(no subject)
Drunken freestyle
Clinging with his fingers to the wheel of the Audi, he felt some form crouching within him while the darkness surrounded it like drapery, perched in the corner of some eternal, mindless space. He felt it, in every part, that creature burning in his chest pinioned by something infinite, as the butterfly would feel reaching outwards from beyond its pin and finding not the end but the beginning. And all at once his cheeks burned in the points of city light that stretched across his face as he felt its awareness of him, like some mirror from the inside that made all his conscious efforts and appearances so small and far away. He turned his face away from the hollow light and his inner darkness overtook him and turned some hidden rage into apocalyptic desire. But what he was most aware of was that he was for the first time in many years feeling like himself, as if all the feeling had suddenly come back into the numbed fingers of his soul. To put it into words he could not have imagined, for the first time he felt himself fully palpable, as if there had been some parts that had not been conceivable to himself before.
Onwards he flew in the sleek black car towards some nearing oblivion and he felt all the pressures of failure fall away under him as his cold probing hands clutched redemption, shaking at the barriers of their trembling, formless knuckles. Perceiving that he was being watched, he turned round to smile at his son as if he had returned to him out of another world the son could not reach. Something had happened that was not fully revealed; his mind was cast back into the depths once more. He felt the concept flicker across his mind like sun along a fish’s flecked back, the obtuse colours of his mind running in some strange tandem to the hidden thing his conscious vision shied from.
And then it appeared, and it was so simplistic that it disappointed him. It was merely a memory, and it was of the time that he was eighteen and in Brighton and he had smashed up an arcade in some drunken ecstasy. He shuddered to think of it now, the way he had brought the light into the darkness, crushing the bulbs of the deserted arcade with his balled gloved fists in some huge extended tantrum that had left him in the cold blackness, weeping like a child as the exaltation left him. And he realised that it was the last time he had truly been in any way outside of himself; that is to say, the last time he had challenged the comfortable, formal constructs of his affable self. Now his hangdog look had deepened into middle-aged depression and the shadows had claimed the light from his blue eyes under the bow of his drooped brows.
The garage business that he part-owned was failing, it was true, but he did not attribute this new change to it alone. It was the red apple of his love, given like a gift to others, wholesome and unassuming, that was becoming uneasy in his mind. He heard the intonation of Dylan Thomas, tremulous with unspeakable power, ‘Glory! . . . Glory!’ over and over in his mind. The roll of the tongue, that sharpness of his voice, brought a bitterness to the back of his throat and for a few seconds he felt as if he were going to cry. The bright lights became a haze of abstract recognition that threatened to pool into a world of uncertainties and spill into the hollows of his lap like a broken necklace of jewels that had never been unearthed. Some paradoxical kindness and cruelty came into his lips as he smiled, against himself, like a shield before the parting of the Nile, like a fire before the sun. But the tears did not spill and he was somehow not overwhelmed by it all, and he thought of the daintiness, the gaudiness of his existence, like colours in oil petroleum, renewed and attractive before this savage future that now beckoned him. He thought that the feelings would fall away, like tears behind his face, as they had no doubt done before. But the feelings remained; the love and the glory that his life lacked remained branded within him and he thought of his wife, his loving wife, fiery and disjointed as himself, boneless skeletons dancing under the dust of dead suns. Perhaps he would show her his Eden, this Haven of himself, the new direction, wherever he might go.
His son looked at him with widened eyes, strapped in against the unseen forces of the nightmare outerness of his Father’s creation, and his hand reached out instinctively to clutch the sleeve of his father, the biggest of them all. His hair fell in blond locks against his round cheeks, and there was even in the low light a flush of red across his cheeks. The wide pupils reflected the world in a perfect circular bias above his cherubim lips like statue turned flesh, and the aura of irrepressible movement and the damp smell of talcum powder. His son panicked before the triumphant fury of his father’s gaze, for he was a child, and all of his childish movements fell away unexplained into the darkness, which became the foreground; half-realised, shadowy, uncertain. His footsteps tottered not against the mass of his body but the eggshell of the Earth that might plunge him into some old place; he laughed and clapped his hands, sometimes, but all his happiness lay in sureness and his footsteps fell in fear. There was his father, trembling on some great height; a leaf, a giant, inhuman and unreal somehow in the myopic flame of the billowing horizon splayed out and chased by the windows of the car. His face was unworldly and somehow the sum of his son’s fears; and it was in this desperation that he now clutched his father’s sleeve as if to drag him back, through lightness of touch, from the brutality of his expression.
His father recoiled from the advance of his precious thing, and the purity of his son’s expression shocked him from his dual world of love and aggression. When he was himself again, he asked,
‘What is it, Nicky?’
It was the type of question he knew impossible to answer by his son, a mouthless bird, his cries the beating of wings and the scrape of the worm from the earth yet tongueless, inhuman, resounding without teeth.
Clinging with his fingers to the wheel of the Audi, he felt some form crouching within him while the darkness surrounded it like drapery, perched in the corner of some eternal, mindless space. He felt it, in every part, that creature burning in his chest pinioned by something infinite, as the butterfly would feel reaching outwards from beyond its pin and finding not the end but the beginning. And all at once his cheeks burned in the points of city light that stretched across his face as he felt its awareness of him, like some mirror from the inside that made all his conscious efforts and appearances so small and far away. He turned his face away from the hollow light and his inner darkness overtook him and turned some hidden rage into apocalyptic desire. But what he was most aware of was that he was for the first time in many years feeling like himself, as if all the feeling had suddenly come back into the numbed fingers of his soul. To put it into words he could not have imagined, for the first time he felt himself fully palpable, as if there had been some parts that had not been conceivable to himself before.
Onwards he flew in the sleek black car towards some nearing oblivion and he felt all the pressures of failure fall away under him as his cold probing hands clutched redemption, shaking at the barriers of their trembling, formless knuckles. Perceiving that he was being watched, he turned round to smile at his son as if he had returned to him out of another world the son could not reach. Something had happened that was not fully revealed; his mind was cast back into the depths once more. He felt the concept flicker across his mind like sun along a fish’s flecked back, the obtuse colours of his mind running in some strange tandem to the hidden thing his conscious vision shied from.
And then it appeared, and it was so simplistic that it disappointed him. It was merely a memory, and it was of the time that he was eighteen and in Brighton and he had smashed up an arcade in some drunken ecstasy. He shuddered to think of it now, the way he had brought the light into the darkness, crushing the bulbs of the deserted arcade with his balled gloved fists in some huge extended tantrum that had left him in the cold blackness, weeping like a child as the exaltation left him. And he realised that it was the last time he had truly been in any way outside of himself; that is to say, the last time he had challenged the comfortable, formal constructs of his affable self. Now his hangdog look had deepened into middle-aged depression and the shadows had claimed the light from his blue eyes under the bow of his drooped brows.
The garage business that he part-owned was failing, it was true, but he did not attribute this new change to it alone. It was the red apple of his love, given like a gift to others, wholesome and unassuming, that was becoming uneasy in his mind. He heard the intonation of Dylan Thomas, tremulous with unspeakable power, ‘Glory! . . . Glory!’ over and over in his mind. The roll of the tongue, that sharpness of his voice, brought a bitterness to the back of his throat and for a few seconds he felt as if he were going to cry. The bright lights became a haze of abstract recognition that threatened to pool into a world of uncertainties and spill into the hollows of his lap like a broken necklace of jewels that had never been unearthed. Some paradoxical kindness and cruelty came into his lips as he smiled, against himself, like a shield before the parting of the Nile, like a fire before the sun. But the tears did not spill and he was somehow not overwhelmed by it all, and he thought of the daintiness, the gaudiness of his existence, like colours in oil petroleum, renewed and attractive before this savage future that now beckoned him. He thought that the feelings would fall away, like tears behind his face, as they had no doubt done before. But the feelings remained; the love and the glory that his life lacked remained branded within him and he thought of his wife, his loving wife, fiery and disjointed as himself, boneless skeletons dancing under the dust of dead suns. Perhaps he would show her his Eden, this Haven of himself, the new direction, wherever he might go.
His son looked at him with widened eyes, strapped in against the unseen forces of the nightmare outerness of his Father’s creation, and his hand reached out instinctively to clutch the sleeve of his father, the biggest of them all. His hair fell in blond locks against his round cheeks, and there was even in the low light a flush of red across his cheeks. The wide pupils reflected the world in a perfect circular bias above his cherubim lips like statue turned flesh, and the aura of irrepressible movement and the damp smell of talcum powder. His son panicked before the triumphant fury of his father’s gaze, for he was a child, and all of his childish movements fell away unexplained into the darkness, which became the foreground; half-realised, shadowy, uncertain. His footsteps tottered not against the mass of his body but the eggshell of the Earth that might plunge him into some old place; he laughed and clapped his hands, sometimes, but all his happiness lay in sureness and his footsteps fell in fear. There was his father, trembling on some great height; a leaf, a giant, inhuman and unreal somehow in the myopic flame of the billowing horizon splayed out and chased by the windows of the car. His face was unworldly and somehow the sum of his son’s fears; and it was in this desperation that he now clutched his father’s sleeve as if to drag him back, through lightness of touch, from the brutality of his expression.
His father recoiled from the advance of his precious thing, and the purity of his son’s expression shocked him from his dual world of love and aggression. When he was himself again, he asked,
‘What is it, Nicky?’
It was the type of question he knew impossible to answer by his son, a mouthless bird, his cries the beating of wings and the scrape of the worm from the earth yet tongueless, inhuman, resounding without teeth.