we, the damned. the writer.
the writer.
Time collapses. Linearity erodes, on the precipice where fact and fiction merge and parade under the banner of reality with a certain caprice. Here at this desk. I don’t know what time it is. Wednesday? Monday through Sunday trundle on, and destroy one another as an ouroborous. I think its the tail end of the week. Or perhaps the head. In this room, here at this desk, the bland avarice of solubility jogs my memory too much. Too too much. Its on this precipice where time collapses. Its on this precipice where days collide.
At this desk. The grain is solid, running in lines from one end to another broken only by occasional eyelets and objects strewn apparently at random, however now as I picture it in my mind placed just so to imply carelessness. Or perhaps abstraction. There is a lamp, not akin to but a simulacrum of the one that I glanced in the window of 25b Cannon Street, London, WC1. It has a green cuboid shade with one face missing from which slightly protrudes a dull bulb. The wire trails from the back of the cuboid, winding around a brass stem to a weighty base before disappearing over the tip of the far end of the table and beyond. I witnessed the object some years prior, and only from three of its six sides - when seen as a complete object – and so it must be half assumed. If seen in its composite form I viewed only two fifths of its overall external area, tops, and from a distance, and so any wear, deformity, maker’s markings and so on are null in the instance of its reproduction here. It is reproduced lit, however was originally seen unplugged, and so the angles at which the generated light project must too merely be assumed. The light splays little to the sides, or up. And is thrown meekly down across the left half of the table from its sentinel position at the farthest left corner of the solid grain from where ‘I’ hovers. Its light stumbles where it meets the spine and placated pages of two books; the first two thirds of a sheet of paper; the nib of a pen; the very bottom of a cylindrical glass object; the edge of the table on two sides where it falls in to the comparative darkness of the wider room. The book spines are probably coloured in a dark shade, although the material of their binding and their pages are rendered in a greenish hue where the lamp casts tampered light and dead shadows beyond. Inscribed on the spine above is the word INTIMACY, on the other JOURNEY TO THE END OF- the last words are lost. Along the curvature of light three inches clockwise the paper is creased. Slightly. It is lined, in faint grey, or perhaps a dark blue. It has no preordained margin. Along the very top, situated roughly in the centre of the width are scrawled three words containing one use of punctuation. The view has been approached from the perspective of the lamp in this instance and so reads thus:
we, the damned [upside down, backwards]
Using implicit knowledge of the runes of the English language it is possible for the brain to visualise the shapes and render them in a decipherable state. Therefore the pattern reads:
we, the damned
Several lines below rests a pen nib. A metallic gold colour emanating from a small steel ball bearing smeared in dark blue/black ink. The same tone as the words scrawled atop the page. The metallic gold colour housing of the ball bearing backs on to a gold coloured cone of soft plastic before meeting with the beginning of a transparent plastic cylinder encasing a thin tube filled with ink of the aforementioned shade. Baring for the shadows now. Before the ink tube can run to clarity its outer stretch is obscured from observation by a thumb, index and middle finger that swaddle its circumference in such a way as to throttle it thoroughly. Delirium tremens or no the fingers shake just perceptibly, leaving small ink marks around the general area of where the nib meets the paper. The digits are members of a set of five attached to a hand, which in turn connects to a wrist, elbow, upper arm, shoulder, neck, chin, mouth, philtrum, nose, tear ducts, eyes, optic nerve, the visual cortex – taking the hyphen as a knife – through the pons to the pineal gland. Where can be found ‘I’. Nice to meet you. Out back through the eyes the rest of the body is swathed in darkness and must too be assumed. A hand which intermittently grasps at a glass with a cylindrical base, or that picks at the petals of a flower sat low in a glass vase of cylindrical proportions. Below in the darkness from where the table drops; legs, feet and toes sit still, mulling the tapping of a steel ball bearing on creased white paper.
A noise is audible behind ‘I’, a woman laid on a bed; over the covers. She flicks through a magazine of photographed faces in the blue light of a full moon rushing in over her torso, one third of the bed and covering three foot of carpet before falling short of the light and relief of the writer at his table. She wears little, laying stomach down. She kicks her feet against the headboard and flicks the pages with the rhythm of a pendulum. The sound is soft at first, slow, but as moments fleet and the blue of the moon moves across the room, retreating further from the writer to illuminate the woman fully, it grows in candour. A scratch, before a saw, a shout, a scream and then silence. Soon, I’ll have to give up gazing at this paper. I will think about the impotence of my pen and the willingness of my hand. On the bed where I and she will tessellate. With the first rip of clothing the words will finally flow to me. And I will look away from her contorted face and gaze at the darkened wall, and there it will hit me. Afterwards I will sit down at my desk, pen to paper. Write phrases to dissolve totality. Words to transgress utility, a piece of writing to subvert my boredom, with words something like: time collapses, days collide.
