The Amateur Entomologist

There was once an old man whose hobby was collecting butterflies. He was an amateur entomologist. This was his one hobby in his retirement and the death and estrangement of his remaining relatives. The old man had a grey jacket and still had a thick shock of hair, and a thick pair of glasses.

To occupy his time he began to catch insects, and keep them in a jar for a while while he studied them, photographed and sketched them. He always followed scrupulously the advice in the entomology books on how to catch specimens, and was quite serious in his endeavours with his net. He had even, by closely following the advice in an entomologist's manual, fashioned a home-made device for sucking up small insects without damaging them, consisting of an old jar connected to a piece of flexbile hose.

He began to purchase at auction specimens of mounted insects that took his fancy, and his study soon became full of them. He particularly liked some of the more colourful butterflies, and he had several species framed on the walls. Being old and lonely, this soon became his one ruling passion, to which he dedicated an amount of time some might describe as excessive.

He discovered a strange symbiotic relationship between the insects and himself; when he captured one, he saw in its mute agitations and stirrings some obscure analogy to his own struggles in life, as though he had captured the essence of life, of youth, of happiness, as though in some obscure way this loathsome, minuscule thing was the repository of all that he had wanted and lost.

In sketching the tiny monsters, too, he could not help but feel a strange but deep admiration for their beauty, expressed in their perfect symmetry, and how their parts followed the same standard pattern with careful minor variations, all arranged compactly along a centre line, like a tiny immaculate machine. Even the tiniest fly or lowliest louse struck him like this. Even things found under rocks and in cracks impressed him with their blind persistence, their slow strivings, and he felt clearly that even in such small persistence of life there was something noble, something heroic.

His greatest joy when capturing live specimens, and the highlight of every day, came when the specimen must be released. His technique was to slowly creep up on say, a painted lady resting on a buddleia flower,  and gently but firmly force the net down over it, clutching the end. Back at his study he would trap the butterfly under a glass and put it for ten minutes or so in the fridge, as he had read to do in the entomology guides. The cold ceases the agitations of the butterfly and lulls it into insensibility, allowing it to be studied more easily, for cold to a butterfly is a signal to rest. Often he would take the glass and gaze at the butterfly trapped in it for long spaces of time, and imagine all the residues of negativity and bitterness he still felt flowing out of himself and into the insect, as though this thing alone could act as a repository for a lifetime of sorrows while it rested, and bear the load of all the man's hatred, bad thoughts, anger, and sorrow, absorbing it into its lovely compact symmetry, and remaining pristine, as though it were a tiny microchip onto which everything bad in his soul could be downloaded.

The old man always experienced thereafter a kind of small climax of triumph, a childish elation and joy, when he took the butterfly out to the garden and released it, watching it warm and stir, and finally take off to flutter erratically where it would, perhaps even swooping up over the rooftops in the mild afternoon, or be half-blown by a wind across the street and, for all he knew, to the other side of the world. He loved to watch them soar upwards after such a dull captivity.

When the old man died and his few remaining relatives, obscure nephews and cousins, came to take stock of his belongings, they noticed a curious phenomenon occurring in the garden. It was late September, but the garden was full of butterflies, some erratically taking wing, as though confused, others resting gracefully on buddleia flowers, all of them seemingly engaged in some mysterious conference, as though they had chosen this day to gather together and celebrate their freedom and life. In their flutterings and dancing there was now expressed a new meaning, it seemed, as though the ballet of their swoopings, their feints and counter-feints, was a tribute to the man's departed soul. In the westering sun, the colours on the wings of  the red admirals, painted ladies, monarchs and peacocks were muted and soft, for the birds had already begun to sing. It was as though the specimen collection in the old man's study had at the last escaped from their frames and smashed their glass, and flowed out into the garden beyond , finally free.

"The Museum of Child Murderers"

It is Halloween and I am visiting "the Museum of Child Murderers", which seems to be a house much like the one I live in. A small boy dressed up as Shrek walks before me, I suppose he is trick or treating. He has an all-over green bodysuit, which looks in fact like the Hulk, and a Shrek mask which covers his whole face. He goes across the threshold and into the dark corridor inside, disappearing into the depths of the building without a word.

The Museum of Child Murderers is not dedicated to murderers of children, but to children who have been convicted of murder, usually of other children or by starting fires.

But it also houses these children themselves, who have arrived in dormitory rooms, like hotel rooms, off to the side. I go in to check on them, after all they're only kids, but in spite of myself I find that I become very creeped out by them.

Some of them are very silent and withdrawn, and simply stare at me unsmiling when I check up on them. In one room filled with single beds like a makeshift hotel room is a family of two boys and a girl who have been convicted of murder. They seem like fairly normal kids, and I seem to have interrupted some game. When I enter the room, they pause to watch me and stifle their laughter. One of the boys grins at me, a mischevious gleam in his eye. The girl is standing up on the bed beside the curtained window. They know I am scared of them, and pretending not to be. I don't know the specific crime of each child but I know that one set a fire which consumed a building and led to deaths, and another group lured a little girl to an abandoned factory and crudely garroted her with wire.

In one room at the back there is a group of two or three children who seem to be dressed in Victorian or Edwardian garb. Before I walk in I can hear them chattering excitedly to each other in what sounds like German, but when I walk in they grow hushed and whisper among themselves, stealing knowing glances at me. A new and irrational idea begins to worry me; What if some of these children are not just convicted child murderers but the spirits of murdered children which have somehow been revived?

The main exhibits of the museum are in the murky, shadowy main corridor. These consist of large blown-up photographs of children who appear to wearing crude Halloween costumes and facepaint. The costumes and make-up look cheap and shoddy, and the photographs of unsmiling children are black and white and haphazardly arranged. One little girl is supposed to be a "witch", but her costume is just a black shapeless shawl and her face is smeared with dark paint, and she looks unhappily out of the photograph. I notice with unease that among the pictures on the wall is a picture of myself as a child, looking scared.

More yours than his own

"Anyway I'm meant to be grateful, open, loving to you, and am, all these things and more. But I have doubts and hesitations, not extending back into the past but only to the here and now. Since I've given you everything, every ridiculous, stupid hope and dream, left them to shatter, to be ignored or cherished by you, to be left or taken up as you see fit. I was thinking of before I met you, how I was just the same yet different. I was thinking of what you mean to me and I saw and understood how deep it was, how light, diffident, constructive, and full, all at the same time. Nothing could ever be inappropriate between us. Everything I offer you is appropriate, will be and has been.

How right the Buddha was when he said that desire leads to suffering. But I don't care, I'll take all the desire and all the suffering, if that's what it takes.

I don't know about anyone else, or about the future. I only know about me, and about right now. And I know what I want. I know that much.

More yours than his own, etc,

m".

Teeth

When brushing the teeth care must be taken, a certain agility even is desired. When you have a small mouth like mine gotta make sure the lower teeth are diligently de-plaqued. Take five minutes.
Imagine the dental cement if it corroded & crumbled away, or the fillings, sparkling like black diamonds, came loose. No, the cement is tough. When people get immolated in a housefire they get identified by their fillings, them being the only things that survive.
All of the dentists are private and there is anyway a serious lack of them. Alternatives to fillings; rubber, transparent glass, ice.
I had a filling drop out of a back tooth, put there by an incompetent dentist. A nugget of metallic black. Eventually when the dentists get bad enough, or are just replaced by 3rd year students, your teeth will erode through vigorous brushing. Flesh and blood and sharp shards of enamel, a crumbling filling. Get new prosthetic cyberteeth top right. All hollow.
Soap opera actress/model in a magainze: "I have loads of dreams about my teeth falling out. I've been told that means I'm anxious".
Freud interpreted it as a sign of sexual frustration.
Connotations: anxiety, sickness. Moral and physical and structural decay. Angst in bathrooms, slavering.

Old Viz's

In the bathroom lookin through old Viz's, I recall that humour industry that sprang up then. Viz was successful in its market share & therefore inspired a number of shoddy imitators.
And in the old  Viz's, printed on cheap paper, one can see the many strange subterranean cottage industries that were able to exist in its shadow, in the form of the ads for obscene or satiric T-shirts or cards or rubber stamps or inflatable sheep. All of it aimed at the lowest common denominator of Viz reader, vaguely thought of as someone young, sarcastic, a bit cynical. Targeted for the toilet humour sub-market. Nostalgia for anything...
When you leave a magazine for fifteen or twenty years and then look at it again you get a not-unpleasant sense of the futility of life, and you can examine the small ads with a clarity afforded by hindsight. As always, with the small, exploitative ads selling tat, you get a much more valuable insight into the period than with the big-money ads. The ads in old Viz's are not funny, but they belong to an old satiric tradition. This is why popular culture is always immensely more revealing than official culture.
K. is showing me the mildewing old Viz's with the enthusiasm of a recent convert. She always adopts a craze, usually too late, for rap or Marvel comicbooks or the Pixies, or Hong Kong cinema, say, and then leaves token examples of it around her room for visitors to see. Whether she appreciates the stuff in itself is debatable.

Christian Girl

Christian girl is in bed, feigning sickness. In our domestic set-up, our suburban bedroom we share.

She claims to be not a born-again. "I just call myself a Christian". But this is to obfuscate: She is one.

One of the sincere, intelligent Christian teens. Intelligent in a limited way of course. A trendy Christian, unrelated to the old born-again stereotype. The youth movement now is immensely sophisticated and doesn't hesitate to stoop to depths of psychological warfare for recruitment purposes. Someone very clever is behind it. The shadowy hand of a United States-ian.

They have usurped popular genres of music and fashion and Christianized them ruthlessly. Some Christian public relations expert figured out that the thing to do to get the kids signing up was to copy MTV. Thus a particularly nefarious and insidious branch of the evangelical movement is born. They got their own channels & music videos at times indistinguishable graphically & sonically from the merely moneymaking mainstream. They have mass rallies for youth which are then televised, where individuals give speeches more like one a them motivational speakers than an old-fashioned preacher. Like that geezer what sells his CDs DVDs Affirmations for Personal Success and Enrichment in long advertorials, sharp-cheekboned, sharp-suited, perfectly white teeth grinning in a photograph. Obviously pumped up on steroids.
Part of that network of evangelical Christianity and freemarket capitalism which edges ever closer to a semblance of fascism, a fascism with perfect teeth. That has crept all over the rich and jaded west, brainwashing millions of disappointed teens, kids with a spiritual hole in their lives fed up with hedonism, falling prey to the over-simplifications of a predatory Christianity, a Christianity aggressive, base, and greedy, no relation the simple faith of our forefathers.

But Christian girl is a blasé little thing who unfortunately has fallen victim to propaganda. Duvet pulled up to her chin and smiling slightly. She hails from Belfast but is part of a latter-day generation that has seen little of the Troubles. An apolitical and non-sectarian generation. What used to be called in America Scots-Irish. Her daddy is some sort of minister. Very clean-cut air and a pixie-ish face, conventional shoulder-length light brown hair.

School Part One

The school was a long low building, a corridor with classrooms to the side. On my first day it seemed enormous to me. The large windows, the steel frames, the grey panels. 

At the front there was a cloakroom, with coat pegs in it. There must have been benches in there, to sit on. 

The boy's toilets were on the left, a large room with frosted windows along the top. The metal troughs to pee in.

At the furthest end of the corridor, on the right, was primary one. As you went further up the corridor you advanced in age, and primary seven was at the top. 

At the back of the school there was a slight hill which led to a large playing field. There were two sets of stone stairs set into this dip in the land. The back of the school was the windows of the classrooms, with the odd door, and some bushes growing. 

On my first day all this seemed to me enormous and alien. It was more perplexing than frightening. The windows seemed to me to be enormous, like the windows in a cathedral. On that first day I saw a boy have a nosebleed. I saw him throw himself down the grassy hill. It all seemed inexplicable. 

In Primary one, the plastic chairs. The plastic blocks that we would play with. 

At the end of the corridor were the teacher's offices and a sort of small entrance foyer. 

The school was bordered at the front by a fence with a gate, and a row of tall trees. There was also an expanse of grass to the right, at the limit of which there was a slight rise bordered by a rickety fence. This formed the limit of the school, beyond which it was forbidden to go. If you went beyond that, to fight with the boys from the other school, you would be given the belt. 

At the furthest limit of the playing fields was another fence, behind which was a derelict house. This house had an evil reputation and was said to be haunted. 

If you walked to the very end of the playing field you came to some long grass, and beyond it, the woods. Behind the school was a patch of woodland, a lesser part of the wider woods. 

In this little world we spent our days. 

We owe a cock to Asclepius

We owe a cock to Asclepius

We who have renounced this life, 

Therefore on the morrow rising

Do not neglect the sacrifice, 

But dispatch the victim swiftly,

Brandishing the silver knife.

We owe a cock to Asclepius,

We who have renounced this life. 

A serpent on his staff entwining, 

The god demands the price.                            

So that the soul when pining,

May be delivered twice;

First to Hades' shady halls,

And thence to paradise. 

We owe a cock to Asclepius,

We who have renounced this life. 

A report of a gig

We went down into the basement. The band was playing downstairs. The support band was on first. They were some local band. We went into the bare room and hung shyly back. He said into the microphone, "You... can come closer". The slight awkwardness.
I thought it was unbelievably loud. The guy in the band on stage was long and hippyish. They did a cover of "She Don't Use Jelly". I went to the toilet, a tiny closet of a room under the stairs.

I wasn't wearing my glasses. The American band was on stage now. The room was full of bodies. People sitting down near the stage. The clear smell of cannabis from their ranks. The darkness.

The band came on and did their set. It sounded like their records. The singer: An American in leather.

The lights came up and there was some kerfuffle. I didn't have my glasses. It transpired that someone had stolen an effects pedal from the stage. Someone had taken advantage of the darkness.

There was much hubbub and waiting. The venue manager got up on the stage, very irate. A blur of a balding, sweaty man. No-one was allowed out until the wah-wah pedal was returned. Someone in the audience shouted at him. He shouted back, "No you shut up ya radge!". The band waited, nonplussed and brooding.

The pedal was sheepishly returned. We filtered out into the night. I had gone almost deaf, my hearing was drastically muffled, as always happened for a day or two after these punk gigs. They were always too loud.

And it feels almost like a subterranean highlight

And it feels almost like a subterranean highlight, grimy gret toothed old patchy walls all concrete and haunted and no wonder if whatever band backstage, the singer thereof, or more likely geetar player, finds himself most lonely at that point, knuckles cold and fingers raspy and ready just prior to onstage. Haunted is the true name of this stage, this gloom onstage illuminated only by these spectral lights that loom large upfront to fright the eager night. A little doomy club or, nameless word, venue, ripped-off and secret walls, needless hangings, doesn't matter, terrible topfront lights, perhaps seedy memories of sweat dripped on the caverny floor. Echoing loves of spirit up from the lusty ground.
Here is the heart of secretiveness in the heart of that anguished sound, guitar riff, combined with the blind hysteric numb of the dark and the throb thru the feet of the waiting patrons healthy to be crushed, in their hearts a tremulous, approaching love, awed under artifices of star, all the more awed for the artifice, all the more ready for joy, death to leak out in the sparkling night 'r under the subterfuge drink of sweat and fights that turn and twist in the moulting pit, perhaps some shirtless white trash saint, like a ghost, 'll stagedive or splitting thirsty for angst and sweat, make supplications on the creaking floor. The girls down there all clothed and gloomy'll surge scattered and treading with the upsurge of the crowd, hearts awakening, moving onwards, nonplussed in the momentous void. Hear that just then that cry, that rasp of sigh, that delicious escape of shriek that held a dark unlawful promise of condensation and glorious sin among an animal limb?Collectively drawn like grimoire puppets, delicately driven under an awful wing, of music slowly becoming death.

From "Palestine" No.1

Their feet stumbled down snowy slopes, and crested little knolls and hills. Now and again one of them spat, making a little dent in the snow that tufts of grass also pushed through. They were coming closer to the most built-up area of the neighbourhood, and as they once more gained the grey main road the buildings began to loom up ominously around them. They were dark-windowed and grey, marked sootily from years of traffic fumes and only washed by rain. On either side these hulking tower-blocks stood, many of them disused and vacant. Here and there were boarded-up windows and gaping doors. But there were also, as they progressed, windows lit by cheering yellow light and sometimes mysterious twinklings of red light in attic rooms. The architecture of most of the buildings was sparse and industrial, as if they were nameless factories, office-blocks, high rises. As their feet crunched through snow M and Robert grew used to craning their necks to see far above them. Now they began to see tenements and brownstones, run-down and shut-up. In this part of the city most of the buildings seemed to be great dark granite office-blocks, that at night became giant monoliths of silence, and that looked down, as if despairingly, on M and Robert wandering below. Further away, against the horizon, they could see the great sleek skyscrapers of steel and glass.

M knew that they were traversing the perimeters of the Chicago suburb called Palatine, nicknamed Palestine. This was a fairly bland and unobtrusive little town, an outgrowth of the great lakeside conurbation of Chicago. M liked the place, the quietness of it, and often came here to drink, and sometimes just to think. He always called the place Palestine, and for him the name had a cheery feel, biblical, almost Christmasy. Just like the great familial mass of suburbia that lay beyond the place where the towering high rises began. Pacific blandness of the mid-west, that great land holding its Illinois like a vast plain of sleep. From the dull roofs of the suburbs, you could transgress the limits of the great city at night itself, with all its dark towers and endless secrets sleeping by the lake. 

Tree Studies

A Flowering Cactus, drawn in 2015

Poem of April 2016

What of your loves, your errant loves,
When men have loved before you?
They have already traveled that weary path,
They have already written that story.
What does it mean if there was a park
Where you glanced at her, and she glanced back,
At the back of the trees, in the gathering dark?
What of your loves when a man long dead
In an old photograph, turning his head,
Loved as you loved, a sturdy wife
That once was young and full of life?
Was there not some summer when they wrote stories
In love letters, and stopped to smell roses,
Is it not possible that pair knew
Something pure, something true?
Faded glory, the stockbroker's bride
In an old photograph, turning aside,
You can look up the dates when they lived and died.
Marrying a widow in an Anglican church,
With nosegays and posies and perfumes and such,
And a new inkwell and a Sunday hat,
What does it matter, all that?
My grandmother's fox stole,
My grandad's straw boater,
For the sad milkman
And the minister's daughter.
And they taught them to write in copperplate
And hesitate slightly at the gate,
With an opera air, and a popular song,
Battling for glory now gone.
What kind of eye did they look from but mine,
Our forebears in time?
And what makes us live, what makes us divine,
They must've been shown a similar sign,
They must've been able to read the lines
That we can read, and be resigned?
It has all been done a million times.

For they did nothing thoughtlessly!
It was for them as it is for me.

"Idiot bard! I wrote this poem,
He wrote it too, that predeceased us,
This is his kingdom and his realm
That he has leased us,
I am the first and everlasting man
That ever speaks thus".

Pharaoh's Death Bark

Pharaoh's Death-Bark was coloured green,
Of the hue most often seen
In corn before its ripening;
White-robed priests in straining team
Had launched it on the sacred stream,
With incense for an offering.
Pharaoh's cedar cask had come
From the heights of Lebanon,
Inlaid with gold and silver spun,
With lapis and carnelian.
To the Chamber of Double Truth;
Where the scribes await the proof
Of his heart's undying youth.
Thoth, the god that keeps the case,
And black Anubis, jackal-faced,
Calmly wait the appointed place.
Where it will be reckoned whether
His heart, when weighed against a feather,
Will prove the lighter or the heavier.
Lightness of heart betokens one
To be transfigured in the sun,
A purer kingdom thereby won,
An Eden and Elysium;
A field of reeds, another Nile,
That flows eternally, undefiled.

Poem of Feb 8th

Near the grey burn in spate, 

Hangs the solemn cell. 

Hard by the abbey's gate,

And under its spell,

Prison of crumbing stone

That covered well

He who was born great,

Therein to dwell.

Seven hundred years hence

Under the crumbling hill,

Will the old tales make sense

And will the sign still

Make its significance

Or be upset quite,

By the magnificence

Of that serene light. 

Seven hundred years have passed,

Under the rainy slope,

And the meanings hold fast,

Never quite losing hope. 

Would we were Gods not men,

Then we could see

The heroes that lived then,

Wiser than we. 

What for the Sibyl is the word

What for the Sibyl is the word,

And what the form of address

That can most keenly glean from her

The mysteries of success?

What prophet or poet can read the runes,

And what seer can translate? 

Who holds the key to the hidden room,

And who knows the forms

That the Gods will take? 

We who are mortals cannot know, 

What journey's end awaits.

We are the puppets of the Gods,

the playthings of the Fates.

Either to sweet Elysian fields,

Or down to Hades' gates.