Prometheus

The brilliance and horror of going to uni at your home town is that you get to see your family often. Currently writing from the glorious wifi of my parents' ^house.

There's this girl in my course. We had a seminar a few weeks ago, on this poem, 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection'. The professor was asking us our thoughts, and I spewed out this concept about the poem following the narrative of the bible. As I blurted it out I realised it was quite good - or rather, maybe it was when they told me after (my coursemates that is). Said it outshone them or something. It's always vaguely uncomfortable receiving that kind of compliment, although it's probably better than being on the other end.

The thing is, this girl is ... there's something off about her. I've grown to dislike her over the course. Odd comments, these glances she directs at me. Suddenly it's like every action she's making is measured to undermine me. She's trying to ruin me. I don't even know how but she is, there's this malice in her eyes. Sure she laughs and chats and all that shit. She gets on with the others too, but that makes it worse, like she's turning them against me too. I don't know how to explain it. I was never particularly good friends with them to begin with, but now it's like she's trying to get them in on whatever her plan is. I'm sure she has one. But I don't know why. It must have started in the first few weeks of this term. She transferred from another course - no idea how she did it but yay for me she fucking did it. I avoid going near her student housing block. I can see a window across from my own room in the private apartments, facing me, another, from the uni-ran block on the other side of the road. Her block. So yeah, it's pretty unavoidable. But that other room opposite, with the curtains always closed. It's hers. Never seen her there (for obvious reasons), but I'm sure of it. Must be. Right opposite me; it's as bad as those charred trees.

I feel sick. Enough about those trees, I can smell the gasoline again. That tangy smell, almost metallic, not a scent really, that sounds too natural, even the word stench does, more like a presence lurking. So I shut my own curtains. See how she likes that. It's like smoke signals - am I thinking of bullfighting? Spaghetti westerns take place in Italy, the filming that is. Cowboys & Indians. So the curtains are billowing in the wind like a matador's cape or a smoke cloud, which gets me thinking again about that fucking gasoline fire, in the night, where you can't see the smoke, you can't see the smoke it's just vanishing above the red and into the ink it's fucking gone without even the sky because of all these clouds. So when I tug the curtains I have to do it in the right way, the right jerks and beats so that she gets my message and knows to fuck off. We got an email off a different professor and guess what, it's on the same poem. I know she's going to use my points, I fucking know she'll steal them for the essay. I point it out but she'll say I know she says that it was accidental or that she forget or that it got into her subconsious because it was so good but how the fuck do I know if  I can believe her?

I think my girlfriend's in on it too. I'm at my ^house which is much closer to hers so I see a lot more of her. Crazy sounding, but she's got her eyes on ^House of Leaves, my second copy, the one with all the notes. Returns day after day asking for it again, not verbally of course, she knows she can't give herself away, but that's what she wants me to do with the book. She asked if she would like it once, since I'm always talking about it, and I didn't know it then but now I'm realising she wasn't wanting to just read it she wants my copy in particular. The one with my notes. All the pencil scratches I've done across it, the pictures and the annotations I've done every night every morning sometimes she's asking, because it's everything I'm saving up for my final dissertation I was always planning to do on it. She's coming over, I see her so often now and I'm sure that's part of her plan, like she made sure I'd be on Christmas break so I'd be in my ^house, and she could come get it from me. She won't. It's under the floorboards now with my other secrets. No way she can fucking have it. I just hope she doesn't hear the floor creak and figure out where I've moved it. It doesn't matter, I'm not answering her calls or texts, and I'll be moving back to my room soon, so she won't have easy access to me or my book, like she does visiting me here putting cough medicine in my tea or whatever to make sure I'm sleepy and docile. I won't be, I never sleep these days. Too much work. There's just not enough time to sleep I don't want another fire, not that it was me I don't think, anyway mainly it's that I'll start my dissertation soon, even though I don't have to think about that for years, I'm doing the planning for it. And then the course is bothering me with all these essays, like the one that girl is gonna take. Another reason to close my curtains, so she doesn't see my codes with a long-range camera or something. Smoke signals have the benefit of blocking out sight even as they try to communicate. And it's funny, the entire thing takes up the entire floor of my room back at the apartments, all the sheets with my thoughts on Danielewski's codes, even Poe's, and the symbolism etc etc etc e She's ringing right now. Can't see the caller name from the other side of the room, but I'm sure it's her I'm sure that's the phone's vibrating. She's been messaging me all day, and texting, and calling, but I am so fucking on to her it's enough to make me laugh, how she feigns worry. Sometimes I think she looks like the girl on my course too, just in her expression I mean. Girlfriend's hair is black like charcoal, the girl on my course is this vomit-yellowbrown rat-shade. But when my girlfriend smiles at me, it's like Her smile, and it unnerves me and I better remember to mention that the reason for her wanting my notes is that she's the girl's accomplice. They say probably that they don't know each other, but they do somehow, either she turned my grilfriend against me or she was against me from the start and she was sent to fucking befriend and hit on and fuck me or something until she could get to the book.

The phone's still tremoring. I don't have a voicemail, so it won't stop. She's still on the other end of the line, tugging it like string to bait me. I don't see the hook but I can certainly feel it when it comes to impale me. I won't answer her. I won't answer her. I'll go back to the apartment and she can fuck off. I'll be allone with the work and the smoke signals. I'm alone.

Everyone knows that memory is like a book you can read and my book is ^House of Leaves, that's where I have all my notes but even more than that, if I lose the book I lose all my memories of it when they start to vanish again like the one on that fire night, unless I was asleep, they'll vanish because the stolen book's full of ink, and memory's always refilling we are people and we have minds because it's always rewriting and in remembering memories of remembering we keep our minds intact as consistent forms and if I lose it the ink still wet is gonna seep off like drops of tears and all that ink is gonna slither off and I'll lose it all, I'll lose my notes on the book and my understanding of it which is just another word for my memory what I am what I can't lose and I can't lose it I don't want to lose it

Page 562

"There is only a black fence
and a wide field and a bar of Wyeth red.

The smell of anger chokes the air.
Ravens of September rain descend.

Some say a mad mad hermit man lived here
talking to himself and the woodchuck.

But he’s gone. No reason. No sense.
He just wandered off one day,
past the onions, past the fence.

Forget the letters. Forget love.

Troy is nothing more than
a black finger of charcoal
frozen in lake ice.

And near where the owl watches,
and the old bear dreams,

the parapet of memory burns to the ground
taking heaven with it."

Another Thing Illuminated

"She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum."

He's just so done.
Like a glass full of sand waiting for the parched man
to thicken his bile into a paste,
dry his arteries and blacken his veins
until withered roots sprawl across his face and
he exhales dust and
grows still on his chair,
petrified stiller than anything living yet still somehow alive.

Maybe it was the vacancy I had begun to taste, brought on by November—Novum ovum nine and all mine.

Here in November in this House of Leaves we'll play

Leviathan

This round of uni has been bad. There's so much work, and I'm already feeling guilty about not planning for my dissertation. It was meant to be on House of Leaves, which of course is always stunning, immense, sublime, but with all the essays and lectures I already have - and there's so many, it's like a Kafkan fever dream or something, every second that the second hand of a clock crawls across it's circle is an eternity that I feel guilt about not having done enough work: until it all soars up like so many droplets of water, enough to form a Weight, a wave looming above, over me - but with all that I don't know how I can manage to fit the time in to work on the plan. Decoding it's a nightmare. I like that sentence. Decoding it's a nightmare. It is. But you have to suffer for your passions, right?

It doesn't help with all this that there's something in my girlfriend's expression these days. I couldn't describe it but here's my try: like a cargo ship laden with islanders migrating across the Atlantic, heavy, metal creaking below metal, maybe even sinking. Fated to sink. I do believe she's going to break up with me.

"They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong."

I can't help but be grateful to the Mancunian rain. The heady smell of all that charred bark in the back yard - and the rich tang of gasoline - has been wiped away by successive downpours. I can bear to look out of my windows now.

Hah.

I'm reminded of another ^House of Leaves quote. "Through all the windows I only see infinity."
 Originating somewhere else, too, because I know that it was referencing another author's work.

But all that's beyond me right now. Speaking of that book though, I've been reading The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard. ^House of Leaves draws a lot of inspiration from it - especially in the Echo chapter. It's pretty good reading, though I can't say I've gotten that far into it yet. But we never get far into much, do we?

At a Pub with Friends

Tea-leaf stains in tobacco
strings, littered on a
scratched table we depart from.

Conversations overheard but not-
understood.
Words placed on table counters,
or fastened up in leather books,
flesh-packed murmurings,
music-deafened whisperings

Still, we try, to speak,

'O My friends, there is no friend.'

I'm genuinely scared of this book. The way it sits there, emitting so many unspoken volumes of thought that I can never grasp, let alone even see as they shimmer past my perception. An unending stream.

Burnt Trees, and the Manchester Dogs Home Fire

The whole burnt-trees-somnambulism incident is creeping me out. Haven't spoke to the neighbours, but judging by all that silent ash, the blaze must have been enough to alert the authorities, or at the very least wake someone up.

So far, nothing though. I sit in the living room waiting for police to come asking for details on arson, but nothing. The family thinks some crackheads must have broken in and decided to go 1666 on the trees.

All I can say is that I'm glad I'll be back in the flat in a few days. Having those stumps facing me from the bedroom window is unsettling. Can't sleep well with their glowering presence, but judging by how I ended up before, maybe that's for the best.

I just hope nothing similar happens when I'm at the flat. My girlfriend'll be there to check me in my path if I get up in the dead of the night.

In other news, a local sanctuary for dogs was burnt to the ground. Just over 50 dogs were immolated before anything could be done. I know it can't be related, pretty sure they already caught the culprit. Weird timing though - but confirmation bias does that.

The image of that fire does nothing to help me sleep. Hearing the inhuman screams of those mutts, mongrels, Pomerinians, Labradors, Alsations, Huskies, Poodles, Pekinese, echo through my skull, roam rabidly through the city streets, never to find a street curb to rest upon. And the hounds themselves, rattling in their cages with wide, rolling eyes, frothing spittle flying from their mouths and hissing as it collides and is ultimately devoured by the fire that draws closer and closer, louder and louder and hotter. And all the while those screams still going on, because, yes, I have to go back to those screams, the cries of alien vocal cords creating a raking of anguish through the ears, that turns your blood to ice and turns the September night darker than an arctic winter. Rousing nearby residents from their sleep, dragging their senses beyond the walls they've chosen. Here is the sound that calls us gladly to our graves. A poor approximation, built in the still chill of black scratches somehow etched in light, but almost enough to fulfill its purpose.

I think it's time to close these curtains.

Back to Uni

Term at Manchester Uni starts in two days. In this time I might be less active, not that you'd notice.

To make up for it, I'll tell you a story from last week.

I woke up in my garden.

It was 6AM, which is unusual for itself, considering that I usually am going to sleep a few hours before then, and waking up in the morning would usually be entirely out of the question. The sun was glaring softly¹ on my face. I'd gone to bed earlier than usual. Around 1 in the mourning, after doing nothing much when I could have gone to bed hours before. Nothing's All. I just got carried away.

I think I was studying the etymology of 'Ash', as in 'Ash Tree'. Spear.

And when I woke up I was lying with soaked clothes on dew-cleansed grass. I've been known to sleep walk. The odd thing is that I haven't done so since the age of 10. I might have left the back door open, which would have explained how I got so far. What was odder though was that I was fully dressed, with shoes and even a coat on.

So I guess I'd just gone through my wardrobe before I left my bedroom in my somnambulist haze

Except there's one more thing. All the trees in my garden were burnt down, and my hands reeked of gasoline, and had charcoal beneath the nails.

If I were to look out of the window now - and if it weren't 2:45 - I'd see them. Black, spiteful stumps, slouching sternly, black dust radiating from their trunks like shadows that learned to be tangible.


^1. Somehow.

Outside the madman hunches over his own gut, and a tire-track dog dozes in the middle of the road.

Soul Architects

The soul architects slid along the pavements,
sniffing, murmuring between themselves.
They watched for the moment before the storm,
the aftermath of which was their creation,
in such destruction their resurrection,
in such anguish their ^house was built.

At times I wonder the words they murmured

The afternoon haze cast itself a brilliant illumination across the prairie.
Taking steps forward,
Backward
seeking. They were hesitating,
while the future kept beckoning,
because they wanted no part of it.

"There is Now," Malone's words kept passing through their thoughts,
their inflamed minds that once ignited
would never droop to a smoulder
and the atoms that they would become
had never known another,
and in the span of half a century
they finally came together.

A separation so intolerably long would one day
melt
like a frozen finger of ice beneath an afternoon haze.

Until then, they were just holding on.
 Holding on to this moment,

Now

the only moment that had ever - would ever - matter.

The Library

The sun glared on the bare legs of figures spread over Piccadilly Gardens. I don't know how that's relevant, but it seemed a good way to start telling you about something odd that happened yesterday, even though that particular moment happened two days earlier.

I've started volunteering in a library this summer. It's one that specialises in antiques; old, crumbling tome after old, crumbling tome. I get to climb high among the books, like a midshipman scaling the crow's nest. It's an interesting way to look at books. It also gets tiring, spending hours on end reshelving.

I was sat behind a desk taking a break when she came along. Her age was indecipherable. She could have been anywhere from late twenties to early fifties. A lot of the time her age seemed to vary on the lighting, or her mood. Maybe it was just the make up.

She glanced about the place absently, and I watched. Just a habit, I suppose, or perhaps my eyes just happened to plant themselves on her when she turned and caught my eye. I was in trouble now. I was just a re-shelver. Not a receptionist. Hell, it was my second day.

I asked her to sign in on the sheet because that's what the others did when someone came in. When I looked at what she had written later, all I saw was an indecipherable scrawl.

She wanted to know where the section on marriage-advice was. Remember, this library specializes in antiques. One section's even called 'polite literature'. There was no marriage shelf, let alone any self-help section.

Also, her hand was bare. No wedding ring.

Could have been trying to find a book for a friend but she seemed way too personally involved. Her eyes kept flitting about the room, she couldn't settle on her feet. I don't think she ever stopped moving after she entered. She scratched at an arm a lot too, and all while giving the saddest smile.

I didn't notice any of it at the time, but I knew then she was acting oddly, even if I couldn't explain how. None of it bothered me too much beyond the usual parameters of disliking social contact. What really made me hesitate was when she turned to leave. It took some convincing until she believed me when I told her that we didn't have that kind of book. And then she'd gone on a tangent about how I should be careful using the ladders, that I could fall easily.

Anyway, when she started moving off, she did this sort of stretch, and her shapeless beige shirt lifted up slightly. Creeping out of the hem of her jeans was a faded sliver of grey and white. A tattoo. A cartoon rabbit. A Thumper tattoo.

All you who sleep tonight

All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right
And emptiness above -

Know that you aren't alone
The whole world shares your tears,
Some for two nights or one,
And some for all their years.

Vikram Seth

That was an exceedingly depressing conversation.

FATE

Two shall be born, the whole wide world apart,
And speak in different tongues and have no thought
Each of the other's being, and no heed.
And these, o'er unknown seas, to unknown lands
Shall cross, escaping wreck, defying death;
And all unconsciously shape every act
And bend each wandering step to this one end -
That, one day, out of darkness they shall meet
And read life's meaning in each other's eyes.

And two shall walk some narrow way of life
So nearly side by side that, should one turn
Ever so little space to left or right,
They needs must stand acknowledged, face to face.
And, yet, with wistful eyes that never meet
And groping hands that never clasp and lips
Calling in vain to ears that never hear,
They seek each other all their weary days
And die unsatisfied - and this is Fate!

Susan Marr Spalding [1841-1908]

"We're allways sixteen..."

www.onlyrevolutions.com

Without you, I am only revolutions, of ruin.

They find it impossible to conceive of the perceptions of a mind filtered by a lobotomy.

We Carry The People We Meet With Us

Why is it that whenever I catch eyes with one of them that I'm drawn to her to such an extent that her face is burned into my retina? This stranger girl draws me in so much that I leave with part of myself lost, or stolen; a thousand hypotheticals leave my heart feeling drowned.

Out of Reach

I do believe that it's ending. All of it.