Beginning
So, I'm Eugene and this will be my ad hoc art journal. I'll be putting mainly music and writing up, but maybe a drawing or two or a video of some interpretive dance. To Karin's incomprehensibly great vexation, I take a long time to do stuff so I don't know how long it will be between updates. But maybe not even long at all.
Anyhow, for my final English paper, I chose to write this side-story to Mrs. Dalloway. For those who haven't read it, it's an avant-garde(ish) early 20th century novel by my grrl V-Dub and I just kinda made up a character and set him in the chronology of the novel. So, yeah.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oliver Winchill nervously watched from the opposite corner (“now what could this be?” he mused) as the auto gingerly slowed, his veteran mind like a cobbler’s knobby hands, worn and tired but honed for the craft of detection, wary of the car’s potential occupants. His vision, long since waning (though not, by any means, impaired), was obscured by a throng of coyly observant pedestrians, and Winchill audibly damned the onlookers for their unbridled curiosity-though, who could blame them? Most of them seldom saw such excitement; it was as if the sun had not come up at all before the automobile turned the corner onto Bond Street, but sprang up and at once with an afternoon’s buzz in tow and made a focal point of the automobile. The light’s intense reflection on the pristine body of the vehicle seemed to say that even the sun’s slender, inquisitive fingers could not pull apart the blinds ever-so-slightly, if only to satiate the incorrigible socialites ogling and whispering and generally causing a stir where there needed only be the ripple in the air left by the car’s exhaust.
But, of course, thought Winchill, of course, of course, they stare, for what else have they to do on such an afternoon but buy flowers, unexpectedly greet old acquaintances, and fill anonymous cars with the Prince and the Queen and the Moorish infanta and Lord Jesus Christ himself?
Grasping the sensitivity of the situation, Oliver cursorily scanned for suspicious individuals among the crowd in the street. His hawkish eyes caught the stare of a dejected-looking man whose lack of interest in the whole affair, evident in a face wan, emotionless, and empty, the bottom of a beggar’s tin cup-his marked disinterest was in and of itself suspicious. Winchill reached for his notebook in the inside pocked of his mustard tweed coat (he would first check the right, then the left for his silver pen) but quickly withdrew his shaking hand, a hand no longer good enough for Scotland Yard. Then, with an air of demonstrative relief he turned on one heel and put his back to the folderol and the suspicious gentleman (so suspicious, in fact, that turning a blind eye would be downright irresponsible-) walking briskly down Bond and deciding on Regent’s Park as his ultimate destination with hesitation only lasting a split second, unnoticeable to all but the most alert sleuth.
Was it relief or regret? Oliver pondered, though without much vigor, whether he’d ever be able to distinguish between the two again. Only four months removed from his Catherine’s death, Oliver couldn’t have been expected to make such distinctions. Maybe that’s why, as of this morning, he was no longer Chief Inspector Oliver Winchill.
The early scene at the office was expected but undeniably tragic, as he imagined the marriage of a daughter to be. While he removed the memories from his drawers and bookshelves, the first traces of the day’s light entered his office and fittingly made rectangles on the floorboards tinted with that darkest of orange hues that signals the end of a particularly relished sunset on a particularly somber day. An awkward shadow waited patiently in the hall as Oliver frantically conceded every indicator that necessitated retirement, most notably-“Yes, coming, coming”-his very advanced age of seventy-two. How fitting could it have been to work in a place where none were left who knew his Christian name? Finally, he stood from his chair, relying on his still-powerful arms to pull him from the unreasonably adherent leather; the chair had tried to hold him and Winchill fancied for a moment that it may have become animated, begrudgingly letting go of his wrist only when he told it resolutely that his time had come, thrusting forward and barely winning an increasingly-frequent battle with Newton’s forces.
Their relationship had not always been adversarial-at a time, Winchill considered himself a brother to Newton, a son of the Enlightenment and a rational thinker. But as his retinae clouded and filled with translucent fragments of every autumn he’d seen, as his bones and sinews rebelled against their mostly-benevolent lord, Oliver noticed that even his brilliant skills of detection deferred more and more to his developing skill of invention and, more troublesome yet, the alarmingly encroaching habit of senility. Now, he walked toward his doorframe with care, minding the corners of the rug, dreading a slip that would scatter the remains of his life about the dusty floor. So, then, Oliver decided, standing outside of his former (former! former!) place of employment, the passage of time pits brother against brother, body against mind, and finally mind against self before quite forcefully and with daunting finality demanding the unconditional surrender of all.
His usual bench at Regent’s Park gave Oliver some sanctuary from the Melancholy that’d been pursuing him all day, lapping at this knees and ankles like the tide, teasing and threatening to bowl him over and engulf him whole if he even momentarily buckled his knees or dropped the buffer of euphoria and élan. The androgynous specter had chased Oliver through alleys, relentlessly trailed him in its chariot, pulled by the fraternal forces of relief and regret. He’d finally escaped it among the shops and masses of Bond Street until it resurfaced in a mysterious automobile, provoking unwelcome attention and orchestrating a rout that forced Winchill’s retreat to his familiar haunt.
But now he was spread like jam over the park bench-spread thin, he could feel-his languor escaped through his pores and pleasingly melted from his skin. It was dripping through the bench and forming a ravine that flowed all the way back to his house, but he wasn’t ready to follow it yet. Oliver shook the image from his head and looked, instead, at a squirrel running gleefully down a branch, stopping to regain its composure and slightly bending the wood under its weight. But the graceful bend of the branch was too painfully much like Catherine’s legs, one cascading brilliantly over the other and sprawled like a shipwreck on the Ottoman in front of her reading chair, and Oliver had to put his head in his hands while the indolent stream gained force underfoot, bolstered by an added, saltwater tributary. Suddenly, as he lifted his head and made sure no sign of weakness was left on it, for Inspector Cooper was known to walk the park on days like these, the squirrel ran away and the branch snapped back to attention like a beefeater, shaking a few dead leaves off in the process.
Tired of looking at the ground, Oliver craned his neck, stretching up toward the sun’s warmth, and took notice of an aeroplane making letters in the sky. The toffee advertisement hung impossibly in the air, and Oliver stared at it for so long that he began to wonder what he looked like from that unfathomable height, and the notion of perspective awoke another memory of his love, and his palms went white from his grip on the bench’s arms, but he leaned back and decided to give up the fight against the impending grey.
Melancholy had finally caught him, and presently coursed his veins and raided his heart, recklessly pulling the sorest tendons. Melancholy turned bitter by the preceding romp through London, Melancholy growing more brazen in the afternoon as it approached that most malignant, fevered time of day, Melancholy losing patience. Oliver hoped that these strange mutations and the smirk on Melancholy’s subdued face did not mean that depression, in fact, was the new name of his hunter.
These fears quickly left as only a profound calm was left in his perpetually storming mind. The clouds rolled away and the first glimpse of actual sunshine he’d seen in four months appeared, bringing with it a cleansing breeze. The soft light made a halo around a bluff’s summit, and Oliver could gradually see his tawny, prepubescent self laying next to the spindly gypsy figure he knew to be Catherine. She was very white, as if made of porcelain, but vivacious like a marionette in the hands of a bright, twelve-year-old puppeteer, laughing and sparkling and captivating. Winchill remembered her sprightly yellow summer dress (which, in actuality, was a coarse slate blue, dull and weathered but, oh, how memory adds luster to that which we love!) and he remembered his own grin reflected by hers, more refined and precise in its intent. They had climbed the mountain to look at the stars, and the arduous journey in the early dusk was not uneventful. More than once, he tripped on a jutting root, loudly cursing England’s fecundity just to hear her reproach.
With his knees to his chest, Oliver waited for darkness and thought about how small he must look from the bottom of the hill. He was a negligible mass on its hulking body. But he then thought of bigger hills, and the biggest mountains, and soon found himself nearly crushed by the imposing, gargantuan weight of the word “ALONE,” as it stood precariously, towering over him. Not wanting to spoil Catherine’s jovial mood, he pulled her close and watched Venus appear, the bellwether of the universe. Soon, the sky was dark and he could see the creamy white belt which seemingly held up the britches of a lonely old man, his body ripped and scored with wrinkles that formed constellations and guided ancient sailors. Gradually, a slow warmth crept from his palms up his arms, to his expectant shoulders and through the canals of his body, and he could see by her face that she felt it, as well. He knew it wasn’t love, for he’d felt that before, but he had no desire to call it anything, simply letting it coat his very being. It was then that Oliver realized, in complete contrast to what he’d seen just minutes earlier, that his significance was enormous and infinite but wholly incoherent, and it was the same for everyone one Earth. The warmth precipitated a smile and he came to his greatest realization yet: every soul ends up looking at the sky.
Oliver Winchill still felt the relaxed breath of the afternoon, and may have even heard the shuffling of footsteps close-by. But the sensation of sleep proved too fulfilling, and he now imagined himself to be in his chair at work, smelling the leather on the bookshelves and watching the dust waltz through the air. He was listening to the second Peer Gynt suite and the song filled him with its immensity of sound. It pulsed slowly through him and he felt the intricacies of the violins as they ran, ran from the orchestra with their melody, and the horns chased after while the bassoon crawled slowly behind, its notes appearing as honey dripping from the convection of a rainbow. With a picture and a memory, Oliver drifted to sleep as Septimus Warren Smith walked by, wondering if the man on the bench was dead.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So, that's it. I'll be putting up some music from La Boum pretty soon, as well as a short story that I submitted to some contest. But probably I'll just write about my life before then, or something.
Anyhow, for my final English paper, I chose to write this side-story to Mrs. Dalloway. For those who haven't read it, it's an avant-garde(ish) early 20th century novel by my grrl V-Dub and I just kinda made up a character and set him in the chronology of the novel. So, yeah.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oliver Winchill nervously watched from the opposite corner (“now what could this be?” he mused) as the auto gingerly slowed, his veteran mind like a cobbler’s knobby hands, worn and tired but honed for the craft of detection, wary of the car’s potential occupants. His vision, long since waning (though not, by any means, impaired), was obscured by a throng of coyly observant pedestrians, and Winchill audibly damned the onlookers for their unbridled curiosity-though, who could blame them? Most of them seldom saw such excitement; it was as if the sun had not come up at all before the automobile turned the corner onto Bond Street, but sprang up and at once with an afternoon’s buzz in tow and made a focal point of the automobile. The light’s intense reflection on the pristine body of the vehicle seemed to say that even the sun’s slender, inquisitive fingers could not pull apart the blinds ever-so-slightly, if only to satiate the incorrigible socialites ogling and whispering and generally causing a stir where there needed only be the ripple in the air left by the car’s exhaust.
But, of course, thought Winchill, of course, of course, they stare, for what else have they to do on such an afternoon but buy flowers, unexpectedly greet old acquaintances, and fill anonymous cars with the Prince and the Queen and the Moorish infanta and Lord Jesus Christ himself?
Grasping the sensitivity of the situation, Oliver cursorily scanned for suspicious individuals among the crowd in the street. His hawkish eyes caught the stare of a dejected-looking man whose lack of interest in the whole affair, evident in a face wan, emotionless, and empty, the bottom of a beggar’s tin cup-his marked disinterest was in and of itself suspicious. Winchill reached for his notebook in the inside pocked of his mustard tweed coat (he would first check the right, then the left for his silver pen) but quickly withdrew his shaking hand, a hand no longer good enough for Scotland Yard. Then, with an air of demonstrative relief he turned on one heel and put his back to the folderol and the suspicious gentleman (so suspicious, in fact, that turning a blind eye would be downright irresponsible-) walking briskly down Bond and deciding on Regent’s Park as his ultimate destination with hesitation only lasting a split second, unnoticeable to all but the most alert sleuth.
Was it relief or regret? Oliver pondered, though without much vigor, whether he’d ever be able to distinguish between the two again. Only four months removed from his Catherine’s death, Oliver couldn’t have been expected to make such distinctions. Maybe that’s why, as of this morning, he was no longer Chief Inspector Oliver Winchill.
The early scene at the office was expected but undeniably tragic, as he imagined the marriage of a daughter to be. While he removed the memories from his drawers and bookshelves, the first traces of the day’s light entered his office and fittingly made rectangles on the floorboards tinted with that darkest of orange hues that signals the end of a particularly relished sunset on a particularly somber day. An awkward shadow waited patiently in the hall as Oliver frantically conceded every indicator that necessitated retirement, most notably-“Yes, coming, coming”-his very advanced age of seventy-two. How fitting could it have been to work in a place where none were left who knew his Christian name? Finally, he stood from his chair, relying on his still-powerful arms to pull him from the unreasonably adherent leather; the chair had tried to hold him and Winchill fancied for a moment that it may have become animated, begrudgingly letting go of his wrist only when he told it resolutely that his time had come, thrusting forward and barely winning an increasingly-frequent battle with Newton’s forces.
Their relationship had not always been adversarial-at a time, Winchill considered himself a brother to Newton, a son of the Enlightenment and a rational thinker. But as his retinae clouded and filled with translucent fragments of every autumn he’d seen, as his bones and sinews rebelled against their mostly-benevolent lord, Oliver noticed that even his brilliant skills of detection deferred more and more to his developing skill of invention and, more troublesome yet, the alarmingly encroaching habit of senility. Now, he walked toward his doorframe with care, minding the corners of the rug, dreading a slip that would scatter the remains of his life about the dusty floor. So, then, Oliver decided, standing outside of his former (former! former!) place of employment, the passage of time pits brother against brother, body against mind, and finally mind against self before quite forcefully and with daunting finality demanding the unconditional surrender of all.
His usual bench at Regent’s Park gave Oliver some sanctuary from the Melancholy that’d been pursuing him all day, lapping at this knees and ankles like the tide, teasing and threatening to bowl him over and engulf him whole if he even momentarily buckled his knees or dropped the buffer of euphoria and élan. The androgynous specter had chased Oliver through alleys, relentlessly trailed him in its chariot, pulled by the fraternal forces of relief and regret. He’d finally escaped it among the shops and masses of Bond Street until it resurfaced in a mysterious automobile, provoking unwelcome attention and orchestrating a rout that forced Winchill’s retreat to his familiar haunt.
But now he was spread like jam over the park bench-spread thin, he could feel-his languor escaped through his pores and pleasingly melted from his skin. It was dripping through the bench and forming a ravine that flowed all the way back to his house, but he wasn’t ready to follow it yet. Oliver shook the image from his head and looked, instead, at a squirrel running gleefully down a branch, stopping to regain its composure and slightly bending the wood under its weight. But the graceful bend of the branch was too painfully much like Catherine’s legs, one cascading brilliantly over the other and sprawled like a shipwreck on the Ottoman in front of her reading chair, and Oliver had to put his head in his hands while the indolent stream gained force underfoot, bolstered by an added, saltwater tributary. Suddenly, as he lifted his head and made sure no sign of weakness was left on it, for Inspector Cooper was known to walk the park on days like these, the squirrel ran away and the branch snapped back to attention like a beefeater, shaking a few dead leaves off in the process.
Tired of looking at the ground, Oliver craned his neck, stretching up toward the sun’s warmth, and took notice of an aeroplane making letters in the sky. The toffee advertisement hung impossibly in the air, and Oliver stared at it for so long that he began to wonder what he looked like from that unfathomable height, and the notion of perspective awoke another memory of his love, and his palms went white from his grip on the bench’s arms, but he leaned back and decided to give up the fight against the impending grey.
Melancholy had finally caught him, and presently coursed his veins and raided his heart, recklessly pulling the sorest tendons. Melancholy turned bitter by the preceding romp through London, Melancholy growing more brazen in the afternoon as it approached that most malignant, fevered time of day, Melancholy losing patience. Oliver hoped that these strange mutations and the smirk on Melancholy’s subdued face did not mean that depression, in fact, was the new name of his hunter.
These fears quickly left as only a profound calm was left in his perpetually storming mind. The clouds rolled away and the first glimpse of actual sunshine he’d seen in four months appeared, bringing with it a cleansing breeze. The soft light made a halo around a bluff’s summit, and Oliver could gradually see his tawny, prepubescent self laying next to the spindly gypsy figure he knew to be Catherine. She was very white, as if made of porcelain, but vivacious like a marionette in the hands of a bright, twelve-year-old puppeteer, laughing and sparkling and captivating. Winchill remembered her sprightly yellow summer dress (which, in actuality, was a coarse slate blue, dull and weathered but, oh, how memory adds luster to that which we love!) and he remembered his own grin reflected by hers, more refined and precise in its intent. They had climbed the mountain to look at the stars, and the arduous journey in the early dusk was not uneventful. More than once, he tripped on a jutting root, loudly cursing England’s fecundity just to hear her reproach.
With his knees to his chest, Oliver waited for darkness and thought about how small he must look from the bottom of the hill. He was a negligible mass on its hulking body. But he then thought of bigger hills, and the biggest mountains, and soon found himself nearly crushed by the imposing, gargantuan weight of the word “ALONE,” as it stood precariously, towering over him. Not wanting to spoil Catherine’s jovial mood, he pulled her close and watched Venus appear, the bellwether of the universe. Soon, the sky was dark and he could see the creamy white belt which seemingly held up the britches of a lonely old man, his body ripped and scored with wrinkles that formed constellations and guided ancient sailors. Gradually, a slow warmth crept from his palms up his arms, to his expectant shoulders and through the canals of his body, and he could see by her face that she felt it, as well. He knew it wasn’t love, for he’d felt that before, but he had no desire to call it anything, simply letting it coat his very being. It was then that Oliver realized, in complete contrast to what he’d seen just minutes earlier, that his significance was enormous and infinite but wholly incoherent, and it was the same for everyone one Earth. The warmth precipitated a smile and he came to his greatest realization yet: every soul ends up looking at the sky.
Oliver Winchill still felt the relaxed breath of the afternoon, and may have even heard the shuffling of footsteps close-by. But the sensation of sleep proved too fulfilling, and he now imagined himself to be in his chair at work, smelling the leather on the bookshelves and watching the dust waltz through the air. He was listening to the second Peer Gynt suite and the song filled him with its immensity of sound. It pulsed slowly through him and he felt the intricacies of the violins as they ran, ran from the orchestra with their melody, and the horns chased after while the bassoon crawled slowly behind, its notes appearing as honey dripping from the convection of a rainbow. With a picture and a memory, Oliver drifted to sleep as Septimus Warren Smith walked by, wondering if the man on the bench was dead.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So, that's it. I'll be putting up some music from La Boum pretty soon, as well as a short story that I submitted to some contest. But probably I'll just write about my life before then, or something.