growing as characters pass across a wasteland or through a formal garden, which trees line an avenue in France down which they cycle, or, as a narrator soliloquizes about his life from the hard comfort of a picnic table, which bird has landed at his elbow.  From making this effort I know a little bit more than I otherwise might, but I still feel an ignoramus in front of the vast variety of the natural world.

But I keep perusing field guides and checklists, and as I have done with trees, perhaps I could also outline my life using the birds which have flown through it.  Sparrows, pheasants, and pigeons.  Herons, peafowl, and Canada geese.  Red-crested pochards, tufted ducks and coots.  Blackbirds, crows, and great tits.  Nightingales, of course.  Murmurations of starlings, tidings of magpies.  There has been the odd Garrulus glandarius too.

Keep your eyes peeled for birds with a twitcher’s intensity and you’ll see things you’ve never seen before.  Red kites soaring on updraughts where a plain meets a line of hills.  Falco subbuteo – the hobby – emerging from an abandoned crow’s nest to fly like a Brazilian footballer dribbles.  A charm or flutter of greenfinch chasing each other in and out of a hedgerow.

Near where I work there is a park and at its centre, an aviary.  I don’t much care for birds in cages, but we will insist on putting them there, and I suppose it is another means by which children come to know birds.  The other day I was circling this aviary and I saw two cockatiels copulating.  The male’s cheek was no more blushed with colour than it usually is.  The sex was rough and short-lived.  The female flew off as soon as it was over; no endless turtledove cooing here.  I wished the cockatiels an uncaged life back among their native Australian trees.  One in which they could stretch their wings whenever they wanted and raise their young to live free.