The dead morning ( a continual story )
The only sound that morning came from my footsteps on the hard linoleum floor, that familiar noise of entry and exit, as I ended my journey at the door. The exit. The entrance.
I rolled those words around my mouth, eeeeehhhhgggzzzit, Nnnnnnntranceeeeeee, and felt very happy at the sounds. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the broken glass on the worktop. And I read in the form of words, An idiot pounds these halls, pads these wooden boards, and quite suddenly I found myself stood leaning against a car opposite my house, fully clothed.
I squinted blindly into the haphazard sun, its early javelins being thrown deep into my orbit. The image of the sun burned into the retina.the lapsed catholic.the mastermind. Othello, words that trouble the stupid and noises that lock out the poor.
A connection of skin that bridges over the landmass a thousand years wide beyond counting is the horrible burnt encounter between countenanced pebbles on a hundred separate shores. I craved circles. Rotundity. Spherical shapes and sounds of glass smouldering under padded feet and then I stopped. Wherever It was that I stood I opened my eyes. I walked softly around a room. This room. The only sound the coming from the slapping sound of naked feet on hard linoleum floor. I looked down toward the sound and the fractal patterns I had burned previously into the floor suddenly came back to haunt me, as I knew they would, the familiar/strange geography of my own house becoming a landmass of irreplaceable items. I placed a finger on the wall and traced a thousand years. I slowed the revolutions of the clock by the projection of a stone. I placed the stone in the oven and hoped for evolution. I tried to elongate the light as it fell on my hands, moulding the light that had travelled from the sun;
# Extract from diary/ written the night before:
“ Its hard to understand the meanings of all these lines, they’re angles in relation to the wall, and the wall in relation to the floor and the relation I have to all of them. I sit here aimlessly scribbling lines on the floor with a ball point pen, and when it runs out, I pick out another and start the process again, no reason or thought can comply with the motion..”
I placed the diary back on the wooden table and sighed for an unspecified amount of time, realising for the first time that I was naked and suddenly laughably cold, the redolent emotion around the negative space giving away all the presumed secrets of my frame, I looked to the door and remembered monsters came through here last June, images of the past played out in slow motion, coal black hearts and minute attention, lesser trade halls and strychnine detention.
Rounding the doorframe the light from the front doors proportionate light seemed brighter than lies to me, the cold sun hearth willing me the stairs. I decided to sit down on the third step and waspishly collate my moments, I crossed my arms my thighs and hung my head, aware of the nakedness and the odour of flesh in the ripening sunlight, the carpet from this angle gave me ideas of psychosis and memories of the first house as a child and the time I would spend on the stairs just listening to the redolent noises of my parents, the occasional laugh of my father, or the mumbled hush of my mother, and I felt no comfort in looking backwards, no sense of fondness was reached, I remember sitting on the stairs and hearing the silent arguments, and marking the wallpaper with my fingernails, digging into the thickly coloured wallpaper, the feeling of wallpaper underneath nail satisfying my need for distraction. I raised my head and with my hand I felt the carpet on the palm, the peculiar feeling of a stair carpet, fresh, worn, fresh, fresh, worn, fresh, this fleeting revelation seemed to awaken something awful inside me and the continuation of the action brought this closer until I nearly vomited on myself, the memory wasn’t false and the Iroquois nation would sleep easily that evening.
I observed the hairs on my arm move forwards, I could see the expansion of the universe, I knew instinctively what it looked like the shortest possible time after the big bang, I saw it very clearly, I saw it move silently through the nothingness creating the space it left behind it, and around it, and in front, it’s peculiar silence always a feature of it, standing up I started to climb the stairs backwards, an attempt to reverse time? The coldness of my body was now apparent, even to me, even to the person who livened the organs, although the sound of a slapping foot on cold linoleum reverberated in my mind, echoing gradually louder, I had to keep scratching my head to distract myself from the noise, or I had to make voluntary noises to compete, just to determine which noises where real and which I was just hearing inside. I slid my hand through the still closed curtains, the warm sun light captured between the curtain and window a reminder of the rapid may fly death in the African congo, the hovering of the mass, warm before death, they’re first few moments agonizingly close to they’re last, my hands moving gently around the curved edge of the windowsill, years of old gloss paint piled on like automatic laughter.
I must have fallen asleep on the floor, under the radiator, like a useless cat. At this level, I could see the malevolent coarseness of the carpet, it’s smell dragging me out of my blank infinity, I wrapped my body in a blanket and could with the suddenness of thought saw no merit in pouring my eyes over some foreign texts, or sketching the palisades of the momentarily lonely, I drifted into the bathroom with my eyes closed pretending to grope blindly for the light cord, even though it wasn’t there, ( I disabled it ), I stood flailing in the darkness for a few minutes, which in the negativity of the darkness seemed to drag on for an era, my arm swinging left, right, left, right, smashing into the wall, into the door, again ,again, again, the repetition of the action countermanding the pain, this action opened up colours in my imagination which I needed somehow to pursue, mainly green lines that I could only hope held an answer to a question I hadn’t even begun to understand, and yet, and yet, I stopped, the motion in the darkness suddenly boring me, I held my arm close to me like a protected ensign, when a sound, a noise louder than banging on wooden doors but softer than tearing flesh that had distracted my pathetic violence echoed around my corridors of pity. The sound was virulent. Like empty metallic truncheons on a prefabricated structure, but softer, then louder, then nothing. I stood on the landing desperately trying to decipher the shapes through the frosted glass, were distorted mannequins faceless beasts obviously where determined to belittle my efforts at fortification.
I never understood this house at all I now realise, I lived here for spans of time that equalled years and never understood it’s true nature, its inherent purpose, it’s blank appearance sluicing my derision and ideas, I had unconsciously trained each atom of my body to recognise each noise and sharp corner, to recognise the smell of lack thereof, to walk these halls blindfolded and bruised I would know the turns, the creaks, the spinal closeness of injury, to know the speed of all doors as they shut in my path, knowing which ones to catch before they fell in they’re cushioned pockets. Groping walls for light switches and never arousing a sound, each and every lock amplified in the sodden post electric air, so slowly my hands would glide along the once ruined patterns of the anaglypta paper which seemed to be welded on or so my mother claimed, or so she claimed all her life.
#extract of diary from the night before
“ the noiseless wheels of the wheelie bins being pushed to maximum velocity tonight, useless eviscersation? Secondary sexual impulse? Do I want to fuck the bin? the feeling of desolation is hard on my heels tonight, a throbbing impulse to kill or fuck something, maybe both.”
“The tears haven’t stopped falling once tonight “
In the kitchen I once again paced the linoleum floor, the slap, peel, slap of my bare feet making the most distinctive sound I could possibly imagine, I walked in a seemingly endless circle, making the same mistakes every time, catching the side of my leg on the uneven wall with my uneven body falling from the unending floor, a balance had been achieved in this circumlocuted motion, but even this deleted half spectrum of salient light failed to channel my torment away from me, and then, and then, in the deepest recess of my mind I realise suddenly that there is someone else in the house, this is very real and cauterising, I keep glimpsing shadows in the very edge of my sight, flailing figures falling , flailing figures falling down the stairs and throughout the shafts of light between my broken twisted fingers, which blind me endlessly, I see these shapes, these desperate ionised pastors, mandolins and ancestral spines, and then, and then, I found myself being very quiet whilst hiding under the stairs, I wasn’t sure how long I had been in there, but from the emptiness in my stomach, a few numb hours must have elapsed.
There was no straining light around the edges of the door, so I unclicked the partial door and into the dark cold clapping silence I strode aware of my own particular mass in relation to the cupboards, the dark recess tin laden hell, the machines that inhabited this small room, the mocking nature of the fridge, the chattering cutlery, I turned in my socked feet and walked away from the sleepless mechanics and I closed my eyes and opened them very rapidly, I repeated this action for a minute, I counted one hundred blinks, the darkness was filled with bright holes, a collapsed empire voiding the sun, a solitary animal inviting the callous calls of a million distilled invisible sonic cathedrals, I halted myself as I fell into some stygian abyss, the blue black mountain of trestle tables and sloe gin assaulting my mind. An idiot fork. Stuttering spatula. The nothingness of a ladle, the total mundanity of these objects had always fascinated me, and now that it seemed that I had entered some odd time-zone, I decided to explore the banalities, the triviality, the prosaicism, the beautiful inertia, the viable ennui that these inanimate processes projected into the world like vapour and strange glances, these useless Maundy death throes had always somehow confused and disturbed me and had always seemed a little bit sinister to belong in the realm of a delicate pale reality, the reality in which I slowly slipped from on regular occasions, a slow concrete post thrashed into the ground by a thousand megalithic hammers, my mind imposing rules and barriers.
I spent three whole days lining up the contents of my cutlery draw on the one long worktop in the kitchen.
I then spent four whole days studying each item of cutlery I had lined up, each in on it’s own merit, each on they’re own, like metallic soldiers waiting for orders that would never come.
I think I must have closed my eyes and fallen asleep, curled up as I was in some strange position covered in an old orange blanket which had always reminded me of a clear lake as a child, I would wrap myself in the woolly fibres for protection not warmth, with my head under the dining room table and my legs stretched out and lost touching the wall I remembered early morning here, early winter mornings when the heating would discharge itself from the fire, but it would seem cold and I would lie head down on the floor so cold and twig like with no residual heat.
I started to cry under the table, to weep silently, an imbalance of the past and the future, and here I was trapped in some hideous middle ground conceptually idiotic and held down by feather strong memories;
I dragged myself from the table lair, and stood in the half curtain light, the blanket loosely on my shoulders, the kitchen behind me over my right shoulder, the whispering knives silent in the early morning mourning, the house appeared to be changing shape at every turn, blink, an interconnected amalgam of at least five house in which I had had certain and irreparable disasters happen to me over and over again, those stairs, that dining room, three hundred kitchens.
No comments:
Post a Comment