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A Meditation on the Intricacy of the Prison Bars, by John Greenwood

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Outside the world is collapsing back into water. Beneath this skin, something frightful is beginning to happen. The ghosts of reality have been conducting a secret dialogue with each other. Whatever means we try, we cannot escape from being a part of that ghostliness. Every tool we pick up has been fashioned by unknown hands, for unknowable purposes. As we jabber in this darkened cell our words drip, pregnant and meaningless to the floor. They seep between the cracks to breed, and return in monstrous distorted echoes, until we realise that it is no longer us who are speaking. Officially we are outside, and free. To persuade us of this fact, we are shown a film. The film does not flicker, the screen is large and bright. It depicts a windswept, rain-battered moor. In the cinema we are drenched, we are shivering. Above this dark hollow in the earth where we lay the rude silhouette of a tower prods the surface of the horizon. (Zoom in to a small and intricately barred window high in the tower.)

“The modern avant-garde,” said the demon, “is quantitively, not qualitively appraised. Since meaning has been thrown out along with all those other unfashionable ideas, the object of the experimental writer is not to produce works succinctly, but copiously. Of course the post-modern pastiche can be critically measured by certain easily gathered compass points as regards historical and cultural accuracy etc. But the ground-breaking, modem work has no stable textual yardstick, in so far as the experimental work, by its very existence demands that we snap the yardstick in two, as soon as the work declares itself to be experimental. Example: Finnegan’s Wake. Pile of shit. As least as far as the normally conditioned critical analysis can manage. But that is its very advantage. It’s so dense, and so damned big, that the critic can only assume one thing with certainty or declare his own failure: it’s “ground-breaking” (obviously) and as it’s so long, it must be breaking a lot of ground. Therefore it is a masterpiece.

On the tube, the amount of time that one can concentrate one’s attention on the face of a someone in a passing train diminishes with the increase of the train’s speed. Leaving the station one can easily make out the number of people in a given carriage, or the features, clothes and general appearance of any chosen individual, as well as what they are doing, whether reading, or staring at the wall or looking back at you from the other side of two panes of glass, or asleep. As the speed increases, and the train enters the unlit tunnels, many of these details are undetectable. One might be able to tell the sex, or approximate age of one or two people on the train for a split second, by concentrating very hard on their faces as the two worlds fall away from each other. At full speed, the passengers of trains travelling in the opposite direction as only visible as a homogenous blur. At this point it is impossible to know for certain whether the carriages are occupied or empty.

The protective circle of trees around the edge of the park made sure that dusk always came a little early. It was getting too dark to see what they were doing, but their privacy was assured. Hunched forward on bench no.2 (next to the playground, and directly opposite the sandbox), Jeremy struck his lighter five times until it flamed. “Okay that’s five”, he said, and Greg who was sitting next to him the number down in his notebook. “Five”, he echoed.

“You okay to carry on with this?” asked Jeremy.

“Yean, yeah, just keep going, we’ve still got time. This is really important.”

What profundity is captured in the zoom-in, and what further insights are plainly presented in the zoom-out! Time itself wrought and refined in that dark and lovely hive: the cinema. The singing, dancing mysteries of God packed into a colourful and accessible box. We can begin with, say, a flower (giving a perfunctory nod to drooling, mumbling nature in the corner). What does that flower say (nothing, it says nothing, but bear with me) until it begins to shrink and dwindle in our attention, until the sides rush in to squeeze it into its humble context. Rocks and ground swell and recede, and in turn are too discarded. Trees and roads make their romantic gestures and pallid metaphors, but the steady arm of the camera pushes them back into the landscape. We are lent omniscience for 100 minutes. We settle back like smug gods. There are now a billion flowers, flowers to fill a dozen valleys, each suitably humbled. No longer do they shout and squeal like poets, but each recites its lines like prayers offered up: I am in my place, I am insignificant to the whole, I am no more than a pixel. And yet (a city scene now, the classic shot, down the empty corridor between two skyscrapers to the lines of traffic) who is in that taxi slipping between the queues down there? I cannot know. I am impatient now, but the drags on, it is an impressive one. The intoxicating power turns to frustration. The taxi has pulled up at the lights, but only has a few inches before the camera rumbles on. An impulse stirs to shout “Stop the film! Just let me go down there and dash across the pavement, just to peer into the back window, just to ask their name, just to talk for a minute, just to get a ride somewhere, split the fare and have a look around the neighbourhood…” But the camera is master of time, and from it I learn a valuable lesson (I must learn it fast because there are many more lessons to come). The camera is merely demonstrating its power; we cannot ask to partake of it. We must have faith, for the camera will show us one of these stories which are laid out end to end in this brief panorama like sweets on a counter. The camera will show us which of these stories is really a story. Who will be imbued with the sacredness of the studio lights, and who will subside into profanity, like a flower in a field.

“I don’t need to know the details of how you lost and regained your faith,” said the clerk. “I just need to write something in the box. Like RELIGION: CATHOLIC or RELIGION: SATANIST or whatever. Anything. Just a word.” The form came back to Jeremy under the glass partition. He picked up the chained pen, wrote “god” in the space that the clerk had crossed viciously, and then crossed that out and wrote “God” with a large capital “G”. “You’ll have to excuse me if I am necessarily vague.” he said.

-n Academia (ak-e-dem’ia) the academic world; a rehabilitation centre which rehabilitates the world to the psychoses of its inmates.

The sea: it was like a blank page. Mute, bright, painfully insoluble. Elvis played from the speakers on the end of the pier, the final assault of humanity on the incomprehensible monster which sang back, wordlessly and pointlessly. The sea threw itself up the beach, the gesturings of an idiot, flinging out a waveful of pebbles and then churning them back into its secret and worthless store. Jeremy watched a crescent of beige foam slither towards him. It snuggled round the toe of his shoe and then vanished in an abrupt popping of greasy bubbles. Further out to sea, beyond even the reach of Elvis, the thing bellowed to itself, like some stupefied beat poet playing with its own empty rage. And like an earnest student, Jeremy stumbled down the banks of discarded pebbles to the lisping edges in search of enlightenment, and never found it.

In a midnight which lasted centuries, on the corner of a street of which all roads and paths, all tracks and ways and routes were a copy, Jeremy received the word of God from an angel’s shape made vague by effusions of sparklings, with silvery wings beaten into the shape of feathers, as thin as tinfoil. The word was “Portable”. It was chunky, made of a gold-like metal and had a hole drilled into the corner where a short chain and key-ring were attached. This was so that Jeremy wouldn’t lose it, he was led to understand.

-n. Reality (ri-al’i-ti, or re-) (archaic) a traditional interactive soap-opera, noted for its non-televisual origins.

bizarre desert

cacti

patiently desperately

clinging to

cold tarmac

the only source of

silence in this place

life indistinguishable

and still irreducible

marking seams .

nutrients

an ecology of side-effects; they are defending their territory

Outside the night had already returned, and was watching the house again. I had fallen asleep in daylight. Now the isolation became more obvious. There were no more possibilities that I knew of. I thought of painting many pictures on pieces of A4 typing paper and covering the wall with them, but of course they would be misinterpreted. Giving out clues was impossible. And to suggest that an internal world existed that was not a mirror of the external one was also dangerous. Perhaps the internal world had died, or had never existed anyway, as 1 had often suspected, and this would be too painful a truth to contemplate. Especially on such a night. The prison, if it was so, had been very delicately wrought.

I wondered what was happening in this silence. There are things that

what?

why

am I asleep

interlocked

The motorway at night transforms everything into a function. All is obliterated save those things which have a symbolic presence. The cats-eyes mark the boundary between lanes. The overhead lights mark the general direction. Our awareness of other motorists is reduced to a system of red lights to signify traffic travelling in our direction, and white lights to signify traffic travelling in the opposite direction. Other lights signify such aspects of travel and slowing, stopping etc. Crashing is signified by a sudden absence of lights. Our awareness of movement is, after several hours of travel, diminished. The view from our windscreen becomes an unchanging landscape on which is inscribed the various codes of conduct and abstract advice. The outside world assimilates itself into an extension of the dashboard world within. The sense of imminent danger is disguised by a hypnotic boredom. An endless stream of self-referential information streams by us on both sides and above us, metal boards with their own special lamps. Distances, exits, destinations who have no longer any meaning beyond their relation to the motorway system. Bridges, cones, barriers, embankments, turn-offs, pile-ups: they are divested of the qualities which make them objects to be experienced. If they are not intrinsic to the motorway symbology they are invisible to us, who have ceased to be motorists, nor even are we passengers, but mere spectators of a succession of bright images.

Footsteps in the hall presenting themselves to us, life is considered as a series of drug addictions, all of what is pompously called consciousness no more than a turning away of the eyes to something else which is also rapidly avoided. Now a sound reaches us which could be someone screaming and running down hill quickly at the same time. It has an undulation of tone. Other sounds of unrelenting struggle fade behind the relentless noise of the typewriter. The night pushes relentlessly onwards, towards what we expect will be another day. Writing considered as a drug, a mere turning one’s face away from the explosion, a turning the other cheek and covering one’s face. A relentless series of angelic visions present themselves to us. Truth considered as something you might break your back on, a wheel, debilitating, a series of barely negotiable holes to fall through, to fall through the warm and decorative fabric of language and the unrelenting series of drug-induced visions which fade behind each other like angelic echoes. Angels considered as pushers. Footsteps considered as a relentless series of undulations in the soft, downy surface of the night. The typewriter relentlessly denies its own vociferous existence. Reality considered as a fugitive from the angelic visions which constantly assail us at breakfast, on the bus, between our eyes and the TV screen, in the white spaces between the giant letters of cinema hoardings, between the inhalation and the exhalation of all fictional characters such as yourself. Reality considered as a corpse embalmed in language. The sweetly whispered lies of angels. The silence is indeterminate yet unequivocal. The wording is ornamental and metallic, and mentally we do not advise it. Research has shown relentlessly that we do not exist. A road sign tells us to give way: its composition has been attributed to angels. Mars considered as a unique focus of obscure desire. We would like to meet you. We would like to continue, until at least 2000 words have been struck into the surface of these plains, these pastures that are the focus of so much obscure desire. Mars considered as a series of relentless white plains. In the film we are shown, a demon appears at the cell window of the tower. In the film we are in a small stone cell looking out of the window over a windswept moor.

John Greenwood