![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Tranzit audio file
Jokes 5
It snowed and it snowed. My father was playing chess with his penis.
He'd set up a low table and two stools by the glass wall that faced the garden. His penis sat on one stool, its back to the window. My father, who was the more patient of the two, was playing with care and skill, but the penis -- a hothead -- played all sorts of wild and risky moves. For the moment, they were paying off.
A log fire crackled in the grate... But wait, before I tell you about that I must provide a little background.
Before the glass house, before the city, before hysterical males came to dominate our family, we lived in a farmhouse set in an orchard. Those were days of fruit and blossom, the days when my mother was still with us. This is the story of how she came to leave.
Sebastian Skeleton, my father, was not, in those days, the priapic monster he has since become. He was a relatively sensitive man, a horticulturalist, a maker of thin-lipped pottery with his own hand-built kiln, an avid reader of insipidly nationalistic poetry written in the Ugrian-Uralic family of languages. Unfortunately, he was also having an affair. And even more unfortunately, it was with a barnyard fowl.
Where did the sordid tryst between the goose and my father begin? How did the witless bird inspire his love, and what were the feathery guiles she employed to make him lose interest so completely in my mother?
It's difficult to answer these questions. What seems certain is that the location of the goose shed next to the fragile structure housing my father's pottery kiln provided him with the perfect alibi.
It was I, Peter, who found the secret interconnecting door, bent low to pass through it, and saw the two suspicious concaves in the straw -- recent, warm impressions of the bodies of man and goose. Scraping around next to them, I also found a foul pile of goose eggs. I took them to the pig pen and tossed them in, wincing as I watched greedy Pippi snout them open and guzzle their spilled contents -- failed amalgams, no doubt, of human and goose.
I am reminded of a similar case of a rural man wracked by sexual desires he couldn't -- or wouldn't -- control. I discovered, in my father's bookcase, the Diary of the typographer, sculptor and artist Eric Gill. One day in 1929 he noted in his Diary:
"Bath. Continued experiment with dog after and discovered that a dog will join with a man."
Fuck!
We can imagine my father's journal striking a similar tone. "Bath. After, discovered that a goose will join with a man."
But what of my mother? She certainly didn't deserve my father's neglect. She was a woman as well-endowed with intelligence as with beauty. She must have had an inkling of what was going on. Perhaps she noticed how my father had stopped eating paté, once his favourite food.
Anyway, whatever triggered her suspicion, soon after my father's affair with the goose began my mother returned from her regular charity work in the local village with a fine spruce gander. My father, of course, immediately saw the bird as a dangerous rival.
"Take it back," he demanded, "we don't need any more geese on this farm!"
My mother explained that the gander would keep Rebecca -- the goose -- company, and help her produce handsome goslings that we could sell at market. My father protested, but finally (in order not to look suspicious) had to accept the fowl, who was christened Emperor and given free range of the barnyard.
A mere two weeks later Emperor was found with his neck rung. My father blamed foxes, but what fox rings the neck of a goose and fails to take a single bite of its flesh? Later, I discovered in his secret diary an account of the murder. Emperor had plunged my father into the depths of depression -- a depression fuelled by jealousy.
"I wish only to die," he had written. "Bring me an undertaker who will sell me a plot! For I have surprised my mistress in the arms -- or should I say the wings? -- of her husband, the gander Emperor. I thought I was happy, and had love at the end of my harpoon..." (such was my father's odd, florid, antique style of writing) "...but yesterday evening, at the corner of the wood, I came upon my mistress copulating with her husband. What treachery!"
"This so-called emperor of the barnyard, this humping, preening feathered camel, cock of the walk, how can I find the words to describe my disgust for him?" continued my father, rage carrying his metaphors to hell in a handcart. "In beguiling his own wife to cheat on her lover with him, he has taken adultery to its logical conclusion. I had noticed that the embraces of her beak were less fierce upon my lips than before. It is all due to him, her husband! Now she will make offspring who no longer resemble me."
(My father seems to have become feverish at this point -- the goose had made no human-shaped offspring, nor could she.)
"I have surprised the geese," my father continued, "at the corner of the wood! And just to rub it in, the imperial gander is now squawking his taunts around the barnyard -- the one who is wearing the cuckold's horns, he says, isn't the one you think! How he hisses his derision, how he mocks me! He will die for this humiliation! I shall ring Emperor's neck tonight!"
The next entry is curt. "Rang Emperor's neck. I shall tell them a fox did it. Afterwards, crept away to Rebecca's shed. She rejected me. I forced her. The bitch is only a goose. She should not forget it. Nor, for that matter, remember it."
And there you see, pithily summed up, my father's insufferable character, the double binds he would force on all those he came into contact with. We could neither be what we were -- innocent children, deserving of protection -- nor his lovers, his mates, his equals, as we also longed to be.
As for his wife, our mother, his callous attitude to her is clear.
Holding the goose Rebecca under his arm, my father strode into the farmhouse kitchen. "This is the pig I've been fucking," he declared. My mother looked up, surprised. "That's not a pig, that's Rebecca the goose!" she exclaimed. "I wasn't talking to you," snapped my father.
My mother fled. She packed her bags one day and left us, never to return. My father smashed all his pottery and burned down the barn with Rebecca still in it. We moved to the city, to the glass house, where, in full view of the lamplighters, my father now sits playing chess.
"Checkmate," says my father's penis.
[Error: unknown template video]
Multiplying Love
If love is good
As most agree
Loving two must be
Twice as good
And loving three .....
Well, you get the idea
That all seems pretty logical and uncontroversial to me
So why call me cheat or hypocrite
For loving another girl?
I'm simply multiplying love;
There's never enough in this world
Jokes 15
In my earliest memories, my parents are Heian.
By that I mean to say that, although we lived on a farm, my parents dressed very carefully. They had a strict and precise aesthetic code. They were like the aristocrats of Japan's Heian period, described by the Reverend James Murdoch (writing in Scotland at the end of the 19th century) as "an ever-pullulating brood of greedy, needy, frivolous dilettanti -- as often as not foully licentious, utterly effeminate, incapable of any worthy achievement, but withal the polished exponents of high breeding and correct form".
In fact, my parents' resemblance to this strutting, feathered, inbred "brood" makes the tragedy of my father's subsequent affair with a barnyard fowl -- and the consequent downfall of the family dynasty -- all the less surprising; an inevitability, perhaps. For, like Heian Japan, our farmhouse in the forests of Scotland was "an intellectual Sodom" full of "pampered minions and bepowdered poetasters".
Nevertheless, I am flooded with nostalgia -- that most sensuously effulgent and effeminate of emotions -- when I remember a typical scene on the farm. Dusk is falling, and the sky is seared with gashes of hot pink satin. Migrating geese are flying far overhead, for it is late summer. There is a cool breeze, scented with pine cones, drifting in from the dark, silent forest that surrounds our estate. On the raised wooden walkways leading from building to building -- the "petal paths", we call them -- ancient braziers have been lit. My mother sweeps by, followed at a discreet distance by two attendants who bear her train.
My mother lives in an elegant pavilion at the other end of the orchard. It is the custom for married people to live apart; this way they retain their dignity and independence. Joan spends much of her time writing in her pillowbook, or receiving admirers who court her with compact, elegant poems. It takes her so long to get dressed -- even with several attendants helping -- that she often spends six or seven hours preparing for a public appearance which will last only twenty minutes, and consist of a few highly formalized ritual gestures. You can see why, in these circumstances, she lives for her suitors, and the flutter these dandy supplicants bring to her heart.
My father, meanwhile, spends his time making highly detailed technical drawings with a mechanical pencil. The drawings depict utopian improvements he intends to make to the estate. We all know he will never implement these plans, and soon he admits it himself, turning his attention to his feathered friend instead.
It is at this moment that he bursts into my mother's summerhouse at the end of the orchard (wearing a particularly gorgeous and expensive kimono of which the dominant tones are muted mossy greys, and the motif a pattern of pinus japonica, the Japanese pine) and declares "This is the pig I've been fucking!"
It might seem like an impossibly vulgar gesture in such a refined environment. And yet this, too, could be an expression of refinement, an outburst on the part of a man for whom human sexual contact has become unbearably crude.
For Heians, nothing is more ugly than the naked human body. Women wear five or six layers of robes, and make love with them on. The sleeves are crucial; each garment has a slightly different length and colour of material, and the sleeves end, as a result, in exquisitely layered spectral and textural ranges. But, for a man as highly sensitive and refined as my father, it is likely that even the knowledge that his wife's robes could be removed -- whether they ever were or not -- would have been a torture. Enough, perhaps, to lead him to acts of understandable adultery with a creature whose "clothes" were physically attached to her, and who could only become "naked" when plucked as a preface to being cooked for lunch.
In comparison to this miraculous bird, then, any human would naturally seem like a kind of pig. Yes, I can understand my father.
You may think I am struggling unnecessarily hard to defend him. Wasn't he, after all, being -- technically -- bestial when he declared (to a goose, no less!) that his wife was "the pig I've been fucking"? Why claim, in retrospect, that he was in fact a man of exquisite sensibility, rarefied taste and unusual refinement? Why should we -- why should I, especially -- not condemn him?
I will tell you why.
I must begin with the Hindu concept of dharma. Dharma is universal law, the law that sustains the universe.
Now, for some time -- since I met the scary clown on top of the hill, and discovered that he was mere cardboard, and could be defeated with a small push -- I have realized that my family history is governed, not by dharma, but by jokes.
Call it "joke dharma" if you like. Bad jokes, dirty jokes are, to my world, what the force of gravity is to yours. They shape every event in my life, and in the life of my family. I am not sure why it is so, but that it is, I cannot doubt. As a result, I live in a grim mirror world. I am a character trapped in a book of jokes -- jokes, furthermore, which are in very poor taste.
I have discovered that there is a way to escape this grim fate -- the misfortune of joke dharma. The solution, I believe, is that I should assume, myself, the responsibility of telling the very jokes which constrain and define me, and to make, each time, a small alteration in their telling, an alteration which restores a few shreds of dignity, human decency, beauty and sensuality to the tale.
It might begin by embroidery; I add a few details which are not normally included in the rush to the punchline. I must ensure that the story is so well-told that my audience loses interest in the farcical pay-off, the money-shot. I tell the tale several times, from different angles and with different emphases, forcing my listeners to pay attention to small formal questions, adverbs rather than verbs, hows rather than whats.
By these methods, little by little, I believe I can improve my world. Even if you are not in the same grim situation as me, you might want to try this technique yourself.
*
My mother called me to her summerhouse at the end of the orchard and asked me if I was happy. I answered with admirable concreteness: I would be happy if I had an ice cream.
Resplendent in fourteen layers of robes, sitting diagonally at her table with an earthenware cup of powdery green tea in front of her, my mother frowned.
"Ice cream will spoil your appetite," she said. "Go outside and compose poetry in the orchard. Bring me a tanka in half an hour."
The tanka is a five-line poem with alternating lines of five and seven syllables. It must concern nature, the seasons, love or other strong emotions. In the formulaic compactness of its shape it resembles a joke, but in spirit it is something else entirely, something faraway and lovely; sun catching mountains, rivers with rushing water, cold white snow on rocks, tree branches glazed with white frost, white sparkling snow in the world.
But the more I thought of mountains and sparkling snow, the more I thought of the ice cream I wanted to eat. Happiness for a seven-year old is a very specific thing.
"Mother, I don't want to compose a tanka. I want to eat ice cream!"
"All right, just play in the orchard."
"But there's no-one there! I don't want to play alone! The wind is chilly. There are ghosts in the orchard! I want to stay here with you!"
My mother smiled, recognizing immediately that I had replied within the formal restraints of a tanka.
"Very well," she said, "you can stay here with me and play. What shall we play at?"
"Let's play mummies and daddies," I said.
My mother looked a little surprised, but went along with it.
"All right, we'll do that. What do you want me to do?"
"Go to your sleeping quarters and lie down on the futon. I shall arrive presently." I was already assuming my father's tone of voice.
While my mother undressed, I pulled on a robe my father had left hanging in the cupboard. Adopting his loose-limbed gait (though somewhat impeded by the too-long robe), I clumped slowly towards the bedroom, gripping between my teeth the Konig Suitor pipe he had left smouldering on the high mantelpiece during his last visit. Strangely, it was still lit.
When I flung open the screen door my mother raised herself on one elbow. She was completely naked, her legs welcomingly parted.
"What shall I do now?" she asked.
I closed the sliding door and adopted the gruff voice of my father:
"Give your son a big plate of ice cream, you cow!"
No sooner had I spoken than the door behind me was flung open again. In stepped my father, with a goose under his arm.
"This is the pig I've been fucking," he said.
Dialtone
Eyes clear as dialtone
Are you at home? Are you alone?
I call on the phone
Where have you gone, are you out on the street
Dead on your feet, or harvesting wheat
My introvert are you out chasing skirt?
Singing fiddle me rum
Fiddle me dumb
Your lady in her antechamber
Turtledove, my quivertail
My purple head, my nightingale
My corkscrewing fool
Cuckold, coxcomb is it me who's insane
Or is it you who's got sex on the brain?
Always discreet, always obscene
The Viscompte de Lisle is calling me still
Your lady in her antechamber
And time is passing
And you don't call, and my crest falls
So where are you now?
Out with some cow at some Japanese inn
Opening pork cooked in its skin
Pouring red wine like blood down a string
Singing fiddle me rum
Fiddle me dumb
Your lady in her antechamber
Eyes clear as dialtone
Here comes the queen
Always discreet, always obscene
Pushing her luck like the pig who got stuck
Don't think she hasn't got men queuing up
The Marquis of Rochdale's not here for good luck
Singing fiddle me rum
Fiddle me dumb
Your lady in her antechamber
Beijing Opera
AHH CHEE CHANG CHU
[Error: unknown template video]
Thatness and Thereness
Slow-motion repeat of breaking glass
Fear Creeping up from behind
A slide into corruption
A train of thought stops all along the way
From start to goal
Easy to understand
Thatness, thereness
A grid of time in view
Deep blue metal
Undulating, rise and fall
We're hiding ourselves
Don't want to see ourselves
But still desire persists
For self-injury, through exposure
To reality
Thatness, thereness
A deep blue rush in time
Slow-motion repeat of breaking glass
Fear Creeping up from behind
A slide into corruption
A train of thought stops all along the way
From start to goal
Easy to understand
Thatness, thereness
A grid of time in view
Jokes 5
It snowed and it snowed. My father was playing chess with his penis.
He'd set up a low table and two stools by the glass wall that faced the garden. His penis sat on one stool, its back to the window. My father, who was the more patient of the two, was playing with care and skill, but the penis -- a hothead -- played all sorts of wild and risky moves. For the moment, they were paying off.
A log fire crackled in the grate... But wait, before I tell you about that I must provide a little background.
Before the glass house, before the city, before hysterical males came to dominate our family, we lived in a farmhouse set in an orchard. Those were days of fruit and blossom, the days when my mother was still with us. This is the story of how she came to leave.
Sebastian Skeleton, my father, was not, in those days, the priapic monster he has since become. He was a relatively sensitive man, a horticulturalist, a maker of thin-lipped pottery with his own hand-built kiln, an avid reader of insipidly nationalistic poetry written in the Ugrian-Uralic family of languages. Unfortunately, he was also having an affair. And even more unfortunately, it was with a barnyard fowl.
Where did the sordid tryst between the goose and my father begin? How did the witless bird inspire his love, and what were the feathery guiles she employed to make him lose interest so completely in my mother?
It's difficult to answer these questions. What seems certain is that the location of the goose shed next to the fragile structure housing my father's pottery kiln provided him with the perfect alibi.
It was I, Peter, who found the secret interconnecting door, bent low to pass through it, and saw the two suspicious concaves in the straw -- recent, warm impressions of the bodies of man and goose. Scraping around next to them, I also found a foul pile of goose eggs. I took them to the pig pen and tossed them in, wincing as I watched greedy Pippi snout them open and guzzle their spilled contents -- failed amalgams, no doubt, of human and goose.
I am reminded of a similar case of a rural man wracked by sexual desires he couldn't -- or wouldn't -- control. I discovered, in my father's bookcase, the Diary of the typographer, sculptor and artist Eric Gill. One day in 1929 he noted in his Diary:
"Bath. Continued experiment with dog after and discovered that a dog will join with a man."
Fuck!
We can imagine my father's journal striking a similar tone. "Bath. After, discovered that a goose will join with a man."
But what of my mother? She certainly didn't deserve my father's neglect. She was a woman as well-endowed with intelligence as with beauty. She must have had an inkling of what was going on. Perhaps she noticed how my father had stopped eating paté, once his favourite food.
Anyway, whatever triggered her suspicion, soon after my father's affair with the goose began my mother returned from her regular charity work in the local village with a fine spruce gander. My father, of course, immediately saw the bird as a dangerous rival.
"Take it back," he demanded, "we don't need any more geese on this farm!"
My mother explained that the gander would keep Rebecca -- the goose -- company, and help her produce handsome goslings that we could sell at market. My father protested, but finally (in order not to look suspicious) had to accept the fowl, who was christened Emperor and given free range of the barnyard.
A mere two weeks later Emperor was found with his neck rung. My father blamed foxes, but what fox rings the neck of a goose and fails to take a single bite of its flesh? Later, I discovered in his secret diary an account of the murder. Emperor had plunged my father into the depths of depression -- a depression fuelled by jealousy.
"I wish only to die," he had written. "Bring me an undertaker who will sell me a plot! For I have surprised my mistress in the arms -- or should I say the wings? -- of her husband, the gander Emperor. I thought I was happy, and had love at the end of my harpoon..." (such was my father's odd, florid, antique style of writing) "...but yesterday evening, at the corner of the wood, I came upon my mistress copulating with her husband. What treachery!"
"This so-called emperor of the barnyard, this humping, preening feathered camel, cock of the walk, how can I find the words to describe my disgust for him?" continued my father, rage carrying his metaphors to hell in a handcart. "In beguiling his own wife to cheat on her lover with him, he has taken adultery to its logical conclusion. I had noticed that the embraces of her beak were less fierce upon my lips than before. It is all due to him, her husband! Now she will make offspring who no longer resemble me."
(My father seems to have become feverish at this point -- the goose had made no human-shaped offspring, nor could she.)
"I have surprised the geese," my father continued, "at the corner of the wood! And just to rub it in, the imperial gander is now squawking his taunts around the barnyard -- the one who is wearing the cuckold's horns, he says, isn't the one you think! How he hisses his derision, how he mocks me! He will die for this humiliation! I shall ring Emperor's neck tonight!"
The next entry is curt. "Rang Emperor's neck. I shall tell them a fox did it. Afterwards, crept away to Rebecca's shed. She rejected me. I forced her. The bitch is only a goose. She should not forget it. Nor, for that matter, remember it."
And there you see, pithily summed up, my father's insufferable character, the double binds he would force on all those he came into contact with. We could neither be what we were -- innocent children, deserving of protection -- nor his lovers, his mates, his equals, as we also longed to be.
As for his wife, our mother, his callous attitude to her is clear.
Holding the goose Rebecca under his arm, my father strode into the farmhouse kitchen. "This is the pig I've been fucking," he declared. My mother looked up, surprised. "That's not a pig, that's Rebecca the goose!" she exclaimed. "I wasn't talking to you," snapped my father.
My mother fled. She packed her bags one day and left us, never to return. My father smashed all his pottery and burned down the barn with Rebecca still in it. We moved to the city, to the glass house, where, in full view of the lamplighters, my father now sits playing chess.
"Checkmate," says my father's penis.
[Error: unknown template video]
Multiplying Love
If love is good
As most agree
Loving two must be
Twice as good
And loving three .....
Well, you get the idea
That all seems pretty logical and uncontroversial to me
So why call me cheat or hypocrite
For loving another girl?
I'm simply multiplying love;
There's never enough in this world
Jokes 15
In my earliest memories, my parents are Heian.
By that I mean to say that, although we lived on a farm, my parents dressed very carefully. They had a strict and precise aesthetic code. They were like the aristocrats of Japan's Heian period, described by the Reverend James Murdoch (writing in Scotland at the end of the 19th century) as "an ever-pullulating brood of greedy, needy, frivolous dilettanti -- as often as not foully licentious, utterly effeminate, incapable of any worthy achievement, but withal the polished exponents of high breeding and correct form".
In fact, my parents' resemblance to this strutting, feathered, inbred "brood" makes the tragedy of my father's subsequent affair with a barnyard fowl -- and the consequent downfall of the family dynasty -- all the less surprising; an inevitability, perhaps. For, like Heian Japan, our farmhouse in the forests of Scotland was "an intellectual Sodom" full of "pampered minions and bepowdered poetasters".
Nevertheless, I am flooded with nostalgia -- that most sensuously effulgent and effeminate of emotions -- when I remember a typical scene on the farm. Dusk is falling, and the sky is seared with gashes of hot pink satin. Migrating geese are flying far overhead, for it is late summer. There is a cool breeze, scented with pine cones, drifting in from the dark, silent forest that surrounds our estate. On the raised wooden walkways leading from building to building -- the "petal paths", we call them -- ancient braziers have been lit. My mother sweeps by, followed at a discreet distance by two attendants who bear her train.
My mother lives in an elegant pavilion at the other end of the orchard. It is the custom for married people to live apart; this way they retain their dignity and independence. Joan spends much of her time writing in her pillowbook, or receiving admirers who court her with compact, elegant poems. It takes her so long to get dressed -- even with several attendants helping -- that she often spends six or seven hours preparing for a public appearance which will last only twenty minutes, and consist of a few highly formalized ritual gestures. You can see why, in these circumstances, she lives for her suitors, and the flutter these dandy supplicants bring to her heart.
My father, meanwhile, spends his time making highly detailed technical drawings with a mechanical pencil. The drawings depict utopian improvements he intends to make to the estate. We all know he will never implement these plans, and soon he admits it himself, turning his attention to his feathered friend instead.
It is at this moment that he bursts into my mother's summerhouse at the end of the orchard (wearing a particularly gorgeous and expensive kimono of which the dominant tones are muted mossy greys, and the motif a pattern of pinus japonica, the Japanese pine) and declares "This is the pig I've been fucking!"
It might seem like an impossibly vulgar gesture in such a refined environment. And yet this, too, could be an expression of refinement, an outburst on the part of a man for whom human sexual contact has become unbearably crude.
For Heians, nothing is more ugly than the naked human body. Women wear five or six layers of robes, and make love with them on. The sleeves are crucial; each garment has a slightly different length and colour of material, and the sleeves end, as a result, in exquisitely layered spectral and textural ranges. But, for a man as highly sensitive and refined as my father, it is likely that even the knowledge that his wife's robes could be removed -- whether they ever were or not -- would have been a torture. Enough, perhaps, to lead him to acts of understandable adultery with a creature whose "clothes" were physically attached to her, and who could only become "naked" when plucked as a preface to being cooked for lunch.
In comparison to this miraculous bird, then, any human would naturally seem like a kind of pig. Yes, I can understand my father.
You may think I am struggling unnecessarily hard to defend him. Wasn't he, after all, being -- technically -- bestial when he declared (to a goose, no less!) that his wife was "the pig I've been fucking"? Why claim, in retrospect, that he was in fact a man of exquisite sensibility, rarefied taste and unusual refinement? Why should we -- why should I, especially -- not condemn him?
I will tell you why.
I must begin with the Hindu concept of dharma. Dharma is universal law, the law that sustains the universe.
Now, for some time -- since I met the scary clown on top of the hill, and discovered that he was mere cardboard, and could be defeated with a small push -- I have realized that my family history is governed, not by dharma, but by jokes.
Call it "joke dharma" if you like. Bad jokes, dirty jokes are, to my world, what the force of gravity is to yours. They shape every event in my life, and in the life of my family. I am not sure why it is so, but that it is, I cannot doubt. As a result, I live in a grim mirror world. I am a character trapped in a book of jokes -- jokes, furthermore, which are in very poor taste.
I have discovered that there is a way to escape this grim fate -- the misfortune of joke dharma. The solution, I believe, is that I should assume, myself, the responsibility of telling the very jokes which constrain and define me, and to make, each time, a small alteration in their telling, an alteration which restores a few shreds of dignity, human decency, beauty and sensuality to the tale.
It might begin by embroidery; I add a few details which are not normally included in the rush to the punchline. I must ensure that the story is so well-told that my audience loses interest in the farcical pay-off, the money-shot. I tell the tale several times, from different angles and with different emphases, forcing my listeners to pay attention to small formal questions, adverbs rather than verbs, hows rather than whats.
By these methods, little by little, I believe I can improve my world. Even if you are not in the same grim situation as me, you might want to try this technique yourself.
*
My mother called me to her summerhouse at the end of the orchard and asked me if I was happy. I answered with admirable concreteness: I would be happy if I had an ice cream.
Resplendent in fourteen layers of robes, sitting diagonally at her table with an earthenware cup of powdery green tea in front of her, my mother frowned.
"Ice cream will spoil your appetite," she said. "Go outside and compose poetry in the orchard. Bring me a tanka in half an hour."
The tanka is a five-line poem with alternating lines of five and seven syllables. It must concern nature, the seasons, love or other strong emotions. In the formulaic compactness of its shape it resembles a joke, but in spirit it is something else entirely, something faraway and lovely; sun catching mountains, rivers with rushing water, cold white snow on rocks, tree branches glazed with white frost, white sparkling snow in the world.
But the more I thought of mountains and sparkling snow, the more I thought of the ice cream I wanted to eat. Happiness for a seven-year old is a very specific thing.
"Mother, I don't want to compose a tanka. I want to eat ice cream!"
"All right, just play in the orchard."
"But there's no-one there! I don't want to play alone! The wind is chilly. There are ghosts in the orchard! I want to stay here with you!"
My mother smiled, recognizing immediately that I had replied within the formal restraints of a tanka.
"Very well," she said, "you can stay here with me and play. What shall we play at?"
"Let's play mummies and daddies," I said.
My mother looked a little surprised, but went along with it.
"All right, we'll do that. What do you want me to do?"
"Go to your sleeping quarters and lie down on the futon. I shall arrive presently." I was already assuming my father's tone of voice.
While my mother undressed, I pulled on a robe my father had left hanging in the cupboard. Adopting his loose-limbed gait (though somewhat impeded by the too-long robe), I clumped slowly towards the bedroom, gripping between my teeth the Konig Suitor pipe he had left smouldering on the high mantelpiece during his last visit. Strangely, it was still lit.
When I flung open the screen door my mother raised herself on one elbow. She was completely naked, her legs welcomingly parted.
"What shall I do now?" she asked.
I closed the sliding door and adopted the gruff voice of my father:
"Give your son a big plate of ice cream, you cow!"
No sooner had I spoken than the door behind me was flung open again. In stepped my father, with a goose under his arm.
"This is the pig I've been fucking," he said.
Dialtone
Eyes clear as dialtone
Are you at home? Are you alone?
I call on the phone
Where have you gone, are you out on the street
Dead on your feet, or harvesting wheat
My introvert are you out chasing skirt?
Singing fiddle me rum
Fiddle me dumb
Your lady in her antechamber
Turtledove, my quivertail
My purple head, my nightingale
My corkscrewing fool
Cuckold, coxcomb is it me who's insane
Or is it you who's got sex on the brain?
Always discreet, always obscene
The Viscompte de Lisle is calling me still
Your lady in her antechamber
And time is passing
And you don't call, and my crest falls
So where are you now?
Out with some cow at some Japanese inn
Opening pork cooked in its skin
Pouring red wine like blood down a string
Singing fiddle me rum
Fiddle me dumb
Your lady in her antechamber
Eyes clear as dialtone
Here comes the queen
Always discreet, always obscene
Pushing her luck like the pig who got stuck
Don't think she hasn't got men queuing up
The Marquis of Rochdale's not here for good luck
Singing fiddle me rum
Fiddle me dumb
Your lady in her antechamber
Beijing Opera
AHH CHEE CHANG CHU
[Error: unknown template video]
Thatness and Thereness
Slow-motion repeat of breaking glass
Fear Creeping up from behind
A slide into corruption
A train of thought stops all along the way
From start to goal
Easy to understand
Thatness, thereness
A grid of time in view
Deep blue metal
Undulating, rise and fall
We're hiding ourselves
Don't want to see ourselves
But still desire persists
For self-injury, through exposure
To reality
Thatness, thereness
A deep blue rush in time
Slow-motion repeat of breaking glass
Fear Creeping up from behind
A slide into corruption
A train of thought stops all along the way
From start to goal
Easy to understand
Thatness, thereness
A grid of time in view