Death Ship: Part 2

And the churning silence that followed, the land falling back as a hand once sent to save but whose grip has became lost; Fingers turning on themselves and rising to become a heat haze searching amongst the buildings lining the waterfront, reconstructing the undulating hum of the ship's engine in visual form.

It was then we realised he was missing.

Sitting along the deck, basking in the sun and this moment's fleeting freedom before orders would come. Strange men who seemed as part of a mythic tribe, as if this was all somehow routine to them. Were they locked into a silence anchoring its roots in the rehearsal of old practiced friendships, or was there an unspoken language at work here that only they knew?

The heat baked upon the flaked paint of the benches along the bow of the ship. We shifted our weight against it. At intervals large black domes rose from the wood paneled deck, offering no clue as to their purpose, behaving as sudden teenage boils.

None of us had seen him that morning. No one dared remember leaving his side the night before.

The metal of the ship felt misplaced and aggressive against the gentle blue of the sky, as if climbing into bed with a gun still holstered to its waist. From within its bowels a whistle suddenly shrieked piercing the air and jolting hundreds of men to their feet. I did the same as if I understood.

Interview with Designer of Washington Square Fountain

Q: Good morning. I'm sorry I didn't catch your name...

A: You checked Wikipedia?

Q: Yes.

A: If it's not there I'm not sure I exist do I?

Q: Good point.

(Sound of glasses clinking together)

Q: So let's get started. I understand that the fountain was constructed at some point in the mid 1800s. Is that correct?

A: Yes, 1852 I believe. And then again in 1872.

Q: What was the reason for that?

A: God knows.

Q: Wait, I think you're Frederick Law Olmstead.

A: Really? Jesus Christ, I did everything. How boring.

Q: So this would have come sometime between designing Central Park and Prospect Park then?

A: Oh, I guess so. Ah... let me get into character as Olmstead before committing to exact dates though. Ok, shoot.

Q: Wait, are you hungry? I'm hungry.

A: I'm not that hungry but I could eat.

Q: Do you like veggie sausages?

A: Ah, sure.

Q: Ok, gimme 10 minutes. You can keep talking.

(Sound of footsteps followed by sizzling of frying sausages)

A: Do you want to know my thoughts on the recent move?

(Interviewer's voice is distant but audible above the clatter and scrape of pans)

Q: Yeah, go on. Tragedy or what?

(Inaudible shrug)

A: I could care less to be honest with you. The thing changed once already. And the park was never there when I designed the thing.

Q: no?

A: I'm sorry?

Q: I said 'No'? You were saying...

A Yeah, the street ran north underneath the arch, the whole thing was different then.

Q: Really? That's interesting.

(Sound of footsteps becoming louder)

Q: Do you want ketchup?

A: Thanks. Oh, it's like a hotdog.

Q: Yeah but I don't have buns so I improvised and folded a slice of bread in half.

A: Ah gotcha, it works though.

Q: It's nice with mustard as well.

(Sound of spoon scraping bottom of near empty mustard jar)

Q: Is that enough?

A: Yes thanks. Delicious.

Death Ship*: Part 1

By night the streets of Limassol dissolved quickly to a haze of rich purples; tones of purple interrupted only every so often by the screams of street lamps, haloed in orange and pitching their light against the darkness like so many feathers thrown in violence against the wind.

The four of us walked unspeaking and in the morning one would be dead. A death to strangle whispers of friendship that had dared to raise their voice. And If we thought of anything at all that night, our thoughts must have been echoes of one another, each a question trailing behind our mirrored footsteps and falling silently to dissolve unaswered as snow upon forgotten fields. Why have they brought us here? Where will they take us?

Did we walk along a high street or waterfront? I don't remember. Yes, there were palm trees prostituting glimpses of the exotic and painting pools of darkness at their feet. Did this darkness hide unimagined dangers or do I dream that now, peering back through the haze of events? Do I add white dashes of eyes beneath the palm leaves as if retouching an ancient canvas? Were they there watching us then? Could any one of us have known the truth as the ship pulled away from the dock the next morning, roaring its horn against the waves like a injured animal and bidding Cyprus farewell.

*Working Title borrowed from B. Traven, to be returned safely once a more fitting and original title is found.

The Park (Homo Homini Lupus)

Wolf was a gifted writer. His best work, if you asked Wolf, was a story entitled 'The Park'. The story explored the sexual impulses of man. Wolf was puzzled by the sexual impulses of men under extreme conditions. The tragic paths of man led into many directions. But the sexual impulse was so essential to the survival of mankind, that it should persist under all conditions.
Otto Frank was trapped in a death camp with other men, separated from his wife, his children, doomed to die. For months, every day, out of nothing that death blow could come, and it was always expected. Completely delivered to the whimsical grace or vice of fellow men, who held the power to save or sentence him. Could under such bare and deprived circumstances possibly grow a homosexual tendency from such an unlikely feeling of intimacy for a rare friend?
On the other end there was a man like Willy Hitler, the ultimate opportunist. Willy was unrestrained in embracing life, not even held back by a fear for Adolf Hitler and his Nazi apparatus. While Otto Frank sat in hiding, while thousands fled Germany, Willy was attracted like a fly to shit by his opportunist instinct and attending tea dances in the Berlin of Kristallnacht.
Both men deranged, one by a cruel fate, one by his selfish nature, but in a way also both survivalists. One corrupted by the destructive effects of the death camps, the other corrupted by his own careless, loathsome lusts. But in the end, there was always still just a man.
They meet in the dark shadows of the night, where there is no good present, no wrong absent, but only a testimony to their self. Could in a perverted way, under bizarre extremes these men recognize in each other a common homosexual desire? It was an unlikely rendez-vous in the park between two radically different men, but Wolf envisioned a common need to be loved.
Like the rest of his stories, however, the story was never published, it was never send, remaining unpublished and virtuoso, while collecting dust on the shelves. Wolf was also not Wolf's real name. Actually, the man who named himself Wolf had never send any of his stories even to any publishers, agents or magazines. His stories, like 'The Park', were a great embarrassment to Wolf. He loved his stories, but because of unbearable shame, he did not even read them, once finished. Wold feared the psychological pit of the soul. Of course, the stories were fiction, so being only their author, Wolf could not be held accountable on their behalf. But he was never able to believe in this innocence of fiction behind the real fantasies of his writing.
His friends nevertheless urged him to publish, more convinced by his talent than the torn Wolf himself.
'Wolf,' they pressed him,'everything is thinkable, there is no guilt in the imaginary, angels in heaven worry committing brutal murder, in their cells virgins imagine luscious pleasures, atheists fear a god after life, the perversities of your stories express, if anything, exactly your moral sanity!'
But Wolf was not convinced. He wrote another story and placed it on top of the others, ashamed.

Interview with Dr. Spencer Wells

Q: Doctor, welcome. It's a pleasure and an honor to meet you. You became famous to the general public with your film The Journey of Man for the PBS about the dispersal of the human genome caused by the migration of early man out of Africa. Then next in your career you spearheaded the Genographic Project at National Geographic documenting the human family tree. How do you look back on that time early in your life?

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

S: The sins of youth! Yes. Well, these great projects not only defined me in the eyes of the public, they also created and offered enormous opportunities that have shaped me and the path of my career. I have a lot to be grateful for to my early work.

Q: But the tone of your early work stands in contrast to your more recent studies in the last fifteen years.

S: Yes. I think that a lot of my opinions, when I was younger, came forth out of the sensation of discovery. The study of anthropological genetics was a groundbreaking field of science at the time. Now, when I look back at those days from a position of knowledge and hind-sight, I can judge my youthful ideas with much clearer insight and balance.

Q: Could one say you were naive perhaps as a young researcher?

S: Don't get me wrong, the scientific facts still hold as strong today as they did then. The facts were very real, no doubt about that. But looking back, perhaps one could argue that I was motivated by a certain naivety. One has to be when one is making new discoveries, of course, because naivety is the prerogative of discovery.

Q: So how do you explain your transformation then?

S: Well, in my opinion, there is nothing strange about it, it's not a transformation but a development. My view on genetics now are only the superlative step of my research. My current ideas are not some random opinion without base or factual foundation, they are only the logical deduction of the facts of genetic reality.

Q: Your opponents however accuse you of supremest ideas! Your lecture last week was even interrupted by massive protests of students calling you fascist.

S: Yes, yes. Well, we're back to the sins of youth again, aren't we? But let me say this in response, now that I am at least allowed the opportunity to defend myself ... I hope.

Q: Ha, ha. Of course, go ahead.

S: How is it, that these same protesters where my biggest advocates when I called to preserve the habitat and cohesion of non-Western indigenous populations while my current supporters said that I was naive, as you call it, and now when I call for the preservation of, among other, western and especially white indigenous populations, the spectrum of opposition changes radically against me again and I become a fascist!? I have always been fascinated by people, by mankind, by each single individual as a unique being possessing a valuable genetic treasure. I reject any claim to a hierarchy of races, I oppose any moral judgment of race, as I reject a moral instead of a scientific judgment of my scientific work.

Q: But you plead for segregation, does that not imply or at least lead toward a hierarchy of races? Economic scarcity, after all, forces populations to impose such a hierarchy in order to justify a claim to those scarce resources and formulate thus an ethics advocating their own prerogative.

S: I am a scientist, not a politician or a theologian. My interest is the preservation of genetic diversity, to keep the gene pool as rich as possible, to guarantee the preservation of the human race. This is not simply an interest born out of personal whim. The health and the survival of mankind depend on this diversity, and this diversity can only be guaranteed by a segregated reproduction.

Q: So you plead for a segregation of reproduction, not a segregation of social life? But is not the only way to enforce this type of reproduction to institute also segregated societies?

S: Again, those are political questions or just speculations perhaps. I realize that my theory may lead sometimes to difficult social or political dilemmas to which we not always have immediate, practical answers. This has always been the tension between science and society, from the days of early science in Greece, to the days of Galileo and the Church. But these challenges cannot be solved by ignoring the scientific facts, and the scientific facts are the only obligation of the scientist.

Q: Finally, I want to thank you for this interview. I greatly appreciated your time today. Can we expect to hear more from you soon?

S: Well, it was my pleasure. This year, I start research for a new book about the psychology of genetics. As my research became more embedded in popular culture, helping to spread an awareness of our genetic identities, I often pondered about the psychological impact of my research, what effect it had on our self-perception. Now, I will finally have the opportunity to explore this in collaboration with some of the most renowned psychologists, and I am looking greatly forward to this.

Q: Well, thanks again doctor, and we look forward to your new research as well.

The Photograph over the River Seine

The Photograph had been taken mid way across the Point des Arts.

Steven had been in Paris for almost three months now and was getting absolutely nothing from the experience. He had met no-one and had immersed himself in none of the cultural activity that he intended to. What unnerved him most was the sense of being left behind, of having missed out. He struggled to reconcile the photos of Miller and Durrell, or of Artaud and Breton that had emblazoned his bedroom walls during his teenage years with the city he now saw built up around him. He had slipped into the dusty footprint of another era finding it to be oversized and outdated.

More importantly he had written nothing. He never had in fact. the closest he came to truly feeling like a 'writer' was when he stumbled upon a second hand copy of Saul Bellow's 'Dangling Man' in an English bookstore near the river. He had hurried there hoping for solidarity, hoping that it would be peopled with other disenfranchised 'would be' writers. Instead he had found himself amongst a handful of confident American students whose French was far more fluent than his. They had tossed books to one another loudly discussing their content in a way that made him feel that he had stumbled into a literary circus. He climbed the stairs to the top floor where he had been told writers, down on their luck can find a place to crash, to gather their thoughts. Here the show was more grotesque than downstairs. His heart beat at the back of his throat. Whether he was being led through the city by the ghost of failures past or future he couldn't tell.

On the Pont des Arts he paused to look out across the Seine. The light was just beginning to dim now, the tourist boats pulling away from Pont Neuf were now draped in fairy lights, so that they seemed as haloed shadows. Steven watched the boats turn and glide toward him. He realised that he would be able to look down between the gaps in the bridge's wooden planks, that the lights would flow beneath him.

Last week he had received a frenzied phone call from his Mother asking what he hoped to achieve in Paris, why he didn't have a job. He found that he focused on the the tone of her words more than the exact details of what was said. That afternoon, wanting to feel close to other people, he had walked along the river toward the Trocadero and two quite unexpected images had pierced him, bringing him to the edge of tears. As he moved between the groups of North African men selling miniature Eiffel tower statues, he saw a small girl, perhaps three years old, chasing a pigeon. At no point did she come close to catching it, but as she ran she screamed with delight. It was a silly thing to take notice of but it suddenly made everything seem so unreal. He looked at the people around him. He tried to imagine the girl at seventeen or eighteen years old, being asked to attend interviews, to justify her 'passions'. It terrified him. Later, a tourist bus passed him on the rue de New York and he saw the same look of delight on the faces of adults peering from the windows. He realized then that writing was his pigeon as much as Paris was theirs.

He could hear the muffled tones of the boat's tour guide as it approached his bridge. The kush of the engine as it splashed amongst the waves grew louder and drowned the guide's voice so that only odd words could be heard, bubbling to the surface here and there. He heard 'Ile de Saint Louis'. Along the length of the Ile, giant posters of eyes had been pasted. Eyes looking back to meet those of the tourist. Some of the eyes were peeling away but he couldn't say whether this was the result of bad weather or the hands of angry Parisians.

As the boat pulled beneath him he saw faces looking up excitedly. He made eye contact with a fat man in a red wind breaker and the man smiled. As he looked up and back out across the river he was aware of a camera flash exploding to his left. He turned and a middle aged women beamed at him, motioning with her hands that she spoke no French. She moved further along the bridge scouring the crowd with her finger poised and ready to shoot. With his pea coat, cigarette, and beret, Steven realised that he must have seemed to her the quintessential French man of letters - Gazing out into the night, awaiting a flood of inspiration to wash over him.

The End

All his life Arthuro had been an accountant. He had a few friends with whom he drank a port or two after work, every night, on office days. They met at the cafe on the corner in the Barrio Alto. At the cafe there was room for four small tables, each with two chairs, while outside stood a table for four under a lemon tree. But this did not matter, for Arthuro had no more than three friends. The friends joked that there was not another friend because he would not have fitted at the table, while they laughed at their common jest. In the weekend however, Arthuro stayed home, he told his friends that he was writing. On Monday evening his friends asked what it was he had been writing on over the weekend, but Arthuro never said more than his usual reply: ‘oh, nothing. What do you drink?’ to which his friends would reply: ‘Port Arthuro, as always,’ and no one remembered that they had asked about his writing.
One day Arthuro stopped visiting his friends at the cafe. The next day his friends heard he had died in his sleep two nights ago. When they attended the wake, Arthuro’s son showed them a thick packet of papers, a manuscript of more than five hundred pages.
‘Look, this is what my father has worked on all his life. I remember, he was writing on it when I was still a child. Did he ever talk about it to you?’
‘Well yes, of course. We knew he was writing every weekend, as he was not at the cafe. But he never said what it was about.’
‘Did you read it?’ the three friends asked, naturally curious of course.
‘Yes, yes, it’s a travel adventure about four men, each living in a different capital of a different continent of the world.’
‘One friend, Tomas, lives in New York City.’
Tomas nodded.
‘Another, Vasco, lives in Paris.’
Vasco frowned.
‘And a third, Antonio, lives in Hong Kong.’
Antonio said nothing.
‘The four are brothers who know nothing about each other's lives, but they are all looking for their unknown father, a sailor named Arthuro.’
‘How does it end?’ the friends simultaneously asked.
‘It doesn’t!’ the son replied.
‘The last hundred pages are not there. There should be another hundred pages because the story abruptly ends and skips to a final and empty page, numbered a hundred pages higher. I was hoping that you would know about it. Perhaps he gave the missing pages to someone to read.’ The son looked hopeful at the three men.
The friends sighed and shook their heads with regret.
After the wake the three men went to the cafe on the corner in the Barrio Alto, sat down at their regular spots, and ordered a port.

Found Object: Postcard fom Guildford

FRONT

A wash of acidic blue. A blue that makes you think of lemons. The white of the clouds - burnt to life or as if the paper has been slowly eaten away, the ink and card at war with one another.

The castle is small, boxlike and acne scarred. It stands proud but broken, its flag as one last cry against the wind. Young trees scale its walls and seem to laugh.

What is the thin fragile fence that hugs the hill beneath it? What does it protect against?

Three men frozen in time, their faces hidden. One looks down, another gazes at his watch, the third stands with his back toward us. How small they are. How easily they could be lost.

BACK

Dear Cindy

I don't know whether you got my last letter or not but I thought I'd better write just incase you didn't get it. You might notice by my address or if you heard from Stella I decided to go back in the army and it's really great this time. I'm in for Postal and Courier so I might be going to Germany after my basic training but that isn't for a while yet. In fact I'm wanting to go to Northern Ireland, I feel that I'm needed there. Well I'll finish now, I'll write a propper letter when I have time meanwhile I hope this will do.

Love

Lavinia

-------------



THE LONDON CHRONICLE

Vienna - Jan 19, 1899
Today being the thirtieth anniversary of the birth of the postcard, its inventor, Dr. Emanuel Hermann, Professor at the Vienna Technical Institute, has received congratulations from all parts of the world. Dr. Hermann's first article suggesting the introduction of the postcard appeared in the Neue Frele Presse of Jan 26, 1869., Six months later Austria adopted the proposal, and all the other States followed its example.

Landscape 1: Puppy Love

I gulped down the last bottom of my glass of strong black wine, the local Homeric variation of home brewed wine on the island, and payed the bill, three Euro. I imagined to put down three silver drachma pieces. Would it not be better to still pay in ancient coinage? It is a wishful make-believe that everyone shared. It was night, the constellations guided my way home. The sky, the air, the tree and the road, everything was covered in pitch darkness. But in heaven the stars shone brighter than I ever saw before. I searched for Big Dipper and recognized its handle, the straight cup shape in the sky. The black blanket of night was pierced with flickering holes, a full view of curious eyes that spy on us. I walked up the hill, crossed the bend in the road and passed the trash bins. My eye fell on a carton box and the speckled white puppy head peeking over the edge.

Sarcophaga (Flesh Eater)

Most flesh flies are respectable eaters of carrion, but some have fallen to a state of resorting to feces. The sarcophage of this specie of flies stands not at the end of its life, as we humans might believe to be the proper custom, but at its beginning. The cradle of the flesh fly is a piece of rotting flesh or dried excrement, such is the humble start of its toddlers. The larva are verocious, eating their way into or out of anything edible. The womb of their conception literally a crime scene in which these murderous creatures find a home. They are carriers of common illness for man. It can hardly be a surprise that the fates of man and flesh fly meet.