Wednesday, August 28, 2013

ALBA READS FROM “DEAD CONVERSATIONS BURY THE LISTENER”

                                                                                                                                                                        

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I was meditating on a document for The Conspiracy of Beauty, pen and paper on the bed in front of me, when Alba, as she was oft inclined to do, started to recite to us from a biography she had begun rereading the previous weekend. It is entitled “Dead Conversations Bury the Listener”. Going by the yellowed colour of the pages, the claret hardback embossed with the title and author’s name, Bashir B. Sherpa, a tome published a century or more ago. I relax and close my eyes. I am carried away on scents of ancient libraries full of volumes fingered by the chosen few that talk of ages past and of ages to come, not in languages long forgotten, but in dust and cobwebs, the dark and dark secret odours….


‘I splatter, I dribble, I blabber, never having ever wanted to see the light out there. It’s all some insane effort on my part to take myself back into the long gone peach universe and beyond, where there was never a question to be asked. Where there was never anything to be understood because it was a time before syntax. Where there were no tenses to show things their logical order. It was back beyond the time of listening and waiting and growing and putting off ‘till the very last moment my birth. Birth, light, and I can just imagine what was running through my desperate thoughts with no syntax and no concept of tense; a vacuum. Suck the liquid back out of me, suck out everything I never asked to be pumped into me! Suck it all back through that umbilical cord, oh vacuum, suck my life back out of me! Send it all back into the eternity of the only true peace I’ve ever known. Curse the sperm that wasn’t lazy enough to give it all up as a lost cause. Curse the ovary that beckoned on the strongest, stupidest sperm, for it was swimming so hard it had no time to think about giving it all up as a lost cause. Curse the hormones. Curse my father for his lack of control over his hormones and curse my mother for patiently waiting there in submission, in missionary position. Curse her for hating every moment but yet putting up with the pumping. Curse the web of umbilical cords….’


“String Theory!” interrupted The Pretty Girl from the kitchenette. “Jone, por favour, this is serious stuff here, it's art!” Complained Alba. “!Joder¡” I thought without uttering the slightest of sounds, Let’s get back to the crooning, and Alba did just that, but just before she did just that, she looked at Jone through the sliding glass panel to the kitchenette counter where she was brewing a pot of strong coffee and warned, “Don’t you dare….” Jone smiled a knowing smile, winked and executed a cute little curtsy. “Where was I….Oh yes, String Theory….”


‘Curse the web of umbilical cords pumping for life, pumping for the future. I will call on the vacuum. I will oblige it to suck me back through the generations, through the eons, through the infinite tides of amniotic breakers, through the first cell membrane ‘till I encounter, face to face, face to tremulous nucleus, the nucleus, and I tell it, “Don’t you dare….’


“I just said that myself!” Said Alba, interrupting the natural cadence of her reading. “Coincidence!” hissed Jone through a cloud of steam from the percolator. “You’ve read the book before. You knew it was coming before it came, like you do when we’re making love! “¡Idiota!”


‘Don’t you dare, don’t even think about it I’m warning you, on the part of the devilish baby in me, for the never to be conceived me, for the uncountable quantities of baby me that were never and will never be conceived. Don’t do it. It never worked for me and if it doesn’t work for me it’ll never work for you.’ But, of course it divided all the same and that’s how everyone gets the opportunity to make the journey back. Few take it up. Dead conversations bury the listener.’

FURTHER QUOTES FROM “DEAD CONVERSATIONS BURY THE LISTENER”



Her voice, his, this Bashir’s words, they floated in and out of understanding because I was floating in and out of concentration. The sound of Alba’s voice was far more interesting than the meaning hidden in the text she was reciting. She obviously thought the message vital and was therefore reading with an exaggerated vitality. It sounded like poetry, but it was really music and the instant I thought “music” was the instant the sounds became words and the words became sentences and the spell was broken and syntax translated the dream into literacy, then literature. The scents of ancient libraries full of volumes that talk to the old and arthritic of ages past and of ages to come, not in languages long forgotten, but in dust and cobwebs, the dark and dark secret odours promptly evaporate….

At that very instant she waved her hand in front of my face. She had an irritated look on hers. “You aren’t listening, are you?” “Oh yes I am, with pleasure, but I’ve not understood a word. The music, the incense, it is pure bliss!” “The music?” “Incense! Don’t worry about it, go on, go on! Pretty Girl, come and sit with us!” And I patted the sheets and Jone Johnson sank into the bedding leaving Alba between the two of us, clothbound book in hand. “Concentrate, both of you, okay? Peter, please!” I was making faces across Alba’s chest to Jone. “Mummy, tell us a story….Once upon a time….” Jone grinned at me but Alba didn’t see because she was searching for the spot in the paragraph where she had interrupted her narration. “Are you all sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin!” Sang Alba, with an innocent childlike intonation, and begin she did.


‘Look at it like this, can there be anything for her quite as pathetic as the inane grin on her lover’s face the morning after the girl has once again managed to satisfy herself first and foremost? Perhaps the paintings on the wall would suffice as a niggling well of insatisfaction too. She told me there was, in effect, no difference between either, except that in the latter case the foreplay had lasted just a little longer. She said that there was a degree of masochism in both activities, the sharing inevitably unsatisfactory.
‘Imagine,’ she stated quite nonchalantly, ‘the colours are mixed on the palette and my nose is between someone’s legs. The vacuum is tugging at me.  My finger is red, it’s paint. I lick the tip of my brush to bring it to a point. Red, it could be paint. I tongue her brush, fine light brown and downy. I suck her straight into my mouth and I’m just like a baby desperate for taste, desperate for sensations, desperate to explore, to explore what?  The Void! My paint, her blood, your blood, what does it matter, to whom does it really matter? It matters to me! I’m a devil of a child exploring myself and I’m working on myself, on her, on you. I’m looking for myself in the blood and in the paint. I’m looking for myself in the dark, in umbra and penumbra. The void is shadowy. The bedroom light is unquestionably switched off. It’s on in the studio.’
I can quote this conversation word for word because I don’t have to rely on pure memory. ‘Memory only allows you to remember what memory sanctions you to remember.’ That was one of the lines she would often pepper her conversations with. To her, it was a given fact. This was one of the very few monologues she actually allowed me to record, or, to be more accurate, one of the few monologues she did not insist on erasing. ‘Microphones force me to exaggerate, to invent situations. They give me a reason to make a mundane life of over sixty years more palatable, people too. It interests me how often I shit and how often I can’t be bothered to wash my hands, but only momentarily, then I need to do a bit of reinvention! Turn that off and invent a different angle for your readers to see me from. Do me, and your readers a favour, exaggerate from faulty memory. The real me only exists in the dark, in the vacuum. So, the real me doesn’t exist! Isn’t that exciting? That’s why lovers tend to turn off the lights. Intuition! They don’t desire an existence under the light of scrutiny! Neither do I!’ She would deliver a version of this after every interview, but, on this occasion finished with, ‘Let them see what they need to see! It’s not for me to correct. It’s for an artist to see further into umbra and penumbra.’
This was back in the winter, a white December. Her words were falling apart, into disuse, but her images were ever more powerful. She told my recorder, (because I happened to see that she was looking straight through me). ‘You know, doctors and nurses, we’ve all played at it one way or another, at one time or another. You’re doctoring me for a public who pretend to be avaricious for answers to “Why?” You’re prettying me up. I’m The Pretty Girl. I’m doctoring myself in secret secretions, me and my girlfriend, in primers, oil paints, spirits of turpentine, spirits and sundry varnishes, both matt and shiny, but all of it rousingly slippery. It’s dirty. It’s nasty. It’s terribly hard work. It hurts. Why? I do it because there’s nothing else to be done, it’s terribly exciting….to me. My art is my only power beyond myself, beyond this corpse you observe twitch every now and again.
I only ever asked her about the future once and she said, ‘We live in the past tense, but long to project something, if only one solitary meme, into the future. Every projection into the future dies in the past. Dead conversations bury the listener. It’s up to future archaeologists to choose what to put flesh on. Human interest is fickle, it’s nothing. Me? I am only the art I have created, it’s nothing. That’s what there is to discover, nothing.’



But Jone Johnson had discovered something. She had discovered where her nickname had sprung from, for I too had read the book long, long ago. In fact, I had written it.

I smiled over the bed at her but uttered not a word. Dead conversations bury the listener.

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

THE DISINTEGRATION OF POSEIDON



Poseidon glimpses, temporarily out-of-body, from afar, his lonely instant of disintegration. Never upon a time dissolved to become, once more, Once Upon a Time. 




Pandora, yet again disillusioned, imagines her near empty amphora sinking slowly into the deep blue depths.

She watches Poseidon trickle right there from his very own sad little ornamental fountain.

“So, that’s what it all comes down to!” She knows, and she smiles a knowing smile.