Excerpt of an Excerpt of an Excerpt

So it was: That after leaving Manchester Cathedral, on our way to celebrate my exam results, Padre Godfrey paused beneath a towering Madonna, and supposed in his ponderous Texan drawl that my journalism career would be defined by what I did, or did not do, with the privileged information likely to come my way.

He waved his walking stick toward each gravestone, indicating where the cross wind had driven snow against the larger tombs on a shallow angle, so that the outline of their adorning iconography recurred - stretched according to wind strength - in the bare grass beyond their leeward edges.

Like a low sun’s long shadows, could you just about make out the stenciled shape of cherubs, saints and crucifixes, where else the gale sharpened curved headstones to a series of green spikes.

The wind worsened, and I hurried to Godfrey’s right, beneath Mary’s assumption. The snow shelved off the feathers of her attendant angels, and we looked out through the cascade as if stood in the undercut of a waterfall – or an atrocious garden feature, said Godfrey.

He unpinned a dog-eared poppy from the breast of his large, green overcoat; backhand hooking either lapel shut with the curved ebony nuzzle of his horse-handled walking stick, which he swore to replace each time he straightened up to show me an open left palm, and two small indents imparted by the colt carving’s ear detail, after little more that ten minutes use.

Looks like a spider has had me. Big ones in the desert where he was from, he said. And if he’d the chance to choose again he might have overlooked its allegory and plumped for the smooth, featureless nape of a serpent, rather than this damned waste of money, whose use was limited to a prop with which to embellish the most demonstrative parts of his story, whirling it in slow circles or prodding the air when he said things like ‘in the whole wide world’, or ‘somewhere around here’.

Godfrey ran through the drill of securing his coat; battening down the flaps and hatches of the caped old thing, whose original shade and function could be discerned by the un-sewn outline of chevron and shield-shaped insignia along his chest and arms.

It was always enough to suggest his coat was a castle that he could mobilize at short notice; its many well worn folds the great doors and drawbridges of a mighty keep that he was angry at himself for having left ajar and vulnerable again – trusting too well this damned maritime climate. A straight-faced routine he performed often, usually accompanied by whooped goddamnits that drew a laugh from anyone in earshot.

But today there was nothing. He turned his poppy in his hand.

I set off into the snow before Godfrey motioned me back beneath Mary to explain, suddenly angry, that since the law of our respective homelands had seen fit to dismiss the Seal of the Confessional, he could see no damned reason not to inform me of what he’d gleaned from many a good man all those years ago.

I nodded, despite not understanding, and to cover his suddenly breaking voice said something loud and unconvincing about today’s afternoon kick off, and how it might be cancelled if this weather kept up.

He stepped forward and looked at the grey sky. I noticed he was allowing the snowfall to dilute his tears.

We’d left the Remembrance Day service early, during the first stanza of Our God, Our Help in Ages Past; Godfrey ushering me along the back pew and into the graveyard, our hymn sheets still in hand, under whispered insistence of his suddenly needing a beer. And taking, he said, the words of the always-omitted sixth and best stanza as his cue, he’d decided to forget this same old blasted commemoration in favour of something inaugural.

Godfrey pointed between two verses on his hymn sheet. Here, he said, should be sung about those busy tribes of flesh and blood, with all their lives and cares, being carried downwards by the flood, and lost in following years. They always miss that bit, he said.

Several short gusts were enough to part the heavy knave doors behind us; the hymn within spilled out in intermittent bursts like a skipping record, before two vergers hauled the way shut with a clunk. Now only a muffle within.

Godfrey smiled at me gratefully. My impression of ignorance was gallant, he said, but the keen perception that served me well as a reporter also made of me a woeful actor.

As such, he would be thankful if I might tolerate the potential of such melancholy for the next few days, and accept a role as the unspecified person to whom – for the sake of his health - he’d been advised, by some dammed shrink, to recount his troubling memories. 

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Excerpts - For Margaret Vol IV

As the reed accents the oboe were her prayers revealed on the edge of sleep: An under-one's-breath amplified to intelligible by a string of snot or tightened sinus, rasping out her same unchanged hopes from last year. The nightly mantra deepening through the woodwind tones until the orchestration reached a bassoon like unconscious. The nightlong symphony ensuing. Amen.

It was considering too closely the words of others that had caused the demise of Mary's inner monologue. Some sort of malfunction of the temporal lobe, according to the doctor. Or one of those unknown but over-studied parts of the brain, labeled after whichever European made the first incision toward understanding.

The areas of Wernicke, Broca and Broadmann, perhaps, thought John, reading one of two maps in the waiting room as he waited - still waiting - for Mary to return with some long-awaited good news.

The one that was not the diagram of the human brain - 'exploded' as it might be denoted in an automobile manual, thought John. Medulla, Cerebelum, Pons and so on, blown up and orientated cross section so you might learn the current best guess at how it all worked. The map that wasn't this one was a pink-spattered Mercator projection, circa 1922.

It was a reproduction whose presence - John always liked to think - was included as an ironic gesture; a comment on presumption. Indubitable wisdom of the Now tempered by - on close inspection - a small printer’s note in the bottom left corner, indicating that this was the seventh revision - the first to include details not known from 1 through 6, presumably. Unsettling thing for a surgery.

But Wernicke et al - like the namesakes of anglicized Africa - could at least take heart at being first on the scene; vie for reappearance beyond their years as their theories or the towns they founded grow and diminish in importance, according to some present experiment or war, John supposed.

Hemisphere, lateral surface. The language of cartography used also to chart man's greatest undiscovered continent.

Yes. Now that he thought of it, both posters, fully annotated, would be useless - like those early maps when the towns, in grand lettering, obscure topography with place names, because people hadn't figured out where on earth was important yet.

Better left unsaid, for you never know what might happen. It might be ok yet. He'd go on waiting.

Excerpts - 1:10,000,000,000

And at my misunderstanding of the exhibit, I still remember now, as if slowed to standstill or shrunk to a diorama - a scene to be walked about and the characters directed to behave - I still remember those few seconds it took Sarah, smiling, to up on her tiptoes and clasp me on the shoulders as instruction to remain, taking three paces back to demonstrate - wind-milling her arms about like a child missing her sparkler, or a conductor her baton - that Earth’s great exodus from origin represented thus: A huge sequence of ellipses through space and time. Solar system, galaxy, galaxy clusters, until - no matter the omnipotence of the geometrist - it could appear no more like maths than it could the flight of a drunk bumble bee.

Round and around me in the middle. Our planet’s skewed axis demonstrated by dint of an affected deportment: A lopsided shuffle she augmented with The Bells! The Bells! and that threatened to topple us together - that I might catch her - every time her smooth brown arms stretched into the air to demonstrate colliding comets; her poise unsettled.

Now nearing a third full circuit, she raised her hand for the last time, and motioned collision course with another heavenly body, held in the hollow of her upturned hip, bringing one fist down to the other over her strap-off-shoulder, smashing the planet slow-motion into a gently opening palm that she left there at her waist, smiling. Invitation to hold.

And she thanked me - coming in closer - for my part in the demonstration: The singularity about which she’d moved for a while.

Excerpts - Baht 'at

Yesterday's must-haves pitch from abandoned billboards on the end terraces. Torn sports cars and satellite television deals either side of tanning salons and video rentals - symptoms of the same longing that sates itself at newsagents and taxi ranks, on celebrity magazines or the cuts of some weaker quarry.

Women here amend their uniformity with cheap flourishes. Streaked hair and barely-there-tattoos testing the limit of a male sensibility that has no demand for difference. They vie for the nod to give some fumbled comfort to the bar's usual brutes, who are busy drawing on all their lust and loathing to proffer, with a pint pot hand, the final word on tits and politics. Men and women smothered in lust and lofty aspiration, kicking a blanking world because it returns them to human scale.

Through broken homes and ten fathered-families this town is barely a generation away from shared blood, for among those with a distaste for solitude is also an impatience for anything but themselves: a self-obsession based on no merit of their own lone minds, but of a sip and spit of the unfamiliar, so that partners are taken briefly to define only opposition from Self.

The constant to and fro of the limited populous has gradually formed a giant, untraceable kinship, whose components - in the vacuum of their shared anonymity - obsess over their own inner turmoil, making a script of the same small inconveniences used to excuse themselves from the crimes they commit in boredom or hate, for both here are of the same ancestor.

Reality is re-proportioned according to their sense of self worth. Blood thickens until it will clot their veins.

Excerpts - Time, Gentlemen

A wireless operator sought respite from the wider machine. He dwelt on the static between unfriendly voices to loose his thought on un-glimpsed moments far above earth, where white hot shells decelerated towards apogees of inaction, and by quirk of angle and rate flew briefly beside Vs of geese. Or maybe punctured the cloud line, recalling the twitch of surfacing fish to the pilot passing above. Things of programmed intent appearing briefly as things of volition, wild and free.

He couldn't cope outside the war room. He was so use to eavesdropping on enemies that amity elsewhere overwhelmed him. Off shift, outside work, his underused senses struggled to assimilate the sudden mass of benign information that sought him as a target: Those customary loners that mistook him for the evening's listening ear, and read into his uniform whatever missing piece they'd lost. Those young women of departed men, those last living witnesses of another war's woes: Ready confessionals his secrets could never grace. Different types of wounded, wrecking his evening off.

With only the freedom of a town far enough from foe to evade also civilization, he unfailingly found his way to this same pub.

Here the rattle of the gambler, the chinking glasses.

Sometimes the shell would hurtle through a flock at terrific speed, knocking many to earth, so that its parabola could be marked by the dead birds beneath, he imagined.

The passing zip of the school cane, then twisted and deafened they'd be, in the ringing wreckage of the breached target.
His role was to serve a purpose only as it was the dead's to warrant copulation.

For Ma, Vol I

Don't be sad. Reality flourishes in recession: weeds poking through the un-patched pavement, roots showing through her grown out dye.

Folly hiding lies in hard times, for even the sons of science will return to flock on Sunday - too workless to forge their own why.

Excerpts - Arthur's previous women

His university days were spent conducting budget science experiments, using the few suitable apparatus he could scavenge amid the dank bedsit of her: The Uncommunicative Kabbalist.

She was ever hunched in study over some sacred text, keying equations for God's love. Calculator in one hand, post-its in the other. An impregnable curtain of silk hair parting long enough to reveal a face hinting at Creation, but not so long as to reciprocate Arthur's gaze and consent to gaining some primary evidence over on the soggy couch.

Swearing not to pester, Arthur's presence was tolerated - she confined to the divine; he to the divan, which he left now and then to roam the flat in search of ersatz lab equipment to add to his gas hob bunsen burner and steak knife scalpel.

While she, sleepless and thinning, studied the numbers for origins, Arthur cooked and consumed the share she always declined to eat, and generally went about living - as the eight other students in the house did - without thought of hygiene or the future.

He watched as the sieve, bowls, can opener, spatula, tongues, peeler and various other utensils, piled atop a seldom-glimpsed draining board, forsook their independence to form some sort of super gadget - an all-in-one bound by the chance angles of their various prongs, lattices, hinges and teeth, or at least the binding culture of the many and varied molds and fungi that emerged tentacle-like from the festering sink, anchoring the structure in place.

The mathematical quirk of its being was fashioned and maintained by such a huge degree of chance, that it was hard not to believe it owed its existence to some intelligent design, and wasn't just the result of a procession of people unwilling to take responsibility for the mess of it all.

Excerpts - Hamburg

The RAF - acclaimed rhythm section and set designer for one Helga Gerting - initiated their creative partnership during the evening of 23 July 1943; the 11-year-old soprano premiering Lili Marlene to an audience of cowering neighbours during the blockbuster and incendiary bombings of Hamburg - both words latterly used to acclaim her three night stand.

Strictly deconstructionist in form, the RAF's chaotic sorties lent themselves to her brand of interpretive jazz, introduced around midnight when, stirred from sleep, Helga call and responded with St Pauli's intermittent air raid siren, reaching her thick spectacles from the bedside before, seconds later, she was out on the street, her free hand swinging with the beat of falling bombs while the other held tight to her father's.

Tall, strong Georg, head above the crowd, would be ignorant of the ballast his daughter was acquiring below, battling against the drag of each fresh anchor, unthreading the perished to safety like stitches from a wound as Helga stretched out down there among the black trampling chaos. The throng of flailing legs and suitcases of knee level.
She would latch onto wrist, collar, scruffs of necks; encouraging those she rescued to do the same and reach in sympathy to save another and another, so that Georg could only chastise a mercy that might have cost them both dear once the lengthening party finally poured - one long train of held hands - through the narrow doorway of the castle-like Heiligengeistfeld Flakturm IV, an unstiched thread of nearly-trampled souls spilling, gasping for breath, onto the floor of the air raid shelter as the way swung shut behind.

Excerpts - Hamburg

Animals resumed their respective food chains as if by common agreement, settling among the civic features most accommodating their native behaviour.

Walruses heaved their huge mounds of flesh over the jagged remains of bombed out buildings, taking over whole streets and barking their boundaries to those homeowners that dared return and sift these makeshift harems for former possessions.

The pavements were unsafe. Wolf packs gained pace along the city's boulevards, giving chase to elk, whose lumbering understeer propelling the gang's fringes into corner buildings at every t junction and crossroad. Panicked escapes that obliterated unsuspecting news vendors, street artists and shoeshine men, who - safe inside its sound - had mistook their distant rumble for incoming doodlebugs.

Often the elks' wrecking wave met its match: pulverised carcasses wrapped around the immovable, blood dripping down and finding its course in white stone pavements so that letter boxes looked like melting candles, and ram-raided phone booths - animal extremities half jutting out either end - like the modern art of war.

Excerpts - Zoo

Aquariums weren't ok because, honestly, he should like to watch the torment of panting big cats and polar bears prowling back and forth all day, than have to regard a species unaware of - or at least unable to convey - the knowledge that it was trapped. For, said Austerlitz, a great fear nagged at him, for whatever it might imply, that beside Plank's or Newton's constants it might be as easy to determine - via summation of a species' mean intelligence - the safe distance at which a hand is able to place its pet from the borders of what it otherwise recognises as freedom.