So I spend time writing one thing and then go off and write
another that seems like it is a different thing until I realise that the roots
of both of the things are somehow intertwined. I realise that I still
have a paracosm and it has grown out of the same mind as the one that has always been there. In
this sense, as was the case with Eddison and Tolkien and many others, one’s juvenilia can be utilised as the historical backdrop against
which one’s mature work can be seen. [Insert obligatory disavowal of hubristic
comparisons here]. The personal rewards of
publishing the things I have written are insufficient for me to pursue just yet
and the personal reward of pursuing the great interconnected thing beckons enticingly.
Writing is something I only ever
pretended to be interested in in much the same way as everyone vaguely literate
tends to express a desire to write at some point in their lives. But for much
of the time I spent writing I dabbled fecklessly and was generally shambolic in
my irregularity. Now I am trying to dig my way out of a creative stalemate I am
finding that writing might be a useful neurological exercise and not just as a
self-reflexive practice but also as a means of sharpening the wits.
The way I figure it, when anyone
conceives an artwork of any description they start with an idea that manifests
as a series of emotional impressions. For me it is like a
dumb, pre-verbal looming-out-of-chaos of mingled glory and sadness and bitter
irony and deadpan hilarity and the process of trying to capture
it is always always crude. The enunciation of the idea changes the
idea. For me, writing seems like amateur carpentry, whatever
unspeakably wonderful thing glimmers at the edge of consciousness, its
representation is splintery and rickety and has too many nails.
Over time the translation into
carpentry grows less rickety.
'I am that astonishment from which you write in those brief
moments when you can write.'
Russell Hoban, The Medusa Frequency
Also, while I am throwing in
quotes, this is Thomas Pynchon from Mason and Dixon describing something
vaguely familiar;
“The Astronomers have a game
call’d “Sumatra” the the Revd often sees them at
together,- as children, sometimes, are
seen to console themselves when something is denied them, - their Board a sort
of spoken Map of the Island they have
been kept from and will never see. “Taking a run in to Bencoolen, anything we
need?” “Thought I’d nip up the coast to Mokko Mokko or Padang, see what’s
a-stir.” “Nutmeg harvest is upon us, I can smell it!” Ev’ry woman in “Sumatra”
is comely and willing, though not without attendant Inconvenience, Dixon’s
almost instantly developing wills and Preferences of their own despite his best
efforts to keep them uncomplicated, - whereas the only women Mason can imagine at
all are but different fair copies of the same serene Beauty,- Rebekah,
forbidden as Sumatra to him, held in Detention, as he is upon Earth, until his
Release, and their Reunion. So they pass, Mason’s women and Dixon’s with more
in common than either Astronomer will ever find out about, for even phantasms
may enjoy private lives, - shadowy, whispering, veil’d to be unveil’d, ever
safe from the Insults of Time.”
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_________________________________________________________________________________
Unburdening myself from the need to make things intelligible
to the reality of the game is liberating. Conversely, the realisation that the
purple prose is of less use than the poetic resonance of the concept is
grounding.
Some Quasimortals:
It is possible to become so lost that the home you return to
is no longer home. When a magician starts to transcend mortality they realise
that the self they were was rooted in that mortality and that the
transformation they seek makes a mockery of all the reasons they seek it. The enunciation
of the idea changes the idea. Loss is the price of gain.
1. Cornbrash Stratum, erstwhile pupil of Ravelhain the Garganaut,
opted, in his quest for immortality, for a kind of irresistible physicality that
would daunt time’s vicissitudes with unyielding material toughness. Replacing,
over the course of several decades, all that in him was frail with heavier
elements he became the embodiment of fortitude, a ferrous thing that wades
thighbone-deep through the world and sees through the things he once loved like
vapour.
His peculiar obsession is the structure of things, as he
replaced all that was within him of whim and passion with structural components
devised in such a manner as to stave off decay. He communicates now with
humanity only through architectural manipulations of masses of stone.
Unable to recognise individual human beings he nonetheless can perceive in architectural
style as it shifts from age to age the presence of some kind of agency that is
the aggregate of thousands of minds. It is with this aggregate that he now
seeks to communicate, at intervals of three or four generations, by enacting
reconfigurations of the geometries of their communiques or producing
constructions that parody the degradation of abstract mathematical ideals
manifest in human structures.
2. Glowbason Kale, the cauldron witch, is attended by her
Savoury Characters and by the delectable fragrance of roasted meat. The attendants
number seven to ten, range from medium rare to blackening bones and bear her
along upon a palanquin brazier trailed by a turnspit dog who gnaws at their
ankles and laps at the juices they leave. The witch herself has boiled away for
seven hundred years and languishes in her simmering bath of broth. They travel
in search of firewood from the Hundred of Onbethankit long abandoned where her
toothsome crew have chopped down the spinneys and dug all the peat to keep the fire
burning. She requires, for the recipe that ensures her continuity, certain
herbs - by moonlight plucked from unhallowed ground - and spices from the far
lands.
Her Savouries are variously glazed or garnished or stuffed
with writhing young. All are tasty save those who are now, sadly, overcooked.
3. Behold Auld Jack Smelt on his pitchfork, riding backwards
through dreams. He can live there, in his phantasmagorical Clud-Haas above
Galligantus Peak, somewhat outside a reality he rejects. Upon seeing the
exhilarating wildness of his ride through the sky-wrack, one half-expects him to cackle madly, as mad cackling seems so obviously his
domain. He does not cackle but weeps, or remains stony-faced and dark of countenance.
Sorrows fly with him like hoodie-crows, in his Magonian house they besmirch the
golden-whiteness with their purpureal sootiness and incessant dirge. They roost
above his empty bed and bespatter all that place with the stinking memory of
times before all was lost.
Aspics adorn his gate and writhe upon every floor in poisonous
relief. They remind him of the time it happened and of the time before.
4. Manigate Querken: prenticed to Ysgithrog the
Metempsychotic in an early saeculum, Querken sought and found a conduit into
his own past that he might relive his lost youth over and over. Many times now
he has crawled through the Tunnel in the Ivy to capture and murder the precursory
self as it skulked under a bridge one day in its fourteenth summer. Querken
reinhabits the youth’s life with his sinister foreknowledge and meticulous record
of the trammelled paths of his cyclical reality. He bears with him a grimoire
of exploitable occurrences and passes through the world each new time with more
cunning means of advancing his position and status to enigmatic purposes.
The position of the Tunnel in the Ivy he keeps secret or fortifies
with walls of stone and soldiers bought with extraordinary wealth plundered
from those thralls of conventional causality and sequence who have the
misfortune of falling his prey.
Nobody sees him coming. Nobody knows how many times he has
passed backward through the decades or lived forth again along his timeline, his
head full of foresight and cunning schemes. He may be the oldest of all.
With him Hobshanks, Querken’s man, formerly a Drungary of
the Twelth Assize, now loyal to the death to the master. In which former life Hobshanks
was Sir Layloc Theophagus, his current sobriquet arose from his habit of
falling to his armoured knees in the presence of the master. He is huge and
scarred and his purple cloak is ragged. None may stand before him.
5. The Bearer of Ill-Tidings: In her maidenhood she had
fallen victim to catastrophic sorrow and had thrown herself into a chasm. She
did not die, her broken body hung pinioned in a thorn tree for six days and
nights. On the fifth day a gastrel came and plucked out her eyes. In the
darkness of the seventh dawn the Thicketty Man came (whose cowardly habit was ever
to avail himself of untoward occurrence) and planted in her a seed of the
world’s destruction. It grew in her, this seed, and she grew strong again and
stronger still. Now she walks in the world again a witch unbridled, tall as a
tree, gaunt and hollow and swollen with century-child burgeoning inside. When
she speaks no words come but knives instead, clattering at her feet, etched
with glyphs that speak of ruin.
Mostly she dwells beyond the sky in a star of serrated black
iron that hangs in the utmost void. Upon the earth she casts a tripartite
shadow that tells of forgotten suns, invisible to man. By their light she sees.
6. The Get of Ravelhain: A feral thing, sudden and brutal,
furnished with immeasurable potence, squats in the hideous twilight. Its essence
is a blazing blackness: furred, simian, and eloquent in all the languages of
violence. Upon a long chain an angel of bronze, rearing magnificent in gleaming
counterpoint to the black one. The angel is crowned with lightning and sorrow.
She is immortal and captive to a thing born of the wicked earth.
He wields her like a flail. She keens her celestial lament
for the wickedness of man and he batters mighty citadels to dust and splinters
and drags her from world to world in search of empires to trample and cow.
He is his father’s son.
