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.