Smile
by F. Egg
Anyway, the last time I saw my friend, with whom I was formerly so close, although our time together on this occasion had been somehow muted, was at the airport. He was due to go through security, but before he went he had told me the following story, about someone – not, I think, a friend, but apparently a true story – who has had some kind of unspecified episode of mental illness, has attended his dying mother, and now is going to take possession of an inherited house. It sounds far-fetched, and I had the sense my friend was seriously embellishing the story as he went along, or maybe he just made it up there and then. This seems most likely – although the story sounded familiar too, a bit like something from Borges. Maybe he was trying to postpone his departure (he has, you know, a terror of flying), though of course there was a set time for that, or perhaps trying to avoid mention of what we were both thinking: that that this would almost certainly be the last time we ever saw one another. This is the story, as best I can remember:
There’s a groggy feeling that lingers after having slept on a train. Disorientation, and a kind of vague shame or embarrassment. Worse, at the moment he had opened his eyes, an old woman (her face a sunken, immobile maze of deep lines) had been staring at him from her own seat (in a cluster on the other side of and further down the carriage). She had not, as you might expect, looked away immediately - instead it was he who had dropped his eyes first (then rubbed them: they were dull with sleep, and the carriage was painfully bright). Rather, she had slowly shifted her gaze elsewhere, with no modification of the impassive expression her face wore. He was reminded of the Dostoyevsky story in which the smallish narrator is barged into by a stranger - who does not register him - on a crowded thoroughfare or walkway, or perhaps it was on a bridge, and becomes obsessed by this perceived humiliation. It was too ridiculous; the man's eyes were barely open, and already they prickled with self-consciousness.
His watch said it was 7pm. It was a piece of good fortune that he had not missed his stop; his train was due to arrive at the small village nearest his ultimate destination in just fifteen minutes. To miss it would have been disaster, in this remote part of the country (though one which would surely soon become familiar to him, after his having taken up residence), at this cold time of year. He had left London bright and busy that winter’s morning, exhilarated, in an exhausted way, to be finally leaving for good. That city had been his home for all of his forty-five years, it had been the backdrop for his life’s entire catalogue of small dramas, his loves, such as they were, and for his more numerous disappointments and frustrations. He felt he would leave little trace on the city, like a stone somehow cast without ripples.
He had held a small leaving do in a pub a night ago, attended by those of his acquaintances without prior commitments. They had sat around a table and made subdued chat over beers, until quite suddenly music had started to be played at such high volume that their talk was drowned out. So rather than go on anywhere, they had decided it made sense to call it a night. The flat he returned to that night, which he had shared with his mother through her illness and to whose walls the sickroom smell clung still, was now almost bare of furniture; it had either been sold, junked, or sent along with his few personal effects ahead of him to the new house – the house that was to be his new beginning and the prospect of which had seemed at times over the last two hellish years to be a mirage.
He had slept happily; unused to alcohol, he had become mildly drunk on a couple of drinks.
The crowded train had sped away from the capital. He had preferred to study the bright, blurred scenery than read. A change in __________ , by which time a waning sun was low in the sky, onto another train, still busy, but now unpleasantly so. This time he was squashed into the window-seat by the encroaching mass of an obese neighbour, who had immediately begun a crudely flirtatious conversation with a heavily made-up woman opposite. The train's progress now seemed punctuated with unpleasant sensations: smells of hot food, irregular bursts of apparently unprecursed high-pitched laughter that sounded slightly maniacal. He began to feel grave doubts about his decision to go north. He had feigned sleep, eventually becoming real.
Now, waking, most of the passengers had gone, but they had left strewn wrappers, greasy smears on windows, impressions on threadbare seat-cushions. By now it was dark outside. Nothing could be seen of the country save an occasional row of distant yellow lights illuminating an empty strip of road, and the darkness made the carriage seem discontinuous from that outside world’s reality.
With a start he realised that his coat was not where he had left it, bundled between his knees. Momentarily frantic, his eyes searched for his travelling bag - his brain began to calculate the considerable inconveniences of having lost it...
but the bag was stowed safely where he had left it on the rack above his head. His coat too. Confused, he stood awkwardly, joints stiff and aching from the discomfort of sleeping for two hours on a train, and retrieved it. It must have fallen to the floor and been placed on the rack by someone – though turning it he noticed (his throat was suddenly dry at the sight) a dusty footprint imprinted on the back. How long had it lain in the dirt? Quickly, he brushed at the footprint.
How must he have looked to his fellow passengers while asleep? Had he snored, open-mouthed, or mumbled, betraying the wasted secrets of a sordidly mundane existence?
The air in the carriage was becoming stifling.
These thoughts occupied him.
He had been dreaming about his long illness, drifting snatches of conversations, about or directed at him, that had taken place over his bed. Voices - professional, condescending, disconnected, as at the time, like radio waves, breaking into empty dreams of grey sedation, interference in a wash of static.
He had tried to force smiles then at the kindnesses of his attendants, though what had appeared on his face was wrong. He shuddered at the thought of how the echo of that not-smile might have appeared on his dreaming face, now, to the other passengers. He seemed again to scent the cloying sickroom smell in his nostrils as he nervously regarded the empty seat opposite.
The train was going slowly and noisily now. It seemed to have lost the momentum it began with. Every so often there would be a squeal, or a flash of sparks, a grinding of gears, as if it were being dragged against its will. The lady with the lined face, he noticed, was no longer in her seat, despite there having been no stop since he awoke. Perhaps she had moved seats to the one next to hers that was obscured from his angle of sight. He leaned forward to see, but no-one seemed to be there. The only indicator of human presence in the carriage was from the far end; a conversation was being held in low, flat voices, and with an oddly incoherent rhythm: the pauses between each speaker’s contributions seeming overlong. There was no animation on either part, except every so often a guttural noise, like a protracted choke would be emitted, followed by silence.
Without warning, the train began to slow further; the tone of the engine fell steadily. Soon it was crawling through the night, and, though there were no town-lights to be seen outside, the phantasmagoria of a lifeless platform and dark station building crept into view, then shuddered to stillness. It was early, 7.12pm. He peered into the gloom, could just discern the sign: it was his station. Slightly panicking should the train leave, he stood hurriedly, grabbed his bag, pushed the button that caused the door to open, and stepped out into the night. He was the only one to disembark, and he strode a few uncertain paces onto the centre of the platform, into one of the islands of lamp-lit light, not quite knowing what to do next. The place was disconcertingly deserted. A few flakes of snow, heralding the coming midwinter, could be seen drifting sideways in the already bitingly chilly air. Behind him, with a heave, the train began to pull away. He turned to watch it go, noticing with a faint shiver that his carriage was apparently empty.
Monday 18 October 2010
Sunday 17 October 2010
Sand
I used to see the old man, as I thought of him, though maybe he wasn't so old, often on the aimless wanders around town that were one of my principle occupations at that time. His most distinguishing feature was his mouth, which was shaped like the letter u, but I don’t mean by that that he was constantly smiling. In fact, his face wore a pensive, worried expression, as if (I thought) he had just come down from the mountain and was wondering whether he should cast his stone into the tide of general indifference.
He wore always a sand-coloured suit, which was either pressed, or, more likely, was of the kind of material that does not show creases. I would consider engaging him in conversation, whilst regarding him at distance. I felt he had something of interest or even of importance to reveal, but I would think about the practical difficulties or awkwardness (for me) of beginning the necessary preliminary conversation, and would abandon the idea, or defer it until a more suitable time presented itself.
One day, during the festival, I arrived at the square, which was crowded with a noisy multitude, presumably come to hear a band that was playing a fast-paced waltz from a makeshift stage, in time to see him being lifted by two paramedics into a waiting ambulance. There was no siren but its lights were flashing, in a way that seemed oddly congruous with the music that was still being played, and which continued even afterward.
He wore always a sand-coloured suit, which was either pressed, or, more likely, was of the kind of material that does not show creases. I would consider engaging him in conversation, whilst regarding him at distance. I felt he had something of interest or even of importance to reveal, but I would think about the practical difficulties or awkwardness (for me) of beginning the necessary preliminary conversation, and would abandon the idea, or defer it until a more suitable time presented itself.
One day, during the festival, I arrived at the square, which was crowded with a noisy multitude, presumably come to hear a band that was playing a fast-paced waltz from a makeshift stage, in time to see him being lifted by two paramedics into a waiting ambulance. There was no siren but its lights were flashing, in a way that seemed oddly congruous with the music that was still being played, and which continued even afterward.
space limited
I was so highly agitated that I actually felt nauseous, and could barely concentrate on the change from tube to cramped bus I had to make at S_, and when I eventually (with some surprise) found myself outside the familiar door on the bright, bare concrete stairwell (I felt that the florescent tube was making my skin prickle and perspire), I really felt I might faint, and remember wondering who would find me slumped there, and when, and whether my sleep in that interval would be peaceful. It was immediately apparent, however, on his wordlessly opening the door, that A was in a state incomparably worse than my own.
As he seemed barely capable of standing, let alone articulating any kind of greeting suitable to his role as host, I let myself in, having to squeeze slightly though the doorframe past his gently swaying and uncomprehending form, and surveyed the small, chaotic lounge, smaller and more chaotic than I remembered it. It was hard to find anywhere to sit, so indescribably full of assorted junk was the room, covering with its lurid patina (there was nothing specific that attracted my focus, in fact I somehow felt it might be disastrous should any one item of the detritus of A’s life succeed in capturing my attention, and so I deliberately kept looking generally about) not just the scant furniture but the floor as well, but, fearing collapse might be imminent, I cleared some plates and papers from a low table and sat on that.
For a longish time nothing happened at all. It occurred to me I had not heard the front door being closed. A was nowhere in sight; he had gone into some anterior room, or possibly had disappeared off the face of the earth, though there were some curious, indistinct noises coming from somewhere else in the flat which I assumed must be made by him. I picked up one of the items I had swept onto the floor. It was a black notebook. Opening it, I discerned two things: that it was a diary, and that the handwriting was certainly not that of A – in fact I thought it must have been a female hand, because the characters were rounded. The page I had opened the diary on began like this:
was in the bathroom I spent a long time looking at myself in the mirror; it was as if my face had altered and in fact was perpetually altering then shifting back. After a time I realised that this was happening in time with my breathing, then my skin seemed to take on the texture of a kind of dry parchment, and I had to look away. I felt that the others downstairs might be beginning to notice my continued absence, and wondered if they were talking about me. All I could hear was the snake-hiss of water moving somewhere through (I imagined) a pipe. I felt that there had never been
I broke off reading suddenly, becoming conscious of someone watching me. It was A, framed in the doorway which I think led to his kitchen. He seemed to have recovered his self-possession, and was watching me with an odd, inscrutable expression on his face.
As he seemed barely capable of standing, let alone articulating any kind of greeting suitable to his role as host, I let myself in, having to squeeze slightly though the doorframe past his gently swaying and uncomprehending form, and surveyed the small, chaotic lounge, smaller and more chaotic than I remembered it. It was hard to find anywhere to sit, so indescribably full of assorted junk was the room, covering with its lurid patina (there was nothing specific that attracted my focus, in fact I somehow felt it might be disastrous should any one item of the detritus of A’s life succeed in capturing my attention, and so I deliberately kept looking generally about) not just the scant furniture but the floor as well, but, fearing collapse might be imminent, I cleared some plates and papers from a low table and sat on that.
For a longish time nothing happened at all. It occurred to me I had not heard the front door being closed. A was nowhere in sight; he had gone into some anterior room, or possibly had disappeared off the face of the earth, though there were some curious, indistinct noises coming from somewhere else in the flat which I assumed must be made by him. I picked up one of the items I had swept onto the floor. It was a black notebook. Opening it, I discerned two things: that it was a diary, and that the handwriting was certainly not that of A – in fact I thought it must have been a female hand, because the characters were rounded. The page I had opened the diary on began like this:
was in the bathroom I spent a long time looking at myself in the mirror; it was as if my face had altered and in fact was perpetually altering then shifting back. After a time I realised that this was happening in time with my breathing, then my skin seemed to take on the texture of a kind of dry parchment, and I had to look away. I felt that the others downstairs might be beginning to notice my continued absence, and wondered if they were talking about me. All I could hear was the snake-hiss of water moving somewhere through (I imagined) a pipe. I felt that there had never been
I broke off reading suddenly, becoming conscious of someone watching me. It was A, framed in the doorway which I think led to his kitchen. He seemed to have recovered his self-possession, and was watching me with an odd, inscrutable expression on his face.
Budva; Montenegro
The beach at Budva, outside of the pristine maze of the Stari Grad (a miniature Dubrovnik of similarly scaled-down touristy boutiques and restaurants) is an unbroken, five mile stretch of tackiness. Early that morning, dusty and bleak Podgorica had emptied itself into a packed train, already stuffed with Montenegrins and Serbs from the Balkan interior, which had crawled to the coast, stopping in anonymous fields to squeeze in yet more beach-goers and their beach towels and inflatable dolphins. We had crossed the reedy fish-tail of Lake Skadar, and looked south-east through mist at the distant Albanian border. Then the bus from Bar, north along a mountain coastline packed with tourists and punctuated by ugly developments: Montenegro, its coastline its main economic asset, clearly could not afford Croatian restraint in planning permission. Also unlike its northern neighbour, taken over in summer by Italians, Germans, and Brits, the package tourists here were Serb, Russian, and pasty (or painfully lobster-coloured) Ukrainians. Past quaint Sveti Stefan island, where the uber-rich can be gawped at by the masses from their own concrete resort rooms, planted there in a mirror of obstinate voyeurism.
On the promenade there are stalls selling all kinds of greasy fast-food, restaurants with unfathomable Cyrillic menus, and several container ship-loads of souvenirs. It is forty degrees; there is no space on the shingle beach. The Russian women are coifed and dressed-up for their passagietta, tightly white with gold-plastic accessories. A small boat goes by every half hour, containing two men who use a megaphone to contend with the blaring beach-music to herald in Russian ‘the best Russian disco on the coast’. When I make it there it is blasting out a turbofolk mash-up of a Neil Diamond song at unholy volume. Its sound system is indeed powerful; I climb to an empty orthodox churchyard on the adjacent hillside, where the headstones are resounding to Neil. My notes for that night contain this short šljivovica-induced poem:
Call from a boat loudspeaker
A disco you might like to attend
This shore has it all:
Air hockey, crazy golf and henna tattoos
One restaurant has drawn a crowd, cameras clicking, as they did moments ago for a shiny red Ferrari in a hotel car-park. A shark has been caught in the bay – over two metres, big enough to bring automatically into mind the sea-kayaking I have planned for the next day. It seems perfectly undamaged, except that its mouth is bloodied. Its eye (it is the timeless eye of an old god) stares through the noisy throng that surround what they imagine is its final indignity. I pass it on my walk to Sveti Stefan. When I come back, it, and the crowd are still there (though probably the crowd is comprised of different individuals), but now the shark is on its side. It has been slit open, and one of the waiters holds, laughing, the great white sack of its stomach. He has a knife, and is about to cut the stomach open.
The beach at Budva, outside of the pristine maze of the Stari Grad (a miniature Dubrovnik of similarly scaled-down touristy boutiques and restaurants) is an unbroken, five mile stretch of tackiness. Early that morning, dusty and bleak Podgorica had emptied itself into a packed train, already stuffed with Montenegrins and Serbs from the Balkan interior, which had crawled to the coast, stopping in anonymous fields to squeeze in yet more beach-goers and their beach towels and inflatable dolphins. We had crossed the reedy fish-tail of Lake Skadar, and looked south-east through mist at the distant Albanian border. Then the bus from Bar, north along a mountain coastline packed with tourists and punctuated by ugly developments: Montenegro, its coastline its main economic asset, clearly could not afford Croatian restraint in planning permission. Also unlike its northern neighbour, taken over in summer by Italians, Germans, and Brits, the package tourists here were Serb, Russian, and pasty (or painfully lobster-coloured) Ukrainians. Past quaint Sveti Stefan island, where the uber-rich can be gawped at by the masses from their own concrete resort rooms, planted there in a mirror of obstinate voyeurism.
On the promenade there are stalls selling all kinds of greasy fast-food, restaurants with unfathomable Cyrillic menus, and several container ship-loads of souvenirs. It is forty degrees; there is no space on the shingle beach. The Russian women are coifed and dressed-up for their passagietta, tightly white with gold-plastic accessories. A small boat goes by every half hour, containing two men who use a megaphone to contend with the blaring beach-music to herald in Russian ‘the best Russian disco on the coast’. When I make it there it is blasting out a turbofolk mash-up of a Neil Diamond song at unholy volume. Its sound system is indeed powerful; I climb to an empty orthodox churchyard on the adjacent hillside, where the headstones are resounding to Neil. My notes for that night contain this short šljivovica-induced poem:
Call from a boat loudspeaker
A disco you might like to attend
This shore has it all:
Air hockey, crazy golf and henna tattoos
One restaurant has drawn a crowd, cameras clicking, as they did moments ago for a shiny red Ferrari in a hotel car-park. A shark has been caught in the bay – over two metres, big enough to bring automatically into mind the sea-kayaking I have planned for the next day. It seems perfectly undamaged, except that its mouth is bloodied. Its eye (it is the timeless eye of an old god) stares through the noisy throng that surround what they imagine is its final indignity. I pass it on my walk to Sveti Stefan. When I come back, it, and the crowd are still there (though probably the crowd is comprised of different individuals), but now the shark is on its side. It has been slit open, and one of the waiters holds, laughing, the great white sack of its stomach. He has a knife, and is about to cut the stomach open.
nuts poems by Egg
RD Laing’s nuts
mad professor, hitherto lysergic
needs, grudges, a shot
every sane day
O
keep him from turning
(green, pitch, rises)
into that stone savage
smash and mend wall
it’s only polystyrene
as perception
that can’t cleave Noah’s quark
oft-times would
tune in hued to the air
dance tinged the free verse spike
shame
spreads, mops
with the Mail
steady dose
airports remind him not to use prose / insignia at the check-in zones
...remember memories
the no-tautology
ego renewal...
voluptidue, o ball-deep flood
...civic pride
entails -
- execration...
joins the congregation
praying
(must wait
for hands
to stop shaking)
if one day
his medicine runs empty
he will turn
daub
mud obliquely between
mouth corner and ear
make himself
a mask
- or tear away his visagecase -
liberated, prowl (after Dogstoy, Fido)
the rooftops
freedom’s slave
Jeremy Paxman's nuts
Jeremy Paxman
- not the Newsnight saxman –
turns his ire
on the widening gyre
cannot hear
Lord Falconer
mad professor, hitherto lysergic
needs, grudges, a shot
every sane day
O
keep him from turning
(green, pitch, rises)
into that stone savage
smash and mend wall
it’s only polystyrene
as perception
that can’t cleave Noah’s quark
oft-times would
tune in hued to the air
dance tinged the free verse spike
shame
spreads, mops
with the Mail
steady dose
airports remind him not to use prose / insignia at the check-in zones
...remember memories
the no-tautology
ego renewal...
voluptidue, o ball-deep flood
...civic pride
entails -
- execration...
joins the congregation
praying
(must wait
for hands
to stop shaking)
if one day
his medicine runs empty
he will turn
daub
mud obliquely between
mouth corner and ear
make himself
a mask
- or tear away his visagecase -
liberated, prowl (after Dogstoy, Fido)
the rooftops
freedom’s slave
Jeremy Paxman's nuts
Jeremy Paxman
- not the Newsnight saxman –
turns his ire
on the widening gyre
cannot hear
Lord Falconer
poems restored by Fugaz Egg
Dubliners
Half way instead in his magnum opus,
past calm, and future cuddled, yet tense urge to snatch and cry:
Stephanie (a plaintive song),
A minor epiphany
appearing from the door, rejoice –
Like a notice of dismissal, misconduct
Barely legible -
The way home is long and there are a manner of creatures
to waylay; in areas the blare of blank sirens screened, and
the swine-risk,
odd flesh must pass its test.
clinch
do not alight here came too late
you are
an invitation to a chess problem
my grubby white pieces are shattered teeth
I was pleased the tequila went down like water
as if this was my advantage over the vital boys
you floated over in green
I was with Kenny, my level brother, my sorry future, my ex-priest defrocked, my image of spit,
he “was pleased”, like fuck, because we’re the same
would have kicked your ankles in the clumsy third person dance
now I hindsee warnings and remember people can tell,
there’s precedent and scandal and it’s been quantified (in the guardian, no less)
and I am only undifferentiated,
but still,
a guy can think of facebook, and hold the taps,
and imagine you between me and the mirror.
arsehole sonnet
(Rimbaud in Mostar)
Plato’s cave and conglomerate nightclub;
the lady, a contribu-nudist
writes her name around your prow, and
imagines again the diphallic light side skewer-promise.
when mirrored adolesced fear of pendulous testicle
led to shattering asymmetrophobia of low garden walls.
A hijab-wearing trainee doctor
was bedevilled by your porcupine quills.
An occasional spider fluffed at slope,
morphed Arachne, they made an example of her,
but couldn’t entirely quell her quiet hubris.
She is home-spun in soft undulation.
Whatever orbit, once or twice daily you divulge secrets -
another rim-lacuna into hidden workings, society’s upturned ear.
disaster / inaction
It impends, by a river, cold
summer's day, disrupting syntax,
uneven chill makes itself noticeable,
Disaster, in the angles of a swan
appearing in narrowed perspective
of high grasses either side, looms,
heightens in banked old couple, not
far downstream, the man's sideways
glance is hard to read
(I can hope).
To wade in and reclaim what was freely
given to the river - wet-
through jeans and anklesinking deep
(though nothing really disturbs the surface but the two swans
seen individually, and a pine cone I threw)
to leave you drowning on the bank.
Dull disaster, tributary to somewhere of more epic sweep,
threatens nonetheless to tear another fibre.
Half way instead in his magnum opus,
past calm, and future cuddled, yet tense urge to snatch and cry:
Stephanie (a plaintive song),
A minor epiphany
appearing from the door, rejoice –
Like a notice of dismissal, misconduct
Barely legible -
The way home is long and there are a manner of creatures
to waylay; in areas the blare of blank sirens screened, and
the swine-risk,
odd flesh must pass its test.
clinch
do not alight here came too late
you are
an invitation to a chess problem
my grubby white pieces are shattered teeth
I was pleased the tequila went down like water
as if this was my advantage over the vital boys
you floated over in green
I was with Kenny, my level brother, my sorry future, my ex-priest defrocked, my image of spit,
he “was pleased”, like fuck, because we’re the same
would have kicked your ankles in the clumsy third person dance
now I hindsee warnings and remember people can tell,
there’s precedent and scandal and it’s been quantified (in the guardian, no less)
and I am only undifferentiated,
but still,
a guy can think of facebook, and hold the taps,
and imagine you between me and the mirror.
arsehole sonnet
(Rimbaud in Mostar)
Plato’s cave and conglomerate nightclub;
the lady, a contribu-nudist
writes her name around your prow, and
imagines again the diphallic light side skewer-promise.
when mirrored adolesced fear of pendulous testicle
led to shattering asymmetrophobia of low garden walls.
A hijab-wearing trainee doctor
was bedevilled by your porcupine quills.
An occasional spider fluffed at slope,
morphed Arachne, they made an example of her,
but couldn’t entirely quell her quiet hubris.
She is home-spun in soft undulation.
Whatever orbit, once or twice daily you divulge secrets -
another rim-lacuna into hidden workings, society’s upturned ear.
disaster / inaction
It impends, by a river, cold
summer's day, disrupting syntax,
uneven chill makes itself noticeable,
Disaster, in the angles of a swan
appearing in narrowed perspective
of high grasses either side, looms,
heightens in banked old couple, not
far downstream, the man's sideways
glance is hard to read
(I can hope).
To wade in and reclaim what was freely
given to the river - wet-
through jeans and anklesinking deep
(though nothing really disturbs the surface but the two swans
seen individually, and a pine cone I threw)
to leave you drowning on the bank.
Dull disaster, tributary to somewhere of more epic sweep,
threatens nonetheless to tear another fibre.
Tuesday 1 June 2010
Poems by Fugaz Egg
Travel Writing
Horizon was never further
There is a word for travelling
The length of a continent.
Behind the old curtain, a mirror
Plugged in with a few lines.
Mouths blister with sensation.
Horizon was never further
There is a word for travelling
The length of a continent.
Behind the old curtain, a mirror
Plugged in with a few lines.
Mouths blister with sensation.
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