We live among a host of stories; all our narratives are laid bare, they are written, they are published, and then they are forgotten. At my last count, there were 67 books in my local Waterstone’s bearing the grand label ‘Sunday Times No. 1 International Bestseller’. I don’t take the Sunday Times, and so I can only speculate as to their system of lists; but what I want to do is to write a No. 2 Bestseller because, as far as I can judge, there are none on the market, which would make it paradoxically unique. What would happen, I wonder, if it sold more copies than one of the 67 No. 1 Bestsellers? Might it then appear that I had ‘sold out’? I think of the fragile hopes of B.S. Johnson, with his wholly novel ideas for books (his wholly bookish ideas for novels) and of his fate, and shudder. It does not do to upset the established order which, after all, supports such a catalogue of wealthy interns to do publishers’ heavy lifting. That’s what Terry Pratchett said, isn’t it, when asked why he’d become a writer – ‘Well, it doesn’t involve any heavy lifting’. I’m sure there have been times when it did.

… the plans we had (and oh, we had such plans, the three of us, such plans as would make the gods wheel on their great sparkling wings) seemed laid to waste; but we were not made of such stuff. Instead of reclining on those tombs made comfortable by excess of moss, we consulted the ghosts who thronged around us, fellow-creatures of exile and doubt. Their words were of no use; but we were able to make judgements by their perturbations of the air, able to see paths rising from their shoulders, ways to accommodate the labyrinth within ourselves. If we could only take the city in (as it were; there was no hint of deception here in this lonely land), then we would be able to perfect our own union, our own reaching harmony; but this was how many felt then, and now we know better, we know … [here the manuscript again occludes, there is the faint outline of some perching thing, and then the mysterious words] … the fruit of ocular resentment.

A fit of sub-Yeatsian angst about age:

I met young P last evening
And she hugged me, bright and gay,
And who knows what befell men,
What it was, I cannot say.
But then, as we were parting,
She hugged me again – hooray!

And I dreamed of P last night
In a panoply so bright
That I awoke half sobbing
In the dim half-light;
It was then that I remembered
The trick of second sight.

But it didn’t work, my lover;
It didn’t bring her back,
And I’ve forgot her surname
Though over field and track
I may tramp this morning
By many a sunlit stack.

But it’s good she made me think
Of the vicissitudes of age,
Of evening and of morning
And all time will not assuage.
I’ll thank young P for ever
For her hugs, her kiss; this page.

Gull

Jonathan Livingston, George Barker, Chekhov,
Fish and chips, snatched sandwiches, a certain
Stink of half-remembered, half-digested fish,
We’ve got ’em bang to rights, the noisy screamers
And harbingers of our oceanic discontent.

Forgetting how huge they are is one thing; worse
Is forgetting how gull they are, how unlike
Anything else in the many wild kingdoms we
Pompously incline to regard as our home despite
The anarchy of mosquito, buzzard, lynx.

A bald head endangered among rocks, scrabbling
Claws spread to meet the gust, there is nothing
Romantic about this unseasoned life, bare feed
And guano, profitless, enduring, cold
As midnight, we think, is cold; but always cold.

In moments we are gull, instances of dream,
Flapping from the black precipice, swooning
In the down-draught, knowing no knowledge
Except the squawking mouths, the endless need
Unburied for a second in cowl of black and grey.

[‘Punter does for gull what Hughes has done for crow, but more concisely’, Cian Murphy]

A little aside on rainfall:

Rain reign rain main rain Spain rain … moon spoon moon raccoon moon dune … crane drain there is a crane in the drain in the main we are down the drain falling falling mainly on the plain … croon boon it might be noon on the dune and all we know about the moon in June such a prune … bane stain falling from the wain into the main where is the main what is the main mane lion mainline refrain an endless refrain how can we refrain when all is on the main … goon loon they are coming we are falling rune we cannot tell our (falling) tune rune words are here they are falling … brain that’s it brain how to retain our brain when all around us is the stain sane yes we are sane otherwise there is no gain grain refrain refrain from grain chain beating falling under the chain but yes there is (even though we are falling, beneath the chain, against the grain) there is RAIN ON THE MOON!

The World Museum of Peppers (for this should not pass us by) is in the Basque country, and it is distinguished by a magnificent map which distributes topographical size according to each nation’s production of peppers. This produces strange effects, which I won’t attempt to list here (no doubt other similar maps could be produced according to nations’ relative bloodlust, intervals between urban toilets, concentration of unburied corpses, etc), but it did serve to reduce the gap between the self-assumed great and the apparently relatively deprived. The United States, for example, was reduced in mass; other lands which it has traditionally regarded as its backyard appeared to have utilised this ignominious status by growing large quantities of peppers. Yet this, of course, is only the start; it’s the circulation of, the trade in, peppers that is the crucial thing. What use is it if many small countries grow bananas if the whole lot is bought up by the United Fruit Company? What use, come to that, is anything when we are all in the end subservient to the United Fruit Company?

… on approaching the city (which we had been glimpsing for many days across the salt-laden desert) it seemed as though something in our perspectives was altering, and what had appeared human-shaped, human-sized, anthropomorphic, anthropocene, was on longer quite that. The portals, the pillars, the very shapes of the walls, which admittedly had seemed to float and shimmer before our eyes like a heat mirage, now seemed to grow unexpectedly larger. Our mules would rear and start and flare unexpectedly as though all their precedents were affronted; and we were afflicted with insects which glared at us but did us no harm. When we finally drew up (some of us were lagging by this time) before the ‘fatal gates’ (I no longer remember how we had come to call them that) we seemed seized with an unspeakable languor; tired as we were with raising our heads to grasp these ever-receding lintels, exhausted as we then became with reading the liminal inscriptions over which, it seemed, we would have to pass were we ever to …

And so to the next set of section headings from Writing the Passions (remember: male artists are essentially collectors, female artists are dispersers):

A Passion for Subjection
On Suturing and Coming Apart at the Seams
Wounding and Protection
Passions and Incarnations
Betrayal
Suffering Upside Down
Sometimes a Bad Dream

Oh, I like that ‘suturing’ business; did I really write that, and so long ago, in another lifetime, when I had a different appellation, round about that time, I suppose, when flash fiction was being invented? In a little while I shall come on to cenotes, the Mayan sacred pools; and I shall give you the answers to some riddles that have not yet been invented. That is, unless I am overwhelmed by the fragments; as the ghost of John Berryman’s demented priest continues to insist, something interferes with me; everywhere. Oh Fabor, Bruna, Elkan: I wish you were with me now …

Tonight I spent my time (is it my time to spend?) reading in the Book. I have (it seems) spent all my life reading in the Book, a curious monkish adherence, but new words turn up all the time. They were not there before. Why does the word ‘serpentine’ appear to move, to slither, to add grace, to suggest the sheer beauty of betrayal? The Book lays down the law; the Book subverts the law. We speak of ‘hearsay evidence’; there is nothing but ‘hearsay evidence’, but ‘hearsay’ is strangely close (is it not? albeit without etymological foundation) to heresy. In the IRC (encompassed by its fragile wings, enclosed in its unending care, affronted by its petty institutional jealousies) we all felt (and back then there were many more, many more) that we held the secret, or at least one of the secrets. Later on tonight, I shall tell you what the secret was; unless, of course, I am withheld, held in the spell of Nachtraglichkeit, suspended by a fly in amber … or the fragment of a fly. We await a further fragment. I have nothing (yet) to say on the topic of the World Museum of Peppers; except that it is in a small village in the Basque Country.

But these fragments keep rolling in. Where are they coming from – on the west wind, perhaps?

… and after the irradiation, nothing seemed to matter so much. There were phantoms rolling on the high chaparral, we all saw pyramids (cone photoreceptors, probably, writ large as the Yves Tanguy memories came flooding in) but we didn’t know what [a gap in the manuscript here] … wolves of memory, horses of desire, charging down from the strange plateaus. Somewhere in the orange noon, something seemed to shimmer, as if offering a hope of relief, and the thought came to all of us (Fabor, Bruna, the dwarf and the numberless tribe of acrobats) simultaneously: How is it possible that so many of us remain cheerful when we live in the certain fear of imminent death? But then, dancing, entranced, we built the …

What are the next words? I can’t make them out; the light is shimmering. ‘Tin temple’? ‘Skin tremble’? Is it not ‘built’ but ‘felt’?