Great Works:  home texts page next section next writer

Richard Makin

St Leonards

IV

Take the papers found with this, the diaries and the rest, and bury them. We tend to work in four-year cycles and have bricked up the fault. Find him. We tend to work in pairs. Cut off his head and burn the heart. I see a shadow at the peak. There is a noise. We are high on the neck of the peninsula. Superheated steam rushes in and takes the skin off. Cliffs tower above the house. We fight our way out along a ditch. He leaves his tablet behind among the rushes. This pains him.
She refuses to grieve. The writing is hidden. All options vanish. This act again has a rationale, in the lam of the negative: the legendary paperman. A kilted, flexible steel plate is worn skirtlike from the waist. Flaps or a blunder.
I go out through a side door. I see a face through the haze. He keeps his head down while inside the arc, thinking all the while: I could prevent you from leaving here until the following morning.
The story dies. And we were once so fitted for mutual misunderstanding. Now grant each other that last farewell. Be still. I suspect it'll hurt, but it's much too soon to condemn. They rummage in rubbish pits like the rat and the fox. This confuses the sense of place and time, but he can crawl around all night long through this astounding summer. At the roadside, a cross between canine and flightless bird.

It's round, at least from above. It doesn't always make sense. Most of it never happens, in exterior and interior manner. All the three o'clock people can go home now. Extemporize.
I understand right away. The square is mine: if I move, she will.
Read on.
Use white stone. Disappear into the ordinary.
Murder comes with a simile, with semblance, like a parable. On occasion it represents the virtuous—recall his cyclothymic condition, his flapping hybrid. He is linked to a concrete escape hatch by a trench and a rubber hose. Reach across the whole stone.
O this eternal frost.
One thing about the bones is that they never run away during a crisis. Construct the redoubt with what, he says.

I've come about this tardy war. I've come about the sealed-off pyramid mines. Fate has a way of circling back on a man. Just start looking for a new house. It'll be good business to mock. Confusion today among historians of the animal.

By way of making, we introduce some fresh moments, generic and specific names. She systematically transfers from cavity to index the last grains on a black fingernail studded with paste jewels. One of the names is published without a description. Look it up. Yes the town apparently.
Today he's all. Make him stop.
A ray of light pierces from below and above. The skin of her wrist. The back of the ubiquitous.

Pierced with needles in the dark. They were right: the woman dog has to eat the placenta stuff. In the course of the game she expires. The game is enervated by live pieces in the market space, hummed to irregular stations, the household-politic shift of a lifetime. Animate chunks of flesh hop and flop about the square, post-quartering, the aperture of a broken armistice.
None works. No one wants a rerun of what happened this morning. She's made of eclipse plumage and coloured glass, both hands in the natural death position, arms folded across the chest like in a swab film. In all of us is the wish to return to the has-been, and to repeat.
A circle. The plane cuts the surface at any moment. In memory we are not the same thing: insect from pupal case, larvae from egg. They peer forwards from the vantage of the rock.
He finds in the heat a matrix, a bracelet, a miniature gun and the missing talisman. Do we know the way back to the bowels. Sharpen his stake at both ends. The rest is exposed to the world. There's no choice.
I am the antiplot. A failure of imagination, a failure of magnitude. There's a lot of rain. Now it's clear-up time. They have cut off her head: who like the grim. A pair are shrouded head to foot in a subterranean chamber with two blocked exits. At present she is unable to give any coherent account of these events or of her past life.                     He enters bearing the usual rhetoric.
Atom. Lands to the utmost limit.
Block off the east where all heads come quartered.
She has the stars down her arm. She is not at rest. She is not at risk.

Now there's a word. Quietus. One revolution of the building reveals nothing except his yellow gloves lying on the oak desk where he left them that morning before the disappearance. In vain I stretch out a spare limb. He's spotted on the strand. Let's round up the others and march to the top. What about the past: he is cutting back every link to himself, the revelation of the anyday. He writes nothing, hence everything. A sort of footnote follows, removed from the ordeals and the judgements, technology and its mediated uses. His eye is utterly concealed.
True, you have wings and you have written it down. You come without opening the door, and store away the image received. I think we're in a tunnel. What he's looking for is any change in heavy water in the ice. The money's tied up. And all the mutes, recall to mind the delicious mutes of thirty years ago! From the middle of this darkness a sudden light breaks in. Glance at my credit, deadeye. Duties on grain. Everything as compromise, drainage.
I mean a kind of antipilot.
Air.
Better embalm the body. You decide. They peter out beneath the folds of her frock. They haven't heard music for nine years. Where you were and what happened to you? The whole wall suddenly falls away.
We are short on names. Nonetheless, she dies of an excess of nomenclature.

His mind is going in eight different directions at once. He thinks the whole expedition is foolish in the extreme. We have welcome rushlights and open hearths, while he paces about on the platform. There's little room for footsteps. With nothing to bring to market, we'd do better to call the poor man back. He descends the chalk-quarried cliff. The mountain is a harder climb. We can no longer see him. In his wake a litter of bodies and ritual equipment. Over his head, however old, the earth—base and superstructure, a complex trench system. The flower he grips is designed for self-pollination. A single breath of spores is ejected into the freezing air.
Topography: a headland or high cape—a projection, ridge, or eminence, standing out like a promontory. Greyblue shadows beneath ribs.

This is too much of one thing in one place. A heavy dense air, through which our gaslamps throw a theatrical light onto the pavement. An unspeakable vessel. They are obliged to return by the same steam packet on which they made their outbound journey.
See her dream where they peer out from behind the folds of a gauzy frock.
I am back.
Stop. Stop in shape as taught.

Tell us the whole story about the judge changing before the gathered eye. If I'd watched my back this never would have happened. Tell the story about the judging chain. The walk is the Victoria walk, structured as a series of tableaux. Practise the somatic escape. There are carpet slippers on his bare feet. A physician kneels beside him. He brings down the lamp which once stood on the table (in memory, mind). He inspects the lock and the vault. It's evident that death has been arrested by the mesmeric process. One glance at the volunteer is enough to show. His presence can be dispensed with; he is convertible into the ordinary. At least so says the superstition, its expounder. This is heavily influenced, bent like an elbow. We board the waiting vessel. On the bridge we find a reflecting telescope. Point it where there's an apparent absence of space. Its plane mirrors reflect light down the polar axis. The dog, I haven't noticed the dog: three months, four-and-a-half days old. We identify the box. Prize it open. We place a branch of the wild rose on whatever we discover inside. Within is life in miniature, a compressed space through which our gas lamps throw a theatrical light onto wet-cobbled streets. This we fasten: had power once to bind by spell.
More profit is perhaps to be derived from actually reading the literature.
Topographic feature: ice-armoured couloirs. A gully or passage. Town rubbish concerns.

They stream back down from the gables to make sure of their seats. Unbearable. As if he'd been responsible for all the fires. What the hell to say. Something safe. His eyes make out a book on a low teak cabinet. Glancing out of the window, sight of the sundial on which he will lean when he declares himself. He readies. In order not to act, step in accordance with the traditional usage: lament mansion bracket.
Thus not dreams coagulate, the too much costly blue posts.
The condition: she are to be the other cannot. When in its place nothing can emerge (grumble-groan). Tell us about it. She's translucent. Put your minds at rest. I can see the background behind her, through her. It seems, according to the extant notes, that this is our chief predicament. There follows a debate. How can you sleep at a time like this. To the scullion, round the kitchen itself, one after the other present, so dark and sad on this blighted summer day. Without, from his diary, relief is found in a cactus-hedged garden. Sleepsy-wolvsy. Pretzel logic.

The more I think about it, the less reasonable the guide's explanation appears, that the powder is some sort of ash. See her dream where they peer out from behind the enveloping fold. This is not an obligatory exercise, but she does it anyway. I forget everything, torn tightly between blue poles. She holds a dialogue, what's known as a parley. I have no status, no quarry. I stand aside, a temporal mute. No alarms. Vault to be prepared. Dead previous, then and since.
I shouldn't be introducing choices at this station. Circumstances force him to act and write from a perspective of resistance, as though he were the representative of an iron waste. His trick of concealing himself behind the initial letters of words is explained. Silence. I am far from wanting to challenge you. I need to be more explicit. I can see I'm going to be busy all day. I have no reproaches for you, only love.

It carries fat sacs on each of its flanks, thick with paste and plum-swollen. I climb the intermediate stairs. It materializes. Animals are waiting in the wings. Balancing on the mantelshelf is a bowl of newly-invented fish, a genus of gigantic rays or sea vampires. Ask me nothing as yet. Soft white capsule lying in the street. When we break our fast, I'll condemn all your questions.
It's been a hard winter, but we're still in print. He could ask for little more. We separate. His features are knotted together in a large elliptical area.

She smacks of something greater than herself, too noble for this place. Get ready for the big picture, the big sleep. I don't know if pride is the right word. It keeps on raining. On a number of occasions intuition has been a fruitful guide. Whether this guarantees a reliable influence, or is merely the manifestation of a mean tendency in matters of choice, I daren't report. One might say: it is as it were a redemption. It rises then levels off, with no increase in quality, just a dogged persistence across a barren plateau. This can only come about if you no longer support yourself on the earth but suspend yourself from the heavens. Is she dead in the accepted fashion? Nobody calls me on this plane. Up and atom. Nobody comes into the office, lodge of this sinecure.
Put the suspects in two different locations. See what happens. I think about it most of the day: there are several passages extant in the text where they are enumerated. You are not. The total number is sometimes ten and sometimes eleven. Act upon the other's violence. One's depicted in the form of a man with a beetle for a head. Automatic vigilance. This insect becomes his emblem. She seizes the head and carries it off. He dislodges himself from the body. She places the head at the edge of the well. Now there's no such thing as time. Note: Being impaled through thigh. No wonder at night he is nervous in the sicky street, sliding across unmetalled roads. He tells her something that makes her blood congeal. It keeps on raining. Skein of radiowaves like a film. Atomic writing. I climb interminable stairs. The being is the noun.
He would say no more. We separate. Tabasco and ether on the menu.
It's true that someone who is suspended looks much the same as someone who's standing: two in a tiered underground chamber, both entrances blocked by blankets and sheets. Potential stabbings in the darkness. The form is the adjective, plumb-based.

Note: the sickly rays of lamps strung at sway above the road barely illuminate the greasy cobble.
But for the interplay of forces within him.

Nobody calls me on the phone. Up and over a salt lick. Aren't you forgetting something. It doesn't mean you're weak. Vignette: this chapter is without a vignette. The happiest days of your life, the chapter of opening the mouth. There's a long way to go with this. Moths flutter from his old ragweed coat. It just makes you look as if you are meek.
She seizes the head and carries it off (I say as much above). I am honoured with my first and only. Let's say she has an irregular heartbeat, after all. Some burn-house chemist is working in the apartment above.
Second watch (blessing himself): How is that, possible?
Loose whip, an unfortunate rhyme. They become disoriented in the middle. How did we get into the house at all if the bridge is up. Did you see it.
Yes the dog.
I thought you'd be pleased.
I think they're just getting their grieving over with before the rematch begins.

I'm not going to be able to rest here among these so-big breeders. I just want to move on to the next watch. I always get lost. I can never remember where anything is. You'll be going on about this your whole life: I don't want the flower, I don't want his ecstasy.
After this, everybody refuses to come back into the office.

The thing is a particle of matter so minute it can't be cut or divided. That's today's big question. I think about it most of the day. At what o'clock was it raised? I presume everyone in the room has heard of me. Can the animals wait? He is gathering people face up. They show no indication. Stop shouting. They show no signs of attention. A web of string has been stretched across the door. Inside, everything's become very small.
No, I'm not grateful. I talked of the cobble of the street, above, just a few lines ago. It's better than a box of minutes. There is a mess of people here. Forgive me. They don't show any indication they are talking about you, taking on the addiction. I am perplexed. What could you do that could be worse than this.
Read on.
It is a tunnel we are in I think.
Bring me in. I can't wait to get home. Bring me one of those lightweight crucible heat shields, and a long tail-feather to steer with. You can't see the deck. He waves listlessly then slams the lock and bolts it by hand. I am sure there is blood in his sack. He is standing at the naked window. Far off is the hope of our friends. My thought is going to follow you wherever you go. They answer without giving answer. The event takes place forty years after his concealment—the tingle of return, that air-space, that interval. I am still writing on walls after all these years. Sharpen the stick at both ends. I try to explain something to him in detail, but henceforth I can't understand it myself. Despite his efforts, the stick remains blunt. Do you too feel eyes moving over your body, like the march of little feet? All the same his face is the same.

Allow me now to return to the patron of this paragraph: gird him with jamber, hood and harness. His strings are twitched by quills or leather points. He needs a continuous supply of criminals and saints. I have to lie. Often I provide the ghosts of tiny children. His left side is where they usually locate themselves; half viewless they walk in mournful conference. After their departure a dead silence ensues. He is totally unable to explain the process by which the strands fix themselves to his body—a clutch of helixes knotted into a K-tort (the muscles). Cut him down to size. Send another to make a visitation and to officiate in his place. Shunting trams clatter through the undercast street. Twelve squares in the middle. There's a faint whiff of tobacco. Today I look like a horse.
Bastard hartebeest and haruspex. A lean mule, a jade.
What it is the correct order.
It hurts. I can't be bothered to learn. I have to tell him, I am wearing angel. I can't be bothered to explain.
It was like having an operation. It was not altogether unpleasant. Do not tell.

The smell is the smell you associate. Ensure he walks away on the seventh day. Could you talk about something else. Answer now. Don't mention the episodes such as the mountain climb. It was like a torture. Don't mention the learning to hide. Face dull yellow in complexion. Don't mention the chamois hunt. Break up any further material. Debase any action he may care to bring. Don't mention any oddities of the real, such as the postilion and the love affair. Then comes the voice of a woman in ringing cadences. Don't mention the keenly realized rivalries. They are used to this. Don't mention the duel. There is a novel in whose composition the author reveals his caricatures indirectly by the action he portrays—one more fictional duel, and yet not just a fictional duel. The corpse is burned together with a tried and executed greyhound, an executed pig, and an executed chicken. We are sitting on a magnetic boundary. They are used to this too. Have I said enough, something entirely novel. It's lost the very moment it's achieved (one eye lost). Something of which one says, that was how it was.
He loses, so he throws the gaming board into the water. I am filled with impressions. It floats. Preoccupied with unforgivably vivid images, people, events. I can't be bothered to explain. There is no further material on which to bring down my action. Send me away in any direction.
The letters composing this note-cipher range from a through to z. Their intermingled ashes are scattered over the fields of an English county.

We decide to burn his notes too. A pyre is built at the apex of a sharp rise: disintegrating cliffs of chalk and ice.

We bury the head at a nearby crossroads. I always said he was the cerebral equivalent of an overactive thyroid. I call him St Paul. Which is the law, blameless, answers the man roughly. I hesitate outside for a long time. I'm pretty well made, kidneys floating about all grainy like the moon—her blacks draggle and crack etcetera. We'll have to stay close to the platform. Mask the titanic task beneath. He fills the places with the dead bodies, bends the earth. You ask for facial interference. The journey takes a week. He is bound up with all my memories of that period: a full cycle gone, the red flags. I knew I wanted to be a part of them—crude sinew, crude essence: the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping up to the front. They have crossed a threshold of vulnerability. Grey war-stricken towns farther up the line. This, the writing, is done. We'll have to stay close to the platform. The muddy, ice-cold trenches in the mountains. This is in late December. They eliminate the man. Use the big red sword. Of course, at the tail end, where the rocks pile up.

We decide to bury the ash—more a powder—at a nearby crossroads. How comforting this is.

They eliminate the man. Less than seven months ago as I write. His stalk is attached to the edge, near the middle of his under-surface. A set of eight new comers arrives and stands to attention around his bed. Sound an alarm.
Skin of porous texture, much mottled.
New topic. Absorption of heat at a junction, within a circuit of two metals. Where, by the way, he lies until the end. Above his head turns a wafer-wheel with shaped cups about the circumference, into which jets of invented water are aimed at high speed. To what end none is certain. What they don't tell you is that once time starts up again it moves extra fast, to catch up with everything that has happened in the interim. So you've been here five years. We'll have to stay close to the platform. And I see this black figure at the opening door. He carries a spade atom (the mountain's not the only problem). Details are inveigled, unrecorded without eyes, as if arrested in the act of crawling, in the act of earning. Please come and take me away. He is stopped at the barrier—a loose horse. He is stopped at the brook. Lighted cigarettes make small nervous circles in the dark. Please come, please come. An instrument is introduced. Figures on the inside of a rotating cylinder are made visible through slots, stretched by weights and dried in the sun. This provides the solace of animated motion: a fleshy spike of flowers. Spadix. No such space as things.
Whatever it is, it's still moving—a shunting yellow motion. The gaunt train full of shabby soldiers. Rapidly repeat images creeping up to the front.
I missed out the dog bit, at bark while I give the reading above a baroque courtyard. Tasteless extravagance. Grey war-stricken towns farther up the line. The bridge is down. Select colours in sequence on screen: a sheathing bract. A conspicuous one, enclosing.

The bridge is down. It's my typing. I'm asleep. Build a pontoon. True, you have induced wings and have written it down. This is a kind of apogee, a return. True, you come without opening the door. The body's at a point of elastic distance from the earth. On the keyboard sits a metronome. Their expulsion is set in motion, a subtle turn against the direction of gravity. I am not in the slightest degree prepared for such an invasion: almond orchards and the muddy, ice-cold trenches of the mountains. Think of a solution—the synthesis arising from persistence of vision in the eye.
            Add: news of her dog. The surgery begins. I am sitting here at my book without the faintest ambition. The defeat fades. Nothing breaks the horizon. He lives where I used to live. The detail fails. Now he stays down inside the arc. We are being fitted up for mutual misunderstanding. Give each other that list farewell.
A turning, to turn. Culmination.
She runs one finger down her cheek, draws down an eyelid.
Renew network of complicated curves and uneven loops, where his ash is buried. Pertaining to animals: of rocks. Mute success.

Second half. The roof is a shingle roof. A jellyfish-like spurt of matter is flung across the room and lands on the carpet. Distinctive patter of descending viscous fluid. She draws the last grains from her cavity with a purpleblack fingernail, systematically transfers them to tongue, to index.