Wednesday 27 August 2014

31 7 14


A mud bath, the wash, sea-sand. A sleeping dog is folded inside a small box made of stiff hessian as sludgy seawater flows over its’ body and gradually, over an achingly unfolding period of time, before my very eyes, submerging it entirely: an immersive nap or else a watery grave. Zerry – a woman of uncommon mercy and a kindness that verges on the self-less (a suspect condition of self-bondage) – she rocks the stiff hessian casket/Moses basket back and forth in the shallows, watching as waves lap across the contours of the dog’s body, the water reconstituted as fingers that once stroked it, conscious in their (the fingers, the waves) negotiation of shape, variations in hardness and softness and the commune between flesh, fur and bone. “His time has come,” she utters beneath her steady breath, turning to face me, and I face her with incredulity, entranced, and by way of this entrancement, unstable “in my self.” I feel stupid and dedicated to nothing, no-one through witnessing this ritual of submersion, this gentle articulation of a sleep that exists in the tension between life and death. Shutting-down, as opposed to ending, it is his time to retire and not to expire.


This beach occupies the periphery of the school grounds, to which I have returned to complete my education (as all must do). So many a year of procrastination have kept me from this place and I find myself here again, inevitably, for this return is inescapable, at the age of “nearly 40”. Standing at the school gate, which never was locked or functioned as a border between inside and out – a most permeable membrane – I plead with the Mathematics teacher, a stocky man in a shirt and tie, who I realize is approximately my age. He iterates: “EVERYBODY must complete their education”, which I know to be true, and this minor horror thus magnified by necessity and gravitational return must be relived.


I make my unsteady way through familiar corridors, they are etched onto my deep memory like tattoos: burned there indelibly, but the rawness and soreness reducing as years pass. The deep memory – encrusted with scabs. I make my way with extreme caution – one never knows who one may encounter on these unyielding passageways lined with doors like mouths that store bodies until a separate wave of hunger passes over, parting the lips to expel and to ingest: a continuum of consumption and regurgitation. One never knows whom one may encounter on spiral staircases with their blind-spots and the hierarchisation of bodies by virtue of their position on the staircase; with their multiple, invisible entry points. I proceed from the ground upwards. I reach the halfway-point of the spiral, imbibing through mouth nose and pores the sickly stench of cleaning fluid, this aroma seeming to congeal in my throat, a sticky mass, producing a gag reflex that is in spite of itself rather pleasant – body and environment synchronised in the arena of the repellent. I consider the appeal of an artificial floral display whose perfection draws one into collusion with ones own deception: a vision of self-deception. I detect the scent of toast through the fug and make my way (I had paused) down the staircase to the ground floor (again), glimpsing the image of Deanna through the exterior motion of my descent (the interior and exterior steadiness has reversed). I detect the tight blonde curls, the concave thighs and the complexion deliberately masked with a velveteen patina of liberally daubed foundation and compressed powder that fully suffocates the skin; a mask of flawlessness behind which she (afraid, aggrieved, bereft) dissimulates. I detect this girl, and the very awareness of her presence in the scene, magnifying for my perception the power of the CASUAL GESTURE coagulates into an erupting pustule of impotent rage that remains imprisoned, for to manifest this as an eruption that is detectable by her would only close the gestural circle, and render my imprisonment external, or in the real. To echo the casual gesture, to correlate myself, to remake myself in this constellation would unlock lesser-mediated emotional boundaries. Opposition thus reconstructed as alignment, I swallow the key. I did it then as I do it now, “almost 40,” I swallow myself and in doing so reinforce the organic conglomeration cell.




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