Thursday, June 24, 2010




Ship


But this is a mess. I need some structure. We need structure.

Help me dredge up the structure of this old boat from the bottom of the ocean. This algaed carcass of a ship, for years a playground for the fish, will structure my story. Help me drag it from the depths and as we heave, I’ll tell you some things. Listen.

I wish I could speak but dyspepsia holds my tongue. I feel such a weight of tales, such a full stomach of words that I might vomit you a whole book, a library of ink.

Be patient. I will get there.

This boat – and we are heaving it, yes we are – is drippingly emerging from the clouded waters. Heave ho. And your muscles are strong. You are a good heaver. You tug like a veteran ship salvager. But keep your focus and I shall sing.

My song will keep our sinews well oiled. Oh look at the proud old ship! Even its drying drips are wondrous. Look how it retains its glory even after so many years entombed in that liquid Hades. But I was going to sing. I will sing.

Heave hoe, the reaper mows
And as he goes with timely blows
The wheaty ears are blasted.

Heave hoe, the gentle mice
Like scuttling lice, or rolling dice
Flee full-tummed unfasted.

Heave hoe, those earthy greens
Do still beteem, by nature’s wean
Ne’er letting death hold sway

Heave hoe, on nature’s road
Some will be toads, some sing fair odes
And some will do what may

As this old wooden beast gains its renaissance into air we smell its salty promise... while my promises of tales to charm your ears remain yet unfruited. I must needs stop stopping and get on with starting to start. So stand back.

No, not so far back as you can’t hear me over the roar of the creaking vessel (as it inches glacier-like). Thats right, legs firm and keep up your tugging, for I can feel the start of a tale coming on. And what a tale I have to tell.

Oh but look how the gulls - how they hover and swoop, plunging their beaks into the marine foliage, replete as it is with the bugs and mites of the deep. From this uprooted civilisation they pluck in their beaks the spongy, slimy creatures whose eyes, if they have them, are blinded by the first-time-seen sun, and whose lungs, if they have them (or something like them) are drowned in the caustic breezes of the super-marine world. Dazzled and shocked, these wrigglers squirm and recede, trying to hide clam-like in the algal sludge which this doting ship wears like a dressing gown. But plucked they must be, for the gulls are hungry and have no mercy on this chewy treat, no sorrow for this rare and delicious game.

I should focus. You should check me in my digressions. I grow old. Indeed, I forgot myself and my professed readiness to tell tales. I saw the elegant gulls and forgot myself. But you can forgive me, can you not? These gulls playing and pecking at the whale-like hulk: few sights have entered my eyes so majestically. Surely the wide-eyeing majesty of the Now – and not just any now, these gulls, this particular compelling Now – trumps the dustiness of the Used-to-be. Who can cast their thoughts into the distant land of past events? – Who can do this when muscles wrench at a thousand ropes and chants of “heave” have scarcely fallen dumb when they return with redoubled potency, when a historic floating beast of old rears its sleepy head at our cajoling tuggery?

But lo! The Now strikes again – look! The cavernous underbelly of the ship revealed, slowly rising from the water, and we see inside the cabins. A shabby cross section washes into view, rotten timber fallen away here and there to reveal glimpses of the domestic innards. Is that not an old desk, three legged with age, carbuncled with the many kisses of the subaqueous salts? Yes, by jove! An old desk! How startling to see such a familiar thing so changed, do long dunked and forgotten in the colossal bucket of the seas.

But forgotten no longer. We remember you, oh joyous desk of old. It is broad and sturdy, even in its ruined posthumos-ity. I’d wager these were the captains quarters! What think you on’t? And what treasures might there be, of gold and olden silver, of faraway climes and lost tribes. I tremble just to think.

But that was my tale, I see it now. It crept in under the door, all stealth. I’ve told my tale. All the while stopping and starting, ever digressing and circumambulating. But it seeped through - a crafty osmosis! The beans are spilled. The cat is out.

The sprightly goblin dances no more (nor jives the goblinly sprite!)

You see: I told it all in the not-telling. I spoke it in the nods and winks, in the gaps, in nonsense. It was between the lines - between the ropes!

Words but grab at meanings true
Feeble in their violence
Living holds the flowing you
And the rest is silence.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010




Pangrams


A pangram is a sentence that uses all of the letters of the alphabet. The most famous English one being “the quickbrown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. For pangrammatists the ultimate quest is to find a sentence that contains each letter only once. This is known as a perfect pangram. There are a few in English but they make very little sense to anyone but the most absurdly well-dictionary-read lexophile. Here are two examples of perfect English pangrams, with explanations of the meanings in brackets below:

· Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext quiz.

(Carved symbols in a mountain hollow on the bank of an inlet irritated an eccentric person.)

· Squdgy fez, blank jimp crwth vox!

(A short brimless felt hat barely blocks out the sound of a Celtic violin.)

These perfect pangrams may strike most people as ridiculous and pointless achievements but as they become slightly longer, letting in some repeated letters, the hunt for pangrams produce some wonderfully odd sentences that we might never otherwise have the pleasure of considering. Take for example this Bulgarian pangram:

За миг бях в чужд плюшен скърцащ фотьойл.

(For a moment I was in someone else's plush squeaking armchair)

Or this French one:

Voix ambiguë d'un cœur qui au zéphyr préfère les jattes de kiwis.

(Ambiguous voice of a heart which prefers dishes of kiwis in the breeze.)

It seems to me, though I am very likely indulging myself in a ridiculous thought, that if they contain every letter in the alphabet then they must be saying something universal. If they are built of every type of particle in the known communicative landscape, surely they will be a kind of unifying patchwork quilt of representation that speaks of and for all the letters, for the language, for that culture’s communication itself. If you look deep enough into the pangram you will see an entire culture. Its reverberations will ricochet out of it from every letter like a thousand balls bouncing madly out of a swirling arrangement of ink. The typography of an alphabet itself, which will be necessary for it viewing (though even Braille has a design!) already gives away loudly whispered secrets of the culture. Look again at your language in its most reduced form, a single letter. Look at the tincture of a word, the letter a. Look at its handsome form, and how the ink curls about it lovingly. This is the ink’s favourite pastime, indeed, its passion. Ink loves nothing more than to form letters on the page. When we form a word in our mouths and on our faces the explosive complexity is of course to be celebrated. But ink lives for text. ‘Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare’ Guy de Maupassant.

Our words dip their bare feet in ink buckets and walk the papers of our diaries. Our thoughts leave inken footprints. And where there is no ink, our thoughts must leave some marks somehow. Just as Ahab’s peg leg leaves dents in the deck, his thoughts of Moby Dick bechisel his forehead:

‘Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze upon that ribbed and dented brow; you would see still stranger footprints – the footprints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.’

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.




Idleness


Idleness is, I think, our greatest passion. Industry is, surely, a disease. It is an itch upon our souls. A lolling rest is what best suits us; a sated, head drooping, floppy-bodied decumbency. So why am I not taking advantage of my freedom and lolling in some corner in worship to this ideal (or idleal, you might say, but this tongue-challenge may be too much effort for a true idler) why, you might ask, am I sat defiantly upright at the computer tapping away in a frenzy when I could be lazing in any number of positions elsewhere? Well, I’ve caught the disease. I’ve got the itch. I’m a sufferer of the animating impulse that drags our yawning souls from rest and pokes them into action, shoots at their feet to make them dance, showers them in itching powder that causes an itch so dire that it can only be relieved by a most furious industry. So here I am, writing. Un-idled.

But not for long, I feel my gut murmur, not for long will you toil. No? I question. But I can’t help it. Even when I resign myself to a stretch of relaxation, a period of placid inaction, the itching begins and how smart a lash that whip can give. No sooner have I leaned back on a sofa, gazed off out the window and let my eyelids do what they will, than the distant sound of a conceptual police siren can be heard, buzzing about my innards. These police live in my psyche and it is their chief aim to keep me as busy as possible. This, they believe, if they can be said to believe anything, is the finest state for a body to be in: industry, toil, labour, action. Couched in the depths of my unconscious they rest their bones when I am in toil, or they sit about playing cards in the station kitchen, brewing endless teas and coffees, discussing the weather in monotones of wagging insouciance.

But when I try my hand at this, when I even think of such loose behaviour, lights and buzzers begin to flash and whirr on their dashboard and they drop their cards mid-hand, leaping up into sanctimonious alert. Drinks are left to steam themselves out of desirability, hammocks hang inert, and cards fade in the cultural vacuum of ruler-less splay. Into their cars they leap and out of the murk they drive, out into my conscious mind they venture with powerful flairs, megaphones and placards, with harpoons, guns and grenades. They’ll do anything to wake me from my stupor and prick me into action. A modern day Gulliver I have become, whose Lilliputian superego plagues him from the inside in systematic formation. A single ant is as ineffectual as a single member of this constabulary. But just like ants, these officers of my psyche can get to work with marvellous potency when they work in concert. It is unbearable. I feel like the captain of a ship whose deceased mutinous crew have, ghost like, inhabited his body and are driving him which way they will.

So I don’t let myself idle much. It keeps them happy. Instead, I urge myself on. I whip myself inwardly, thrash my hide viciously, lest I become complacent and start to linger or loiter over some trifle. Yes, I beat myself up. As the anarchists like to joke “Help the police: Beat yourself up”. They may joke about it but people do it. People really do. From the inside.

And time passes without a care in the world for what it passes. It simply strides on. It does shock me sometimes when I consider it. Time just keeps on ticking and tocking and moving forwards. There’s no stopping it. So staunch and unstoppable. It plows on without asking for or needing anyone’s permission, without any support. Whether you condemn it or make it an object of your worship, it trundles along like some massive whale whose immensity will not allow for any change in momentum. If you pay no attention whatsoever, on it goes.