But I had spent enough time here, in this hallowed place of my own imagining, justifying it the title of some second, deceptively unloving home. The beams, running overhead in tired procession, were aged, pitted and, in places, singed with some long extinguished flame. Their passage across the white-washed ceiling, twisted in places and buckled in others, had been the wonder of many dying eyes over the long years, of many gazes twisting in and out of focus like telescopes operated by some devilishly uncontrollable child.
The visible portions of the walls were covered with slightly smoother panels of wood than those overarching supports, the material having been replaced at some point in the last fifty years, where those thick, twisted trunks supported the ceiling in such a way that even the idea of their temporary removal would toppled the old building, as though the very magic contained within these walls was ingrained in every scar on that ancient wood.
Hanging at angles which, under different circumstances, could be described as jaunty, aging photographs and posters dating back to World War II adorned the newer panelling. Kitchener’s face, all harsh lines and even harsher moustache, glares out into the centre of the room in a manner reminiscent of some elder sibling, one who possesses something approaching self-awareness, something capable of haunting my waking hours. Across from that everlasting glare sits desire, an abstract concept chained by some dead art, sits the attraction of innocence in physical form.
The eyes of that long-dead woman glitter in the half-darkness, the product of some fading candlelight and the smoky, red air of a lighting system reaching the end of its serviceable lifestyle, another in the long line of replaceable parts in the creaking machine of a silent, unmentioned war. She sits, as though the paint daubed across such canvas could possibly reflect the muse for whom the image was created, with one shoulder bared whilst the other supports a thick, rich collection of materials, cloths and silks plundered from unimaginable lands, shipped and warped and condensed until they fit in a designedly haphazard manner across her white tenderness.
* * *
I know what you want to see. You want this metaphor to come together here. You want this prophesised combination, of the Worthless God and the twisted, failing Drunk, to occur within these next few pages. You desire a new personality to emerge from the stratus of their existence, one confident with his talent, in synergy with both aspects of himself. Particularly after such a quote, one echoing through existence and speaking of revolution. You desire to see them combine, and then rise against this italicised voice of mine. To ascend, and come crashing down against me, like the wrath of the ocean on the impudent land? That would be an ending of sorts. In fact, it would bear more in common with the possibility of a new beginning, one fresh and unstained by days old vomit and meaningless drivel. Before I allow a travesty of such a magnitude as narrative to appear on these pages, I would be nothing but ash laying on some distant shore, washed away amongst the dross.
* * *
Her eyes glitter as though some over-used metaphor, her smile sparkles like the lure of idiom and the tops of her breasts, peeking out from the once red material, seem to shine, no doubt oiled and fussed over like a writer’s simile. Her hair is hanging around her shoulders, such movement captured in such a way that the reality could never match the promise hidden within those brown curls created by the animal hair brush.
All hidden meaning, all promise and castrated lust held in plain sight on the canvas. So many times have I sat below her watchful gaze, so often has she urged me to have one more, that the promise of her sanctuary was tied into the thick, almost aqueous solution spewing from nozzle after nozzle behind the raised barricade of idealised, albeit blasphemous sobriety.
The floor was as even as the ceiling, the influx of modern practice shifting the old, stained wood into singed green tiling, chipped by the influx of heavy workman’s boots. Even now, as I pause at the door, enjoying the breeze on my back and the culture thriving ahead of me, feet shift in awkward positions, they leisurely kick at the base of the building, each and every idle movement marking the floor. The heads, the extension of some inevitable war between biology and psychology, perhaps with a little sociology throwing its influence into the debacle, appear to bob and shimmer in the air noticeable for its lack of smoke.
The crowd wasn’t composed of reality at this point. It was an abstract; it was an idealisation as opposed to some macabre actualisation of the company I endeavoured not to keep. Until I dived into the mess, some protagonist lost in the fog and the forest of the counter-culture, it remained as I would prefer it to be. I could love it as it was. I could find joy in its company.
It was the people caught within that ponderous metaphor I could not bring myself to love.
But, across from me, around the sharp corner demanding some sudden, drunken handbrake turn, the modern psychologist stood behind his couch of brown leather. And so, sacrificing love for the chance to love, I swallowed my discomfort, my hatred and my discontent, and I strode into the twisting shadows I would once have been pleased to call a home.
* * *
The wait was bearable, no falsified frustration thriving in my carefully careless pose, the poison dripping its last into glass forged by supposed intellect due to some untenable research. Time did not seem to slow as that hand, marked with ink and the imprint of a pen still visible in the toughened flesh, lowered the glass to its position. It landed like a glass would, on the golden-toned spillage guard, the head barely shifting in its obscenity, atop the thick black body it lorded over.
The head was nothing here; the body was all I desired. My lust was controllable, of course it was, but that did not mean I wanted it controlled. I was tired. Exhausted of waging a war upon myself, upon the very things that, I had been assured in recent history, made me who I was supposed to be, of rejecting my own desires in the vain hope of some eventual repayment, as though everything I might desire was tied up in the refusal of the phantasmal objects themselves. Knackered of walking by such temples, such buildings dedicated to satisfaction, all the while refusing to acknowledge even my desires to myself.
The glass fits in my hand so well, as though that genius behind its creation had measured it to the sickly claw I had, and still have, the tenacity to call a hand. My nails, uncut for days, found themselves forced against the glass before my flesh, the last desperate attempt of my body to reject the vileness I so desired. I will not pretend that it was some necessary action, that the self-destructive episode was beyond me, was bigger than the small world in which I struggled.
Had it been the influx of some cosmic influence, the chemical production of some xenophobic species’ innate hatred of me, even something not so exciting, some foreign entity possessing me, controlling me, then I would have at least continued my worthless, unnoticed war on its relative evils. Though my desires were self-destructive, I had the pleasure of knowing that they were mine, and mine alone. I thrived in my idiocy, in my folly, in the indulgence of my very nature.
I weaved my way through the crowd with once deliberately-forgotten experience, with a sudden understanding of these good people, these champions of my morals, of my fully-formed ideologies, these defenders of those rights I was certain had begun to fade as though dew in the morning sun.
Elbows and knees, twisting faces, overly-indulged stomachs and the overweight arses of the modern proletariat all pushed their way into my progression, all low-level villains in some stylised fantasy video game. I moved through them in a manner reminiscent of an English free-running enthusiast, all sudden spins and impossible avoidances, gravity defying stumbles and pacing which seemed to send me effortlessly into the air. I dodged them all, occasionally grazing the occasional shoulder in my sudden, spontaneously undeserved confidence.
* * *
The smile was one he forced upon himself, one he caused by forcing sharpened lies between his lips, by sawing them from side to bloody side until that red grimace stretched from cheek to cheek. He painted it over
his eyelids, high gloss ink reflecting the mediocre light as though the very majesty of his work shone in his expression. His face was white with reflection and sickly ideology, a healthy pall for recent corpse.
He hides his hesitation behind appreciation, gratefully breathing in his own imagined success. His honest lips twitch in their barely contained sorrow, his eyes narrow in loathing whilst pupils following his protagonist through the crowd. He wouldn’t leave here the same. He can’t. He’s in the mess now, into that mass which cultivates personality for the clearly expressed purpose of the harvest, though such a desire is blatantly ignored by those caught within its ill-fated borders.
He is afraid now, for all that he remains cold in his activity and for all that his whims have yet to be sated, by these meaningless taps of numbed fingertip on numbed plastic. The fear takes form in solidity, in the lack of reaction to horror and ill-used weaponry. In the realisation of a workman’s tools left in the dirt and vehicles abandoned deep in the forests of idiom.
* * *
I’m tired.
I’m so very exhausted fighting your destruction, both that of the self and that of this poor character. I never thought, when those idle queries of mine crept through the ether as though I had no control over them, that you would abuse them so. But you were so desperate, weren’t you? Buying over-priced, leather bound notebooks to store your masterpiece in and writing on nothing but the receipts? They stand now on empty shelves in rooms you never enter, surrounded by the trials of talented artists. Do you remember how you placed them with a guilty hand, as though you had earned the right to store your blank pages amongst those heavy ones?
What did you do with all those receipts? All that cheap paper thrown into some ignorant breeze, marked with your attempts at knowledge, tattooed with your desires? Or do you possess some cheap cardboard box, a remnant of an old phone, now out of use, or an empty box of chocolates you never managed to give away, within which they are secreted? All covered in otherwise unusable stickers, fleshed out with past tickets and paperwork and the paraphernalia of some dull excursion into memory?
Will Varley
I had intended to fight the desire, even after I had already succumbed to its generosity. I had intended to war with myself, to use my mind as the battleground in an over-used metaphor. To fight in some decaying castle, or one rebuilding itself around us, with lexis in places of blades and the slightest discrepancies of grammar as a punitive defence. To race up grandiose staircase with fragmented cloth upon the steps, along broken battlements, ones that have never seen a soul, into the honesty of dungeons inhabited by nightmares and nothing more.
I forged his weapon for him. I sweated to turn argument into steel, to twist quotation around the hilt that his hand may not slip on his insecurity. I, burning my own hands in the process, used acid to mark the weapon with dramatised utterances that could sway me from my path. I drew my own blood in testing its sharpness, and I strengthened it with my own fears, that it may not snap beneath my own assault.
I contributed more towards the production of my antithesis than I did on my own, the weapon slipping from my own arm as simple as addiction and as complex as compulsion. My own blade was pitted and marked, notched with the minor bites of constant war. My handle was unravelling, my own engravings had long since eroded away, to become nothing more than one long trench in the cadaverous weapon.
And my opponent, that replication of myself whom had, somehow, managed to find the time to shower and shave and eat before our war, never appeared. I know not what thought process ran through his caricatured conscious, whether he simply ran out of time, so intent was he upon living. Whether he approached and saw the state of my palace; saw the bodies of his predecessors strewn across the blackening landscape like ineffectual seeds. Whether his confidence in my idiocy was such that he expected me to fall upon my own argument, or the one I made for him, lost in my misery and my lack of certainty.
And so, around me and in his absence, the wall crumbled brick by brick, the gates aged and rotted as their hinges rusted in sympathy. Those visible tapestries of my triumphs and those of my hidden failures unravelling before my unseeing gaze as though I plucked at their edges like a bored child. A gilded throne crumpled in on itself, some weak ephemeral portal opening within the hollowed glory, the braziers snuffed out with the hint of smoke and nothing more.
And still the glass weighed heavy in my grip, condensation mixing with my sweat. Above the black liquid, above the object through which I had to travel in order to satisfy my desires, the head was thick and maintained the apparent texture of richly indulgent cream, of an advertising scheme with a misunderstanding of necessity. I knew, even then, that my satisfaction did not lie in those depths, but where else had I to search? Where else, when the written word and the spoken, when art and intellectual honesty had nothing more to offer, where should I turn to?
* * *
You owe me an explanation. You owe me at least as much as you owe him. For all that he has stalked these streets, for all that he has travelled his grey world in silence, at least he has had the breeze in his greasy hair, he has had a burning sky on the horizon and he has had emotion, if only those of bitterness and of apathy. What was I offered, when you plucked me from the horrible beauty of an empty sky? Was I consulted when, with nervous fingertips, you kidnapped me from the unnerving tranquillity of emptiness, of abandonment?
I did my time for your race, I stood by as musicians and artists, as poets and geniuses and writers deserving the term used me for their own ends, few creating their creations as a tribute to me. I do not understand you, through your transparency, through your lack of hidden meaning behind legitimate prose.
Why a church? Why lead him into to such an unfitting area, into such a prison? Is it fear? That if you directed his staggering footsteps into a place more befitting his personality, a library, for example, it would show you for the pretender you are? To position him amongst such literary geniuses and fools would force your own incoherent narrative to crumble beneath their gaze, to shrivel under the judgement of the dead and the dying?
Where are the narratives that forged you and, by extension, him? Where is Orwell, when the nightmare culminates in the waking, or the eternal sleep? Where is Tolstoy, when intercourse is empty and meaningless, and man hates the very word of man? Where is Joyce, when the artist raises himself to his full height, when he can at least describe himself as a man, without the slander of youth? Where is Huxley, when biology fails beneath the human desire, when nature is tamed by cruelly gloried ingenuity? Where is Plato, when Greco ideology lies unheard in ancient vaults, the very tips of ancient words misunderstood by those who profess to worship such romanticised folly? Where is Varley, when your apathy, his, is finally abandoned. When its very definition has shifted into a weapon, so long has it hovered over your fragmented mentality? Where is Turner, when the punk matures, for a given value of maturity, into his own personality, one freed of the mass? Where is Fitzgerald, when the bottle runs dry and the tongue lies dead, buried behind the cage of rotting teeth? Where is Toast, when reviled beauty manages to cleave its way into your words, like some performance poet lacking in the audience he refuses to desire? Where is Petőfi, when the fires of revolution, even a personal one, are fanned from a rage maintaining ignorance of the cause? Where is Bragg, when, in the aftermath of a raging war, the villain is dead and you are a disappointment and nothing more? Where is Dylan, when the definitions of those you define yourself against are eventually toppled beneath the screech of electricity, beneath outrage’s outcry? Where is Alighieri, when your Art is disproved, making it nothing but a lie to begin with, undoing any justification you could bring to bear against your accusers? Where is Elliot, when the ether wears off and the patient thrashes against your restraints? When the streets remain half-occupied and there is no one left to speak of Italian artists? Where is Frost, when the last light flickers and fades and God’s rage is nothing compared to the wrath of a
woman, unnamed for fear of reprisal? When to rage against anything as base as the night is a selfish action, when the dying of the light is all that one might desire? Where is Watts, when philosophy fails and clever words bearing some hidden meaning are stripped of intellect and splayed like an insurgent upon the cross?
And, at the end of all things, to whom do your allegiances lie, as the last remnant of literature lies torn and shredded in your ignoble grasp, before that ancient papyrus, stone tablet, sheaf of paper, electronic block or cavern wall crumbles into dust, and is carried away on the last wisps of an otherwise empty wind.
Where are you, when the resolution you refused such a short while ago comes calling in the dead of night, some headless outlaw atop a steed forged in the fires of literature? Where, exactly, do you pay penance to those you have maligned? Where lies your religious apology? Where lies your political rejuvenation? Where lies your sociological satisfaction?
If not here, if not now?
* * *
To my shame and despite my rage, it began to make sense. This sibling to the first glass was held tightly in my juddering hand, whilst my lips opened and closed themselves without my order. The doubtlessly uninterested couple in front of me, grinning in that awkward middle-class manner which speaks of disgust and disagreement behind the rude stretching of expression, would occasionally turn back to their own conversation before my lack of direction interjected itself into their lives once more. I let my tongue trip around and over its folly, hardly wincing as it crashed through the red velvet barriers of respectability, instead focused on summoning what little will I maintained into the control of my gaze.
Such solidity I saw, through that encroaching haze. The air blurred as though distant heat writhing above the desert sands of Egypt, the burning asphalt of America or the haze in the air over Hiroshima in 1945. The pitted wood bore the texture of oil beneath my fingertips, a slimy, semi-aqueous feeling no doubt the produce of a hundred years of spilt alcohol and sweat-covered palms. Physicality only became the real when viewed through the artist’s telescope, though the abuse of the tool would twist its focus into a closer resemblance to a kaleidoscope.