“Ain’t No Fucking Cryptozoologist” [Part 7]

Juja played a mean chord and then fell silent.  B. vulgaris ceased its motion and anxiety flared in [the fronts of] Juja’s [?] eyes.  Horace’s whispered words served to add to the tension — the mere sound of speech was novel, given the geologic amount of time that seemed to have passed since I had last heard it.

“As I said back on the road, yonder critter’s behaviour were documented by a reputable zoologist, although yer seeing more of Beluapal vulgaris than Herr Doktor Heisenberg ever saw.  His understanding of what yer seeing, plain as day, was rather more inferential, and I’d wager next year’s spuds that the cessation of our fine musician’s tunes will prove a catalyst for our witnessing the Beluapalian behaviour from which all of the good Doktor’s inferences were made.

The tunes are relaxing, don’t you know — “

“Relaxing?  That’s maybe the most tense I’ve ever been!”  Horace’s words had replaced Juja’s music as a half the cause of a bifurcation in my intention, and I wondered if he only spoke to maintain my struggle to concentrate, and thus keep the lights on.

“Brother, not some damned loud.  We can’t be having yonder critter swallering its own self before I’ve got you prepared for what yer about to witness.  As I said, Juja’s music and my sweet spud hooch are the only things between yonder critter and serious anxiety as would cause autophagy so damn quick you’d never get a decent look.

Pretty soon, the mind-vapours of my sweet spud hooch are going to cease to have the desired effect, and yer going to see yonder beast swaller himself.  Perhaps your most funda — “

The animal, seeming to take its cue from Horace’s warning, slowly and visibly shifted its weight to the fingers of its rear legs and stood erect, sinking slightly into the soft mud in so doing.  After this, it moved with a quickness that was cat-like but, owing, presumably, to its intoxication, not at all supernatural and amenable to watching, at least by someone so self-consciously concentrated as I was.  The tail shot forward, between the hind legs, and simultaneously, the animal abandoned its stance, rolling deftly backward onto its shoulders, raising itself tail-first off the ground.  As these acrobatics were in progress, the small weasel-mouth opened, like the mouth of a shark about to deliver a massive bite — but moreso.  The carcharadon’s mouth opens improbably wide: this mouth opened impossibly wide, I am fairly sure, so that when the tail entered it [as I had been promised it would], neither the viciously hooked teeth nor the pulsating pink tongue touched fur.

For B. vulgaris, once the tail had entered the still-gaping jaws, “swallering itself” consisted of: a sit up.  The creature contracted its abdomen, forcing its hindquarters into its mouth.  Tighter and tighter it wound into itself, until, in the space of a few seconds, it was gone.

Often we miss, in our very attempts to concentrate on the things we watch, the most crucial details.  Sometimes the ball is over the fence before it registers with us that the batter has swung, and then we concentrate on the ball and miss his follow-through.  In very intense instances of this effect, the temporal order of things seems unclear, though the phenomenon is purely psychological.  I was reminded of this vanishing-swing effect as I saw Beluapal disappear, but, though the temporal order of things at the instant of its vanishing certainly did not seem obvious, I had a nagging and difficult intuition that the vanishing-swing effect was not at work.

Indeed, precisely because our language is so rooted in our spatial intuition, I am at a loss to describe what I saw in any further detail.  I’m afraid that Herr Doktor Heisenberg may be a figment of Horace’s narcotic imagination.  Indeed I have since, not for lack of exhaustively trying, been unable to locate any writings by the latter, on Beluapalian or other subjects.  Therefore, I must attempt my own description of a seeming mammal, inside itself.  This fills me with foreboding, for it makes unavoidable the knowledge that I have had an experience, whose literal reality I may not honestly discount without calling into question all else that I have ever seen, of a sort which is in the normal course of life accessible only by abstraction or approximation.

Before describing what happened to the creature, self-swallowed, and what happened to me shortly thereafter, I will emphasise, but not yet specify, the epistemologically devastating consequences of this experience: consider them emphasised.  To describe them now would be to get ahead of myself, and there will be enough temporal confusion in the story to come.  Too much before after after and I grow tired.

“Ain’t No Fucking Cryptozoologist” [Part 6]

My first look at a representative of the species Beluapal vulgaris was, even under the utterly surreal circumstances, somewhat anticlimactic.  I saw: an inebriated weasel — or a hairy salamander.  The creature, however, merits further description since nothing beyond those first few seconds had any of the necessary features of anticlimax, and this description is made difficult only be the singular morphology of B. vulgaris, not by any difficulty in observation, given the clinically bright light cast upon all in my field of vision by the aforementioned energetic friction of my mind.  The animal was approximately as long as a large housecat, but with far less curvature of the spine, its body being roughly cylindrical, tapering necklessly to a well-whiskered snout at one end and a short, blunt, not obviously prehensile tail at the other.  The comparison to a salamander is apt for non-serpentine reasons: the legs, numbering four, were attached to the body in the typical quadrupedal places, but the manner of attachment — shoulderless, and emanating straight out from the torse — was sirenoid.  The legs, hairless, pink and scaly, like the skin of a recent thirst victim, perhaps, were nearly parallel to the ground, but the creature maintained a healthy eight inches from belly to mud by balancing improbably on twenty delicate, eerily hominid fingers, emanating from tiny hovering palms, five per leg.  The fingers were rather longer than any human fingers, however, and were themselves splayed with the effect that each “hand” formed the skeleton of a teepee, and these together supported the animal.  Its movements were ungainly, and seemed as though they must be so even in a sober animal, but if, as I was beginning to suspect, Horace’s claims about Beluapalian defensive behaviour were in some sense true, then this animal would of course have no need for pedestrian agility.

Beluapal was a rocker among weasels, sporting, everywhere but its legs, a thick slick slimy coat of deep black fur, glistening with greasy moisture, like some sewer rat particularly deserving of the name.  Even the well-whiskered nose was greasily hirsute.  It seemed as though this hair, if dry, would increase the apparent size of the animal by a large factor, but as it was, the weasel’s sleek physique was apparent, as were its eyes — eyes!

Unlike the eyes of the furry furies of fiction, these eyes were not horrible piercing points of light or abyssal black pools.  These were the eyes of a man: an old drunk man.  They were bloodshot and bright blue, blurred by a wet film of moisture, from under which they shone with a kind of starry-eyed ecstasy, like the eyes of a glossolalist or someone having a beautiful trip.  They were vaguely familiar eyes, too.  I’d seen these eyes recently, today even.  At risk of being recaptured by his music, I shot a glance at Juja, and saw, to my shock and bemusement, that his eyes remained rolled back into his head in the singular manner mentioned earlier.

Where first I had but wondered, I began to analyse, though the flood of utter newness I had encountered in the immediate past rendered the process of analysis similar to a surgical operation performed with a scalpel made of soft cheese.  My first patient was my own human tendency to spin a web of relationships between the data of my world, and to ignore things lying outside of this web, spurious though it may be.  Thus: were the tired, joyous eyes gazing at me from either side of the wobbling and pointy well-whiskered Beluapalian nose really the eyes of the man who, thirty feet away, played a spatial-intuition-defying guitar with his eyeballs reversed?  In the absence of such a guitar — whose description, though difficult, was far easier than actually looking at it — which was a primary agent of the reforging of my mental scalpel from camembert, I would have readily questioned this notion, but my spatial intuitions were crumbling literally before my eyes, and in some peculiar way the guitar seemed to lend plausibility to my strange feelings about the ocular unholiness of its operator and the bizarre creature his music had apparently attracted, and some apparent connections between them [the instances of ocular unholiness].

As was becoming something of a regular occurrence, my web-spinning and strand-picking was interrupted by new data when the wind changed, carrying a scent to my nostrils from the direction of the staggering animal.  It smelled not like the sewer rat it resembled, nor even like  a sewer, but how a sewer would smell if it had recently been alive.  Perhaps the butcher’s knowledge comes closest to knowing the unmediated stench of a mammalian intestine; the present moment, however, was my first experience with such smells [i.e. via me not being in the butchery business].  While the rodent inhabitants of the sewer may (I would not be surprised to find) smell of the noxious products of digestive processes long terminated, this was the aroma of something which had been running freely inside an intestine.  If I’d smelled this earlier, I would no doubt have found it easy to ignore Juja’s music.  This smell was an experience.  Sometimes a potent odour will be felt on the tongue; I could smell the fucker with my skin.

“Ain’t No Fucking Cryptozoologist” [Part 5]

By degrees, my verbal consciouness began to melt under this universal threnodic hypnosis, and soon my ruminations were pressed into some ignored corner of my mind by a distinctly-shaped impression, and that shape was: flat.  That flatness, of tone of voice or affect or composition, is used to metaphorically evoke boringness, seems, I began to realise, to indicate a massive collective failure of imagination unless certain Aesopotropic cards about familiarity breeding contempt are played as an excuse for the benefit of the metaphor-makers.

For all of its crags and little trenches and smeared sludge and slime and automotive detritus, this yard, like most places I, and everyone else, have ever been, was essentially flat; even the most intrepid mountaineer, perceives, through the soles of the boots, even the most jagged peak as flat for the purposes of standing in one place.  Wherever we wander, up is up and down is down, in some deeply intuitive way that even the most braindead disco aficionado understands, which understanding is made clear by his iconic pose.  That I despair of describing Juja’s guitar with clarity is evidence for the orientability of our intution.

Since that night, I have often wondered if the dualism which permeates our linguistic and intellectual traditions is a reflection of the orientability which is present in the vast majority of the world we experience and thus dominates our spatial intuition.  Right or left?  Right or wrong?  Origami, and mu.

This thought didn’t occur to me in any way to which I am accustomed, however: I heard it in Juja’s music, perhaps from the same multidirectional universal source that informed his unconscious fingers.  The music played my brain as it played Juja’s poker chip, as though whatever combination of inspiration and Horace’s sweet spud hooch produced Juja’s muse had somehow penetrated my musically uninspired sobriety.

I am not certain for how long I was nothing beyond being embedded in Juja’s music, but after some time — just as I was beginning to feel overwhelmed and dissociative — I became somewhat anchored in the perceptual world to which I am accustomed by the comforting presence of a rustling sound, which originated very distinctly from the vicinity of the tree by which Horace had left his foul-smelling elixir.  It was a comforting mesocricetan rustling, suggestive of something small, furry, vulnerable and alive.  Horace heard the rustling, too, and shot me a glance which commanded silence and stillness.  I seemed to be under something of the paralytic spell that afflicts us at the half-awake moments of nightmares during which movement — fighting or fleeing — is most desirable.  Horace needn’t, in short, have worried.  I did, however, muster the mobility to stare in the direction of same gnarly pine, and this decision, even if I had entertained no notions of the kingdom Animalia, was the most psychologically influential one I have ever made.

Horace had spent his adolescence [this story having been related during our drive] bouncing between the homes of his late mother’s siblings, which homes were sprinkled liberally about these woods.  After his mother’s death, his long-suffering father had made a heroic attempt to raise young Horace, but a particular incident, which occurred when the latter was twelve, provided the final of many straws which actually culminated in the literal breaking of Maurus pere’s back and resulted in Horace’s itinerant teens.

Horace’s Pops was half of a prodigal son, being the only of the Maurus clan to leave these woods, never to return, and Horace spent his most formative years in a dingy but well-maintained bedsit, watching his widowed father assuage his loneliness with noxious fortified wine and a maudlin monologue directed at the even more long-suffering one-eared greyhound, Argonaut, who shared their modest quarters.

Not even the young Horace knew [if he'd even thought about it] whether the pranks to which he subjected his Pops were mere mischief befitting any claustrophobicly-housed neglected twelve-year-old semi-orphan, or if they were manifestations of some sort of proto-Horacity which would, in mature form, have him violating diverse blue laws and essentially the entire tax code.  The question is academic, though, because one evening, young Horace exercised his natural childish curiosity and, an hour before his Pops returned that evening from wherever it was his Pops went, unscrewed the cap from his Pops’ last bottle of Raucous Corvid and decanted a generous bloody puddle into Argonaut’s empty water-bowl.

The fleet-footed dog fell upon the Raucous Corvid like it really was blood, and by them time Pops returned,  Argonaut was in the throws of an unmistakeable inebriated sugar-high.  The generally lethargic animal lurched rapidly and randomly around the tiny apartment, eerily seeming to be, if not quite everywhere at once, mostly unconstrained by getting-from-A-to-B rules about having to be somewhere betwixt A and B in the interim.  That Pops tripped over the confused beast before he [the former] could even ask what the sam hill was wrong with Argonaut, and that that tripping resulted in a fall which in turn brought about the premature end of Pops’ gross motor skills and like child-rearing capabilities, to say nothing of desires [once he saw the wine in the water bowl], is not really here nor there, and may not even be true.  What is both here and there is that I have heard a lengthy and authoritative dissertation from one Horace Maurus on the effects of ethanol on the behaviour of the so-called “lower animals”.

Whatever was doing the rustling had clearly found the glass of Horace’s sweet spud hooch.  Though they were but dim outlines, it was clear that the tree abutted a small bush, and that the glass had been placed on the foot-wide strip of bare mud between them.  More careful listening revealed the rustling noises to be punctuated with forlorn knocking sounds, and with some straining of the eyes, I was able to make out an indistinct shadowy blob, perhaps the size of Argonaut [or some other greyhound, if Argonaut was fictitious], swaying aleotorically about this patch of mud, bumping at intervals into the bush and the trunk of the tree.

Juja played on, more and more intricately, and I felt a tension grow between my desire to observe the vague shadow in the trees and the barely resistible urge to become immersed in the music.  For some minutes [for my sense of time held on as long as some of my attention was focused on looking at the trees in an ordinary way], this conflict escalated, as though with each increase in my effort to observe the apparition, who- or whatever dictated the score to Juja made those intertwined harmonies more compelling.  I fought as one fights to leave the bed on a freezing morning, and, seemingly as an effect of my growing mental friction, the world became suffused with a growing unearthly orange light, rendering its features slightly more readily visible.  As the mere facility of sight was thus aided, the act of observation required less will, and my hard concentration on the trees became easier.  However, when I began to treat this task of viewing as less mammoth than it had been, the conflict in my mind diminished, and with it the light!  Several times I repeated this, and found that changing the intensity of my efforts to observe the tree, at the expense of attending Juja’s harmonies, brought about a corresponding modulation of the illumination of the forest.  My divided attention was a candle, shedding light on all I could see, and flickering with my willpower.

I whispered to myself of eye sockets and balls.  I imagined deafness and earplugs and van Gogh, cutting off an ear that he might see.  I am become binoculars.  Music means nothing — its abstractions hold no attraction, emotionally.

Everything around me vibrated with the strains of Juja’s guitar, but I was by now oblivious, and everything in my field of vision was lit as though by daylight.  Dead centre, standing still and stupid with liquor and hypnotised by the ecstatic music [which music I could by now barely hear] was a creature.

Graphology 101…

…or how I learned to love the blogosphere.

Kundera said -  or to paraphrase him due to the incongruent nature of my bookshelf in relation to my person at present – that we’ve  forgotten how to write.  By this he intends that the western world has lost the ability to actually use words to explicate and we instead merely place them on our various and increasing media to describe the world as we see it, failing to define it beyond pinning labels to it and saying ‘Look, a flying unicorn!’, when really it’s a mythological being the like of which defies nature and the laws of physics, and all the intricacies that are tied up in such an entity’s existence.  What we should really be doing is aiming at what it might be, to be a flying unicorn.  In short, we’ve become graphologists and not authors.  By graphology he intends not the study of handwriting, but  the use of lingual signs in general.  In other words we’re looking at the words, whilst missing the intention.  By ‘intention’ you may  understand ‘meaning’ here if you want to, but I wanted to leave a discussion of meaning for another post so I’ll refrain from using it if I can.  For that same reason I’m going to avoid ‘reference’ and ‘intension’ for the time being.

So, Mr Kundera would have us believe that we’re a nation of sign users, that the story telling tradition, which has given birth to both our folklore and then some of the world’s greatest authors, is melting into the weight of the world.  He claims we’re drunk on the rising tide of obscurity, which rolls in ever stronger waves as communication and information become more necessary to our survival.  This gives rise to a desrire for fame (as Warhol knew 40 years ago) and to avoid sinking to the bottom we’re left with only one other choice;  to scream over everyone else.  We scrabble to make our voices heard in whichever way is most effective to the largest number of people (like perverted utilitarianism; the most personal opinions to the most people).   And what is the most effective way of achieving such giddy heights in the modern era?  That’s right, you guessed it: THE BLOGOSPHERE!

My attempt at satire not withstanding there is a very real message in what Kundera is saying.  We are forgetting how to say anything with intention and instead are becoming addicted to the act of just writing (being, as it is, one arm of (and also a metaphor for) the entire pursuit for fame).  99% of all blogs can be condensed into the following short phrase:  ‘Look at me! I’m famous!’.  Alas, this is rarely true, it usually belies the real intention of such blogs which is ‘Look at me!  Please!  Anyone?  I wanna be famous!’  We’re scared of disappearing into the masses and have become intent on defining ourselves by how we stand out against everyone else.

But should we be bothered by this?

Well, that will have to wait for another time.  ‘You can’t write in here, Gentlemen!  This is the blogosphere!’ Or words to that effect.

“Ain’t No Fucking Cryptozoologist” [Part 4]

I’m not an excellent musician.  The aimless hitchiking which had taken me to this desolate wood was not the result of the devastating breakup of any of the balalaika septets of which I have never been a member (and this illustrious collection includes all balalaika septets ever).  I do not posess absolute pitch, nor have I ever coaxed any tone from a wind instrument that could not have been more artfully produced by a cow.  I’m barely competent on the few instruments whose use I have practiced, and all of the guitars I have played possessed both an inside and an outside.  I’m a lover of music, though — it is the art form which I believe speaks to the widest range of human faculties, appealing as it does to our greatest passions and our most quiet and circumspect powers of abstraction.  In indulging this enthusiasm I have heard much music, but I have never since heard any music which evoked the same bizarre imagery — and so visually – as the tune which Juja played on the night in question.

Juja was a hybrid-picker, pinching a scratched blue poker chip between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, leaving the remaining three of his long, dry pink fingers free to caress the higher strings, and he played precisely and contrapuntally, still staring inverted-eyed into the inner recesses of his skull, as though reading tablature inscribed on his very brain itself.  He played fanatically, interweaving his four melodies in a way that would utterly confound Fux’s notions of the kingdom Punctus contra punctum; his voices sometimes sang together, sometimes argued violently amongst themselves.  I have never seen such playing, but two features stood out prominently.

First, it was eerily unclear from where the music emanated.  In each of us is a refined ability to isolate the source of sounds, and upon watching a guitarist, we are aware, in a deep and subconscious way, of the fact the the music issues from literally inside the soundbox: it is in that contained column of air that the vibrations are amplified.  I have already described the unusual architecture of Juja’s instrument: to this guitar, all of creation was the soundbox, and the harmonies he produced issued not from his humble position on the stoop, but rather the sounds seemed to flow from all directions to his guitar, and I listened by being embedded in his music as it flowed past from all sides.

The effect was intoxicating.  Juja’s fingers acted not as messengers but as beckoning beacons, summoning the intricate noises of everything.  From the expression he wore on his wrinkled face and the backs of his eyeballs, this phenomenon seemed to be mirroring what happened in his mind as he played; this is the second of the inimitable features of this spectacle.  Indeed, rather than the bodily attitude of Zen-like absorption or ostentatious confidence often assumed by a brilliant musician in action, Juja’s posture was distinctly one of deference and obedience.  His every action seemed to be dictated to him, each whack of fingertip on fretboard the result of an instruction from somewhere so deep in his mind that it may as well have been external.  Juja’s playing was Music with a capital Muse, and the sonic ubiquity of it reflected this.

“Ain’t No Fucking Cryptozoologist” [Part 3]

Since I was left outside while Horace negotiated in the shack, I shall not speculate on what went into those deliberations.  Instead, I shall describe the bizarre sense of trepidation I felt, standing in the dark, still air, fearing to walk lest I stumble into some toxic oily puddle.  The feeling was not conventional fear or run-of-the mill anxiety.  I’d begun to trust Horace’s intentions, and his competence had never been in serious doubt — his confidence had thus far been shaken only by my haphazard shotgun shenanigans.  I had no doubt that Juja posed no threat to which Horace was unequal.  Instead, I sensed that my walk in the woods was not an elaborate joke, and that I was soon to be exposed to some sort of truth whose integration into my understanding of the world would be impossible; I felt like some sort of neverending cognitive dissonance was my fate, and each of my reassurances, based on morbid curiosity, only served to increase this quiet dread, confirming as they did a certain self-defeating lack of self-preservation-instincts in the face of something interesting.

As is often the case, the discomfort of introspection was interrupted by the society of others, and the friendly offer of a drink.  Presently, I found myself seated on a rock close to the door of the shack, while Horace stood to my left and Juja, an ancient, wrinkled hairless man in a tent of a rough grey wool sweater, sat in a state of practiced relaxation on the threshold.  The latter held in one hand the ceramic jug which Horace had brought, and a somewhat mashed tin cup in the other.  He poured, and passed me the cup.

Thinking it wise, under the circumstances, to retain my faculties, I declined, pleasantly, and Horace took the cup (but did not, according to his custom, imbibe).  Juja regarded me in a way that was either absolutely searching or completely oblivious, took a long pull from the jug, and set it down.  Horace spoke to me, pseudo-sotto voce:

“This gentleman, he don’t think as you and I.  You’ll see Beluapal tonight, but first yer liable to see Juja bein’ as human as it is us humans get, and I ain’t saying he’s liable to get nekkid.”

Saying that, Horace walked ten yards to the edge of the forest, and set the untouched glass on the soft mud beneath a gnarly, emaciated pine.  The light of the lantern from inside the shack was just sufficient to make out the pine itself, but visual detail at that distance was extremely hazy.  Horace returned from his errand, quickly and with the silence of a cat-burgling combat veteran.

“Juja, I think it’s time for tunes.  Let’s calm this savage beast.”

Juja didn’t seem to have heard Horace’s request at all, and certainly did not acknowledge it.  Indeed he seemed to be acting in accordance with an incredibly detailed script as he reached inside the door, without rising, and recovered his guitar.  In so doing, he turned his head to show me a three-quarter view of his face, and thus flooded his features with light from the inside.

I began to gasp in shock, but suppressed the gasp — as an expression of my shock, I refrained from gasping.  Juja had rolled his eyes back in his head, not as you do and as I have just done as I write, but so fully had he rolled them back that — well! — I have never seen an optic nerve in its natural habitat, and I was unaware that such a rolling-back of the eyes was medically or even topologically feasible, but if I am to rely on my visual memory of the more quotidian things I have described thus far (hopefully in sufficiently clear detail that you, reader, have relied on my sense-memories without question up to this point, trusting them to resemble those you would have carried away from a jaunt in my shoes those two days), then I must accept that I looked at the back of Juja’s eyeballs.

This was merely the beginning, for it was, understandably, with the most sober care that I regarded Juja’s instrument as he tuned it.  I know something of guitars, and this was a beautiful example, though not the work of any commercial luthier I have ever encountered.  The headstock was very clearly the bleached and epoxied complete skeleton of the hand of some hapless polydactylite.  The region of the country in which the present tale is set is often ridiculed for the, shall we say, genetic homogeneity of its population (though this is rarely so [brotherfuckingly] politely expressed).  Indeed, four bony splayed fingers and two thumbs, one on each side formed the headstock of Juja’s diabolical guitar, with the machine heads affixed directly to the fingertips.  The grisly and complex handshake that took place as Juja twisted the pegs is not a spectacle I am keen to witness ever again.

The instrument’s neck provided welcome respite for my faculty of being shocked, being straight and thin, subdivided by reassuringly normal-looking frets.

The body of the guitar was such that I had eventually to abandon speculation about its acoustic functioning and merely wait to hear it (Juja seemed, even with his ocular inversion, to tune somehow by sight, since he had yet to make a noise).  Juja’s guitar was a flattop — with a twist.  While most such guitars consisted of a strip of wood, bent around to join itself at it’s ends, with the addition of a front (with a sounhole) and a back, Juja’s guitar possessed a subtle difference.  The aforementioned strip of wood proceeded normally from the base of the neck, but where the loop joined itself, opposite the neck’s bottom, it was clear that the luthier had twisted the wood, so that it was clear that while probably every other guitar manufactured divides the world neatly into an inside, where there be vibes, and an outside, Juja’s guitar was single-sided.  The body was a rich black, save for white seams — a single white circle.

Stymied by the question of where, exactly, this guitar was to work its acoustic magic, I suspended disbelief and awaited music.

“Ain’t No Fucking Cryptozoologist” [Part 2]

We wandered.  Horace walked with the air of one who would be walking with confidence in his path if his confidence weren’t being negated by the gun pointing at him, and I walked halfheartedly, with a vague feeling that I would become lost, which feeling was inspired by the lack of path-confidence in evidence in Horace’s walking.  I slung the shotgun over my shoulder and his pace became visibly quicker and his stride more sure.  Within minutes, my conviction that we were lost left me, and I began to doubt the accuracy of my convictions.  Lack of confidence in one’s convictions is an uncomfortable feeling: I pointed the gun at Horace, and he grew nervous and stopped completely and glanced around, his idle left leg chattering like the teeth of Beluapal (assuming such creatures have teeth).  I’d never seen Horace this pale and hesitant, and from his unnerving vacillations I deduced that we were lost.  My conviction had, after all, been accurate.  Having one’s convictions confirmed, after a period of agonizing self-doubt, is delightful, and I was glad we were lost.

That we were apparently lost warrants more description than where we were lost.  We’d walked for perhaps an hour in a relatively straight line, along no discernible path, through a dark coniferous forest whose features were so unchanging (certainly more uniform, to my unschooled eye, than the highway) that I wasn’t actually absolutely sure that our path had been straight, especially after Horace’s two-day asphalt circle.  I half-expected to walk between two gnarled, lichen-carpeted trunks right back onto the dirt track where our journey had begun, but I was surprised when Horace suddenly overcame his nerves and walked quickly and deliberately into a dense thicket.  I followed, and soon we emerged into a clearing.  A yard, rather, for it had clearly been inflicted on the forest by human hands.

I am emphatically not a stickler for lanscaping.  However, this yard was the most poorly-maintained human creation I have ever seen.  Little vegetation grew; the variegated red-brown loam was pocked with pools of oily water and threaded with an intricate web of thin, shallow trenches, as though some hyperdactylic demon had clawed the mud desparately in an attempt to return to hell before the sunlight turned it into some inanimate object.  Not counting the myriad shredded tires and rusted lawn furniture, three objects in the yard could have been of demonic origin: two rusted-out, wheelless cars whose make and even colour had been obscured by time and neglect, and the dwelling at the far left corner of the yard, perhaps forty yards off.

The simple cubical shack had evidently been assembled artfully from plywood, and had at one point been painted the cheery yellow which I suspected had also once been the colour of Horace’s truck.  Most of the shack was now rudely stained with mud and things perhaps more synthetic, and the windows, one in each wall, flapped in the light breeze in a way that suggested that they were made of something one might staple to one’s shack.  Completing the ensemble was a stovepipe protruding from the nearest wall, making an neat encouraging perpendicular turn skyward, and then snaking chaotically off in what seemed eerily to be several directions at once.  The most remarkable thing about the dwelling was the incongruity of its angle: perfectly level.

The sun had begun to set as we entered the yard, and by the time we reached the shack, darkness had begun to establish itself firmly and presently a flickering light emerged from the near window.  Quietly, but with no pretension of stealth, I followed Horace to the other side of the shack, which wall was interrupted by a door of the same plywood as the wall, apparent in the dim light only by its hinges.  Horace knocked, and then shouted:

“Juja!  Open up!  I’ve got yer fine sweet spud hooch and I’ve a body as needs to see the wildlife!”

He pronounced it “Yooo-ja”.  After a pause of some minutes, a grunt arose from inside the shack and the strangest person I have ever seen emerged from within.

Happy Festivus

Felicitous Festivus to anyone who happens to stumble by, and I promise that the second portion of “ANFC” shall arrive as a late and unsolicited gift to all of you sometime in the next week.  There will be psychedelic nonorientability.  Also, with luck, punch and pie.

“Ain’t No Fucking Cryptozoologist” [Part 1]

“There’s critters in these woods as would confound yer notions of the kingdom Amimalia.”

I’d been in Horace Maurus’s pale yellow pickup truck for two days, and for all of this time, we’d been driving continuously, save brief stops at the roadside during which Horace inhaled fat dirty-white lines of cheap, acrid speed while I pissed enthusiastically into the ditch.  I was going nowhere in particular, Horace was taking me there with great vigour, and he showed no evidence of the exhaustion which had long since overtaken me.  Frenetic bluegrass apparently competed with Horace’s manically bobbing foot for the attention of tachometer as we described a highly self-intersecting path along the cracked and deserted highway.

As we progressed, the initially taciturn Horace began to open up a bit, and his thoughts, and manner of expressing them, grew increasingly involuted, as though he was intent on a conversational Gordian knot every bit as complex as the tarmac one he wove at a cool eighty miles per hour, hour after hour.  One might question the wisdom of remaining for two sleepless days at the mercy of a stranger who counted the staving-off of amphetamine psychosis among his daily chores, but I was at loose ends, and my growing interest in this singular chauffer conspired with my sleepy judgment to make me resolve to remain Horace’s passenger for as long as he would have me.

I’d met Horace at just past six in the evening, as I stood at a bleak crossroads following my ejection from a semi, whose driver, apparently, was no longer headed in “my direction”.  Horace’s was the first vehicle to pass, and he stopped carefully and precisely next to me, opened the passenger-side door, and introduced himself as “Whores”, before offering to “remove you from the damnable predicament in which you’ve found yerself”.  He spoke with a vaguely patrician authority that belied his greasy, gray rope of hair and hyenic case of meth-mouth, and something in his calm demeanour encouraged me.  His was the only ride, to be sure, but I slid into the seat with a lack of reticence which is contrary to my usual hitchiking practice.

Aside from the aforementioned characteristics, Horace’s appearance was nondescript; he was cleanly dressed and had the agelessness of those whose appearance of advanced years is more an indicator of lifestyle than actual senior citizen status, and in fact he claimed some hours later to be forty-four years of age.  He had the build and natural movements of, perhaps, a chimpanzee; the grace and economy of his conscious physical actions contrasted, however, with his many small tics and spasms, as though his measured thought and speech were compensated for by absolute muscular schizophrenia.  Chief among these was the bobbing left foot, which, exactly when the clutch had no use for it, moved in a way that suggested the existence of a telekinetic sprinter somewhere far away.  For countless miles and hours I listened to the chaotic drumming of work boot on floor, punctuated by an absolute shift in the whole personality of his leg each time he shifted gears.

During the sparse conversation of the first evening, I divided my attention between Horace’s dancing foot and his hat.  Indeed, his hair was controlled by a common hunting cap, consistent with the shotgun which protruded from behind his seat, except that it bore a curious symbol, evidently hand-drawn in black ink, above the bill: the word “potato” was neatly written, with the “A” capitalised and circled to form the well-known anti-authoritarian logo.  Reticent to ask the stranger about his politics, I pondered this at length.  For some time, I entertained the notion that Potato Anarchy was a form of Irish republicanism that had escaped my attention, but that seemed somehow far-fetched.  Besides, the hat was orange.

It was during our first morning together that we began to converse seriously, and by the second morning, Horace was a living expression of the phrase “to hold forth”.  My entertainment was Horace’s erudition, which time and introspection had mutated into the broad and crooked wisdom of the confidently solitary.  His words expressed a sort of theology of his own experience: Horace-world was a place of lofty principles and everything he had ever learned and seen bore them out, while an apparent lack of input and criticism from anyone else had allowed him the freedom to conclude that Horace-world was a place of absolute truth and consistency.  However, my glimpse of Horace-world revealed a place that explained so much of my own experience that I was loathe to dismiss him as a crackpot of any sort.  Finally, early in our third evening together, I asked him what drew him to these lonely backwoods, and what he did here.  His reply is the story that begins our story.

“Brother, I travel and I think and I manufacture.  I manufacture notions and, to address what I believe to be the downright euphemistic side of yer question — what do I do fer my, shall we say, daily bread and nightly bed — I’ll say that I operate a small-scale beverage concern, by which I mean I convert the Peruvian Solanum tuberosum, the common and wonderful spud, into intoxicating liquor in the privacy of a shed I’ve erected fer the purpose.  I’ll trust you to return the hospitality I’m displaying in this here vehicle by not mentioning that to just any folks around, because I do so outside of the law, which has no business detarmining which business a body chooses fer procurin’ the aforementioned bread ‘n’ bed, so long as that business is legitimately productive.  There’s more of a market ’round these woods than I can provide for.  I’m an abstainer, myself, though.  Teetotal, albeit for reasons of simple preference rather than any moral convictions about what I imbibe, which would be damnable silly.  There’s many things, though, that other folks do that I do not, and vice versa, and most are profounder differences than us having named different poisons.”

“The best explanation, brother, is by way of analogy.  Supposing yerself and several other folks all write down a number, secret-like, to whatever precision as they favour, ranging from ought right through to one hundred.  Then y’all display your numbers, and the person whose number is closest to preeecisely one-half of the average of all the numbers as y’all’ve written wins a jug of my sweet spud hooch.  I’m assuming yer not a teetotaler as myself, and you’d love that jug as you do yer very life itself.  What number should you write?”

I pondered for a moment, and then said “Zero.”

“How come’s that, brother?”

“Well, everyone’s number is at most a hundred, so half of the average is at most fifty, so I shouldn’t guess above fifty.  But they all know that, too, so they won’t guess above fifty, so half of the average guess will be at most twenty-five, but they all know that, so…”

“I’ll be damned, brother.  It’s true.  It seems the only thing to do is to write down a nought like the bright full moon and split the jug with them other folks as have done the same, ’cause as you say, ‘they all know that, too’.

Trouble is, brother, what makes you say they’ve all thought about that?  I’ve known many folks and most wouldn’t take the trouble, so I dispute the accuracy of yer strategy, depending as it does on the assumption that the other folks will trouble themselves to think the game through.  ‘T the very least yer underestimating the power of the promise of a jug of my sweet spud hooch to distract a body.”

“I guess I see your point,” I began, “but what’s this a metaphor for.”

“‘S no metaphor, brother, it’s a silly example of a real phenomenon.  I’ve wandered through life, by way of habit, doing my damndest to make good use of the imagination I’ve got by virtue of being a human being.  All of mankind has the capacity for abstraction and imagination and the finest damn thing we can do with this capacity is to put our selves into the skin of our brother, and since we’re able, as I see it, this is a hard task which we’re compelled to do our fucking utmost to succeed in.  There’s lots of maybe components or some such to this task.  A body’s got it in his head to be empathetic, he’s got to do all sorts of things.  He’s got to walk nicely to his conclusions without jumping, he’s got to understand that people do things owin’ to their own special circumstances and not necessarily because of how they innately are.  He’s got to see his brothers one at a time, and he’s got to keep his eyes open and put up with shit.  That there’s the secret to why prophets and teachers of morality have hated sloth for all of history.  It’s sloth of the imagination they’s after — the sloth of imagination as makes empathy impossible and makes a body do real dirt.

Like I say, I make great effort in this regard, and for a time I assumed that others did too, the way you assumed them other folks would execute fine figgerin’ in the guess-half-the-average game, but that was ignorant of me.  It wouldna been entirely moral, as I sees it, to give up on walkin’ in my brothers’ skin, so I came down to these here woods where I’ve got fewer brothers.  Mostly I associates with my customers, and folks that drunk are harder to hold to the kind of high standards I mentioned, so as I don’t get disappointed.”

Not to chase after other men, I suddenly thought: that is the Law.

“Now, brother, don’t get the impression that I think myself superior or that I’m a damned misanthrope or nothing of the sort.  I’ve got a way of seein’ things that is just mine and sort of feeds things back into myself and keeps me going, and these last years I’ve just needed to set a while in this loop.  In that respect I’m like a critter of these here woods.”

I ventured a guess: “An  opossum?”

“A ‘possum?  Fuck me with a pinecone, brother.  There’s critters in these woods as would confound yer notions of the kingdom Amimalia.”

I bit: “You mean unknown animals?”  This brought a flash of aggression which marked a sudden departure from heretofore Horace.

“I said I’m not a misanthrope, but I ain’t no fucking cryptozoologist neither.  Tell me, brother, how I’d be fixin’ to tell you about a creature that is both unknown and well-known enough for me to compare it to my own damn self?  That’s downright contradictory.  Don’t fucking fail me like the other folks.  You been damned open-minded so far and I don’t tolerate it when someone in my car has sloth of imagination and forgets to allow fo’ critters as are outside their personal experience.  Even ignorant folks who think sloth is some like maybe theologically proscribed lack of a work ethic have the imagination to conceive of of a whole fucking deity!  Don’t be like them, brother.  There’s critters in them woods as you’ve never heard of but with which the bona fide zoological community have legitimate records, and the one I’m talking about is called, ’round these parts, the squeegee-come-squeege.”

“The what?”  I grew a bit concerned at his sudden temper and seeming venture from longwindedness into out-and-out bullshit.  He calmed down a bit before proceeding, however.

“The squeegee-come-squeege is what the folks in them woods call it, but it’s more properly known by its Linnaen appellation, Beluapal vulgaris. That there’s derived from the Latin “belua” and the Romani “phral” and taken together is rendered in ‘Merican as “common brother of monsters”, and there’s a perfect name for the bastards, who is kin to monsters of legend but which inhabit them woods in great numbers.  It’s important to bear in mind that the “common” refers to the species’s population and not to their encounters with the folks…”

He trailed off, and I gently asked for a description of this animal.  My skepticism was aroused, but moreso was my worry that palms which rested on the steering wheel, and thus held my life, belonged to a sleep-deprived person in the grip of a paranoid amphetamine delusion.  I had begun to interpret his earlier non-misanthropic talk of empathy as bitterness and paranoia, when he calmly interrupted my anxious musings.

“That’s hard to say.  While their various furtive comings and goings, theft of chickens and such, give much information as to its habits, B. vulgaris exhibits a single behaviour, for which it has a curiously adapted mouth and digestive tract, which makes explicit morphological description difficult.  In fact, I just gave an example: everything known about the curious digestive system of Beluapal is inferred from this behaviour.

Presumably it’s a very shy critter by nature, but this too is only something the science of zoology supposes based on its curious habit, which is that when something frightens or overstimulates the critter, it swallers itself, from tail to forehead, assuming it’s got those.

That’s not quite accurate, come to think of it.  It’s just assumed that this weird defense mechanism is inspired by fright; in fact them zoologists have only witnessed this behaviour being inspired by one thing: them zoologists know that Beluapal will swaller its own self whenever a zoologist tries to get a look, which is to say no damn zoologist ever saw one.  This sounds far fetched, but it’s all there in a long treatise on the wildlife of them woods by a bona fide zoologist, name of Heisenberg.”

It was official.  The only “bona fide” person was the bona fide crazy person who’d picked me up, and this quantum monster-brother amply confirmed it.

“No offense, Horace, but I should get out here.  You’ve, erm, been really kind to take me this far…”

I fell silent as I saw that we approached the crossroads where we’d first met, and my heart grew heavy in proportion to the shrinking of my excuse.  My dismay gave way to surprise, however, when we turned abruptly to the left, down a narrow dirt track shrouded by a thick canopy of ancient trees.  Presently, we screeched to a halt and I recalled having looked, from the crossroads two days ago, at the entrance to this ominous road, now a hundred yards behind us.  Horace leapt from the truck before I did, and anticipated my intention to run by yanking the shotgun from behind the seat and pointing it in my direction.

Stock-first.

“Brother, I’ve been putting myself in yer skin for getting on fifty hours now and I know you must feel in a worse damnable predicament now than you did when we first met.  Yer stuck off in the backwoods on a lonely road with a dirtyass redneck with a bona fide piece who’s been ingesting powerful stimulants, but I’ma show you I ain’t a body who tells tall tales.  I’ma hand you this piece for the duration of our little walk.  I’d like to show you that my Beluapal story is the honest truth, and then I’ll bring you back up to the road and we can part ways if that’s to your liking.”

He thrust the gun forward, and I reasoned that if I accompanied him, I’d at least be able to defend myself for as long as we remained together.  I therefore took the gun, the first I’d ever held, and he slowly proceeded to the back of the truck, and stopped.

“Brother, the old feller who will show us our critter will want some payment, so I’ma real slow take a jug of my sweet spud hooch from the truck if it’s cool.”

I assented, and he produced five gallons of something whose smell was so evil it was distinctly noticeable though the earthenware jug was corked, and we set off, perpendicular to the dirt track, into the thick woods.

(Erm, to be continued.)

“Diagram Chasing” [Part 2]

Different ears, left to their own devices, tend to set their sounding lines for fixed depths of the sonic sea.  Perhaps this is a product of their actual cartilaginous wiring [or whatever]; perhaps the various ears multifarious owners have natural frequencies at which their perceptual filters are weakest.

Different sets of vocal chords, when talking and singing and shouting in a way that doesn’t crack glass or cause the vocal chords’ owner particular discomfort, also tend to dualise this notion: each pipes-piece plays it song, for the most part, at a depth for which some ears-piece is tuned.  Perhaps there are beautiful stories of people brought together in the myriad fraternal ways of human together-bringingness via such a voice-ears match.  This is not such a story, exactly.

Paul thinks he must have what those who consider such things a blessing call “good ears”.  It’s just as likely that his perceptual screen is very porous in the regions that deal with sound.  Even so, like everyone else, he has his own sensitive spot, a little band of frequencies to which his senses are so attuned that no amount of fascination with anything else, or even sleep, can hold his attention when the wavelengths are right.  One pharynx that can really get it right belongs to Siobhan.

Paul skips the peaceful sensation that befalls the lucky awakened, but he doesn’t by any means awake with a start.  He’s not jerked from sleep as by an alarm clock.  Instead, some deeply overzealous guardian on the demilitarised frontier of his consciousness, at the interface of his private somnolent world and our shared waking one, puts in a quietly ominous call up the synaptic chain of command, and with the terse “Sir, yes, sir” of one about to destroy a village in order to save it, the recipient of the news that the Voice has been heard begins the task of waking Paul up to marinate in a cold sweat.  His quilt contraption is sufficient to distort her words beyond recognition, maybe, or perhaps she’s not speaking English; he’s never been able to tell.  The content of her speech is unimportant, though.  He can almost see the door vibrating in the uncertain half light, transmitting Siobhan’s voice into the air of his own personal space and into his body until in some vague way, at the interface between his perception and consciousness, the literal waves become figurative vibrations at the natural frequency of the strings of his mind.  Indeed, on first awakening the worst part is the sense of dread and foreboding the voice engenders, implanting as it does the knowledge that his subconscious is going to be shaken for as long as Siobhan talks.

Today he can hear Dave’s voice as well, quiet and even and angry. Dave and Siobhan are fighting at eleven minutes past six this grey morning and, with the cursory consideration of politeness, they are keeping it the fuck down, in the sense that nobody is shouting, but by Dave’s tone, Paul can tell that Dave is very, very angry.  It seems likely that this is unreasonable, and as Dave speaks and Siobhan is silent, the beginnings of kind concern begin to form in Paul’s mind.  It sounds like she’s being fucking berated in there.  Oh fuck and oh dear.  Then she begins her reply and for two epochal minutes the door vibrates and the air gyrates and the waves manifest themselves as horror swells and jagged whitecaps of panic on Paul’s mental ocean, ripping his thoughts into tiny tortured quanta too small to support elaborate empathy-type thoughts.  By the time she’s finished, the resentment is so strong within Paul that even as his capacity for elaborate put-yourself-in-Siobhan’s-shoes-type thoughts begins to return, and even as Dave’s angry whispers encourage the fulfillment of that potential, Paul can’t help but think of Siobhan as only his torturer and nothing more.  If she were to come into his room now, he’d probably bite her.

Of course, were we to reach omnisciently down and have a little chat with Siobhan, she wouldn’t even know her role as her emotional entanglemorphism-buddy’s flatmate’s private psychosonic torturer.  We just can’t expect her to keep track of Paul’s little aural idiosyncracies, much less feel responsible for the tone of her voice.  That’s ridiculous.  And so, we’ll have to suppose, this just isn’t one of those nice stories alluded to before.

—————–

I think I’ve partially made good on earlier promises, although I haven’t gotten to reactance yet.  This story is now completely stupid, but I shall continue until it is finished.