Three Strange Angels

The Plague of Plato’s Ghost (I)

She woke up this morning to find Plato was living inside her head. She asked him what he was doing there but he just looked at her and said: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

Not that it was anything unusual.

It was like this every single morning.

And more recently every morning she’d get angry. Rebellious. Start arguing: “You’d think after living in my head for so long at the very least you’d try to get to know me. If you did you’d know that compassion is my default position. Kindness is the lens through which I see the world. Jesus Christ, what oh what do you do between these injunctions” These flat-line announcements that drone through the waiting room of what is the airport that is my life?”

No response.

She never got any response.

Just the morning ritual of an impartial enjoinder.

They began on the 26th of June 2001 when she was finishing her anchovy toast and tea and had started thinking about brushing her teeth.

There was no trumpet call. No arrival of a flock of circling birds. No lightning in the sky. No declarative signal summonsing attention. Just the statement uttered in third person. In a voice distinctively apart from her own or any that she recognised. A strange voice that over the months and years had become all too familiar.

She remembered that first missive well. Seven words. Simple words. Not one of them longer than two beats.

Noun. Verb. Adjective. Pronoun. Adverb. Preposition. Noun.

The sentence began and ended with the name of a thing. Two things that stood in stark contrast to each other: Courage. Fear.

She remembered well what he had said in her head. It was such a significant event that those words carried weight. May have well been engraved on her bones:

“Courage is knowing what not to fear.”

At first those words became her religion. She wrote them down in note books. On serviettes in restaurants. On wallpaper; and shelving paper; and on the slim edges of newspaper in pencil. On beautiful parchment with an ink bleeding nib that tore into the paper with such passion that she missed the whisper of the next day, and the next day, and the next day.

So obsessed was she with those seven words that everything else became oblivious to her as she scrambled for etymological dictionaries, encyclopaedias, biographies and other important books with some strange understanding that she needed knowledge, more and more knowledge to deconstruct those seven simple words in order to find meaning.

She missed a month of Plato’s missives in her search.

And then the meaning came to her.

And the meaning was clear.

And it was straightforward.

It was:

“Courage is knowing what not to fear.”

(To be continued).

Vanity publishing and the death of reason

Sean Hughes picked a scab from his nose. Rolled it into a little ball and then looked at it. Half blood. Half dried mucous, a touch of sweat.

“I am not even worthy of being a piece of dried phlegm in my own nose,” he thought feeling miserable. The rent was due. His stomach was grumbling. His dick was flaccid. He couldn’t write.

Hours passed and he sat looking at the blankness. Empty wall. Clean page. The virgin Moleskin book the girl once gave him. She fucked him because he had said he was a writer. A published poet. A real author.

He was a liar and he knew it. The truth? He wrote a couple of poems and a short story that had been printed in some vanity publications. The ones where you have to buy the book to get a printed copy of your poem or story. Annuals of effluence with apt titles like: “An Autumn of Literary Seasons” or “The Shorties – flash fiction from first time writers.’ When he read the crap that was published alongside his writing he blushed, gagged and wondered whether someone could actually die laughing. It would be a good way to go.

He paged through the empty Moleskin and thought about the girl. He fucked her because she was there. Because he could. So he could pour some of the hate and self loathing normally reserved for himself into her. Afterward she wanted to cuddle. He picked at a cigarette, played with a box of matches, and told her to get out. She told him he was a nihilist cunt, so he started flicking lit matches at her as she scrabbled to pick up her clothing, tears streaming down her cheek. One flaming match struck her partly naked back just before she could close the door and leave. Her back was beautiful, lean and tanned. The minute she left Hughes wondered whether he’d feel remorseful about he way he’d let her go.

He scratched his thigh. Stood naked in front of the mirror, looked at his cock and then sat at his desk.

Nothing.  Just that empty Moleskin book. The one he despised because those books looked so pretentious. He wondered what Nietzsche would think.

“Ha fucken ha. Maybe I should create a whole range of plastic bangles that read: ‘What would Nietzsche do?’ A homage to that master philosopher and his definitive thinking on mortality. Mementos that would celebrate the power of thought and show the middle finger to religion. That would fight for the right to reason. The might of intellectual freedom. The freedom of thinking. Because no one thinks anymore. No one wants real freedom. Not really. They want Jesus. Eyes upturned in pain. Bleeding and dying. Nailed to a cross. But no one wants to take responsibility for their own lives. Why should they when every last bit of evil they do can be blamed on some other fucker? Any other fucker but them. Ignoramuses.”

It was then that Hughes realised that he wasn’t thinking. He was thinking about thinking, not really engaged in true thought. Hughes started feeling sorry that he had been such a cunt to the girl. Maybe if he dedicated his first best selling novel to her, she’d forgive him and come back so he could fuck her again. He typed furiously for at least the next half an hour. Then with some degree of satisfaction looked back at what he had written with a wry smile:

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He who has a why to live….”

The Winter Count (II)

When did you come to stay? Was it the month of May? When meaning left my words and thoughts became trains departing on long journeys into the night, only to return in circular form. Like homing pigeons. Or one of those nightmares that never leave you as a child.

I said "came to stay". I should have said "visit". Because like all things your time with me was temporary. Ephemeral. You would be with me for the cold season, through the winter count. Those days and nights before the equinox when people of old counted the days and the moons. If you can get through half of life perhaps you can make it all the way.

But you came to stay. If only for a while. And you made me smile. In the cold we laughed and the warmth in my heart reminded me of hope. That frail bird that stumbles on fragile legs before taking flight.

You stayed. I called you happiness. For that’s what you were.

And then you left.

Now I look forward to winters and the fragile hope you’ll return.

The Wicked Within

Charles lay on his back in his father’s wheat field and wondered if his fingers would ever curl round the edges of other worlds. He wondered what it would be like to fly through space. He turned on his side and watched a line of ants walk across the stems bent by his body. Remembering the nightly instructions read by his father he wondered what would happen if he killed one.

“Wicked,” he whispered softly and then ground one of the insects into the earth with his index finger. “Wicked,” he said a bit louder and then picked up an ant and started pulling off each of its legs one by one. The next ant he ate. The one after that got skewered by a small stick. In a ritual that began with the utterance of one barely audible word, the rest of the afternoon was spent killing ants. By the time the light began to withdraw from the sky, the ground was littered with the tiny corpses.

When Charles saw the sky changing colour he jumped up and ran home. Every child who lived in The Clan knew darkness was dangerous and staying out after dusk was forsaken. An evil so terrible that most people were too frightened to even talk about it. By the time Charles got home his mother was already fretful and together with his father they bolted down all the doors and windows. Ate a light simple supper, turned the lights down and got into bed.

His father walked to the study to fetch The Book. He would read The Book to Charles, often pausing and getting Charles to repeat certain passages from The Book until he knew them by heart. That night when his father came to sit by his side and read, Charles said:

“Father. May I ask you something?”

“What is it that you wish to ask my son?”

“Could we put The Book aside for one night? Could you tell me a story?”

Charles could see his father startle, his face become pale and his lips thin into a grimace.

“Have you learned nothing? Have these readings fallen on empty ears? What heresy is this? Sure as the darkness threatens to eat all our souls, stories are the work of The Wicked. The only way we can keep The Wicked without is to shut it out and know The Book. To live by the code of The Book. Stories are a demon magic used by The Wicked to enter your head, open your heart and devour your soul.”

As his father spoke Charles looked deep into his eyes and remembered a time when lightness lived there. Now there was just a fierce fear and the starkness of black pupils.  Charles recited many passages from The Book that night, when his father left he tip toed down the hall to empty his bladder. In the small bathroom Charles would lifted the candle up to his eyes to see what they looked like. He felt like something was dying inside of him and knew instinctively he had to try and find a way to keep it alive.

Back in his room under the light of the moon he looked into his pants pocket and there found three dead ants. He opened the window bolts and the window, feeling a sweet breeze on his cheek.

Then he gently put the bodies of the three ants on the sill and whispered: “Once upon a time, long long ago…”

What lives beyond the edge of reason…

The bristles scraped across his teeth like they had done every morning all these years. A repetitive act. The reiteration of habit. A rote ritual devoid of myth or meaning. His eyes fixed squarely ahead on the same spot – his reflection – looking, but not looking. His mind hummed like a refrigerator. “I must sort the rising damp. Why did she say that? Jesus I think she’s hot. I haven’t even started reading that book I bought. There’s never time. What the fuck happens to all the time in my life? It is cannibalized. Eaten by everyone I am responsible for. How did I get here? That project is taking so long. I never thought that… Fuck that Mason guy is an ass wipe I would so like to…”

Then he saw it.

Flitting. Fleeting. Far out on the periphery, it stumbled across the line between blurred vision and the boundary before nothing. It flickered, then fled. Ran right through the outer edge of his view.

He raced through a range of emotions. Confusion. Anxiety. Distress. Panic. Each one of them felt just like fear. He thought at first to ignore it, like some glitch in a  piece of software he had written that everyone would use, but that only he would know was in the minutest part dysfunctional.

Without thought he turned. And as he turned. He turned. And as he turned he fell into this falling feeling. This feeling that someone had been calling and calling. Calling his name. Like an echo of a beckoning that had faded into the background and now become part of the muzak in the up-down elevator that was his life.

But today he changed. He listened. He adjusted the cubicle of his time space perspective and there it was. And in turning he fell deeply into his life. Like an adventurer on the precipice of the unknown. A pioneer leaving everything he knew behind to take that very first step into strangeness.

He was leaving the edge of reason and falling off the edge of the world.

And then. In that instant. He understood where freedom lived.

Come again?

Artwork by the incredible Mark Elliot @ http://www.markelliott.artroof.com/

And God spoke:

“One life is not enough.

I want to fly into an infinite field of possibility and live a million experiences.

I want to be the crack whore crawling towards the door, heaving, lying bleeding, taking her last breath as she reaches heavenward for relief. 

I want the innocence of renewal, of being birthed into a virgin body. I want to live in the sighs of love, between the sheets and moans and groans of lovers tangled in the sweat of longing.

I want to be the soldier that climbs a hill and through his rifle scope seeks out his enemy and sends on bullet that will hurtle into and shatter a skull. I want to be that skull of a seventeen year old fighting for an ideology he doesn’t understand, lying over soft grass in a valley, adrenalin coursing through his body, anticipating his first kill but thinking of his last kiss. The full length of a beautiful woman’s body lining up against his, the fall of her soft breath against his neck and the touch of her lips reaching his just as he dies and his blood trickles into soft, musty earth.

All these faces and places and possibilities dance within me.

They circle around and through my heart as I walk down crowded streets I see God’s face in every face. And as I see the face of God in ever face, I see a field of infinite possibilities.

God is having every experience. This one, and that one, and this one and… and I realize that God is me. And that God is you. There is some essence that is me, but not me, that is having all of these experiences.

And at once I am me, and I am you.

And I am everything.

And I am nothing."

The truth about Charlie

- A story about family.

Personal narrative. That story that lives within you and without in the people you love. But it’s never quite the same. When you start having long and detailed conversations about your personal history with those who were there when the action went down, you’ll find that your story is dynamic. As if your memory plays with your imagination to thread through everything you thought was reality. So much so that you begin to wonder about truth and whether there is any real, objectifiable evidence of it out there, or whether everything is only a matter of perception.

How you see things.

How you saw things.

Charlie and I saw a lot of things together. From the first time I sat on his lap, drew the comb out from his inside jacket pocket and ran it through his Brylcreemed hair. I opened his cubby hole one morning, my mind filled with unbounded curiosity, my legs dangling toward the floor of his Datsun. There was a magazine bound in a tight roll and all I could see was half a smile and one nipple staring at me. Charlie looked at me and told me to close the cubby, which I did. Because we shared the same language. It was unspoken but we each knew what the other person meant. I have found this is extremely rare in people. But I only found that out later, when I was older. After Charlie died.

Let me just say that Charlie and I had been intimate. We were born from one headspace although there were some fifty years or so that separated us. I had seen him drunk, paraletic, with piss running down his legs. He had seen me suck condensed milk from a tin without stopping until I stood to puke all over the back yard.

There was no space for advice to live between us. Charlie was wise enough to abandon the arbitrary lectures that went hand in hand with relationships between adults and kids. He loved me exactly for who I was, and I simply returned the favour.

Then came the day he started to forget. Small things. Like where to put the key into the ignition. What day it was. That he was supposed to come and fetch me at twelve to go for chicken pie, chips and gravy. That our staple diet consisted of chicken pie, chips and gravy with a side of coke, and Smarties for desert. He forgot to buy condensed milk. He couldn’t remember the route to work.

At first I covered for him so my family mumbled about his old age. Then came the days that no amount of lying or maneuvering on my part would rescue. I remember screaming and crying and begging them not to take him to that special place. Charlie told me that old men and women went to die there. Without his independence, Charlie said they may as well put a revolver to his head and pull the trigger.

My folks had earnest late night conversations in between days when we were called from Checkers or the chemist or the cinema to fetch the old man. By that time my ma had put his name, our address and phone number like a tag on all his jackets. He looked like a disheveled Auschwitz prisoner with that tag, and because he had started forgetting to eat. So I would sit on his lap and comb his Brylcreemed hair like I always did amidst the consternation and hushed adult conversations.

And then he was gone.

Until Sundays when I was taken in the car with my folks, my brothers and sisters to visit. Then there was no him and me, only us. The forced awkwardness of familial obligation.

Given our relationship had lurched into crisis I had no other choice but to cut my extra-murals short and drive all the way out to see him on my bicycle. And there we would reminisce about the days we spent at the car wash, or reading stories or going to the cinema.

And then I was gone.

Came that day when he looked at me with those big old empty eyes and I saw that he had struggled to keep the fragile bird of my memory alive in him, but that the fight was too fierce. Merciless and too long. After months of scrabbling bloody tooth and nail, he let go and I slipped from his grasp.

Still I came on my bicycle day after week after month. And on Sundays with my ma or pa, who took it in turns to watch the old man waste away to nothing.

In the week I would sit by his bed and hold his hand as he shook and twitched. Other times I would read him Don Quixote by Cervantes. Or retell him the stories about the movies we had seen together. Frankenstein and King Kong versus Godzilla and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. He would look at the ceiling or he would sleep, it didn’t matter. At times I thought I did it more for myself than for him. But on a couple of rare days he looked at me and those big old empty eyes would focus into a small moment of clarity. He would see me and smile, and I would tell him again that I loved him. Which I did every day until the day he died. His hand slipping gently from mine. His story taking its last breath in his rib cage.

Interesting thing, personal narrative. The way our stories live and dance in ourselves and the people we love, hate or live with. How they walk on two legs and grow like legend. How they grow a lot like love.

Thank you to Sunday Scribblings for inspiring people to write.

My gratitude to Charles and Charlie. This is just a story but without them I would have nothing.    

Longing and the smell of bitter coffee

Yusuf put his satchel in the car and looked at his wife. Later for lunch he would find and old enamel tin box filled with rice spiced with elachi, with peas cooked into a fragrant softness. Like his mother, Sabiya served him well. Tender and yielding, she would deliver everything but his heart’s true desire. As he left her behind in his rear view mirror, he watched the young boys walk to school. Sadness welled within him. He imagined that one of those children was his.

Brought up with six brothers in a Marrakesh spice shop, Yusuf would often flee the constant arguing to sit alone the silent attic. There his father stored saffron in glass, long sticks of cinnamon bound with string, and turmeric in big wooden vats. Some times he would plunge his fist into the turmeric and see how it came out yellow, the dust floating all around him. Occasionally he would mix the turmeric with spit to draw elaborate pictures of the stories his father told him. Tales of Arab refugees escaping to West Africa with little more than their Gods in their hearts, or yarns of spice sailing the seas during a time when saffron was a currency more valuable than gold. Yusuf would draw the wind in the ship sails with yellow spit, and the spice traders in flecks of coriander, cumin and cloves. Then he would dream how he too would have a spice shop, seven sons and would sail the seas.

Rendered fatherless one fateful night, Yusuf caught many trains with his mother to get to Cape Town where his family lived with Auntie until he was old enough to go work. Sacrificed to economy, life was a monotony made bearable by his old dreams. The minute he met Sibiya he saw in her the mother of his unborn children. From the first night after their wedding he burnt his passion into her. Months turned into years, and years passed but she bore him no sons. First he blamed her, but when her first gynaecological exam showed that she was more fertile than new soil, he had to look to himself. They never spoke about his secret meetings with doctors that revealed his sperm was wanting. So each morning when he rode away from her, his longing twisted within him, making him increasingly sad, bitter and alone.

Then he devised his plan. He would ask his brother to impregnate his wife. His brother was leaving to live in Mali, and it was likely they would never see each other for many years. What a gift he could keep if his brother did this. Yusuf’s youngest brother made tangible in a child he could call his own son. His brother took convincing, but his spirit acquiesced when he saw the man’s unbearable longing. Sibiya was more difficult. She had only known one man and would not lie with another. For months he whittled away at her, as she cried and prayed and ignored him. As the months moved round and his brother got ready to leave, he delivered the ultimatum. He told her that if she didn’t do it, she may as well kill him. That he was dying already. She looked at him and gasped. Then with eyes turned downward, she said she would do this thing for him. To keep him alive. To keep him with her. To let him have the only thing his heart would love.

***
After her husband had left for work, Sibiya opened the door to his brother. The man shifted nervously and entered the house awkwardly. She had made thick coffee sweetened with raw sugar, stirred with a stick of cinnamon.

“I can just leave and we will tell him that we did what he asked of us,” the brother said.

“Here drink your coffee,” she replied, looking deeply into his eyes.

His hands were elegant, his lips soft and tender.

Then she stood up before him. He smiled and touched her finger. She dropped her scarf and dark dress to the floor.

***
Three months later and Sibiya is pregnant. She sings when she rolls the rottis and floats from room to room. Her hand covers her rounding belly, she smiles through the days. Yusuf’s rice and soft pea curry are more delicious than ever before. She laughs as she tucks his satchel into the back of his car. He looks at her in the rear view mirror. How she glows and holds herself. Like she’s embracing a beautiful secret. Then he rides to work and all the way he thinks of her with his brother. What she felt. Whether she was covered modestly, or  completely naked. Whether her hands touched his brother’s body. Along the way young boys walk to school as they always do. But Yusuf doesn’t see them now. His longing has been reborn into something new.

Misery loves company

After decades of being without been seen, Misery became matter. Grew legs, arms and little feet. Stretched and took on a cloak. Then set off for council.

Along the way Misery knew he'd find company. And before long he found Despair, and together with Bitterness and Anger they made their way to the Council of Elders as they had done every hundred years or so.

At the council they sat opposite Joy, Peace, Happiness and a myriad of other Elders who traveled long and far to be there. They would talk about the one thing they had in common. That which had brought them together.

They would talk about humanity.

Sitting like two hemispheres in one brain, they would face off in consciousness, while a thin membrane of white light, a hologram of unbiased purity, both divided and united them.

In a language with no words the two disparate groups talked in a binary stream that at times was like a raging river, crashing and thundering around them. And then they were like the memory of a whisper, a softness so slight it hardly existed.

After centuries of sacrificing so much to time and space, at last now they could surrender their duality to unity. But after a moment that lasted forever, they went their separate ways knowing they would always live on in each other. Until the next time they could take form to unite as one.

They left each other and as they did they became more defined. Richer, deeper and more uniquely themselves. And on their journey home they began to lose form. Let go of their arms. Dropped their legs. Abandoned matter to become without sight, nor smell, nor taste, nor sound. Yet they retained a sense of oneness.

Because Misery loves company. And as humans we are never only good. Or never only bad. Or completely happy. Or absolutely sad. We are the ocean of each and all the elders and the youngers, and the purity of experience that lives between them.

Bristle

First came the Y-Fronts. Then the socks. A slow migration. The gradual colonization. The erosion of my space.

I remember the shirts that I loved. I would nestle my face into them and smell the faint fragrance of mint and coriander. At times the scent that, in part, made me fall in love with him. The smell of him. Now they just smelled of the lavender linen water I had bought in Parktown before I knew him. They were stacked neatly, all three of them, two shelves down and one shelf to the left of my bra’s and underpants.

Then came that which would end it all.

Tall. White. Proud.

Standing next to mine.

His toothbrush.

bristle!

Like some settler who left everything she knew for the solitude of wide open places. The wildness of undiscovered spaces. I knew. I was no longer alone.

This was the beginning of the end.

The first day I saw it I took its slender neck dipped its head with a splash into water held by the ceramic bowl.

“Oh my god I love you,” he said later that day amidst our conversation. He pulled me into him. His mouth moved down to meet mine.

The fourth day I gripped it firmly toward its tapered end and pressed hard as I scrubbed a spot of brown off the side of that white ceramic.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” he said looking miserable. I watched every word coming out his mouth with intimacy. As if I could witness the formation of the vowels and consonants. “Lately each time I try to kiss you, you just push me away.”

By the seventh day the toothbrush was not longer there.

The new world had begun.