1. Act: Pleading for Asylum

1. On the Union Blooms. 4
2. Attwater to Winderby I. 6
3. The Housing Estate at Dawn 8
4.Attwater to Winderby II 10
5. Two in the Housing Zone 15
6. Attwater to Winderby III 18
7. The Arrest 24
8.Attwater to Winderby IV 30

2. Chapter: The Storytellers

9. Winderby Haunts the Ashmolean Museum 36
10. The Perils of Tracy
1.The first reality: fixed ratio 38
2. The Second Reality. Continuous Ratio 41
3.The Third Reality :Fixed interval 42
4. The Fourth Reality Variable Ratio 44
5.The 5th Reality: Open Reinforcement: the desire for flight 47
11.Winderby Alone 49
12. The Evasion of the Penalties 55
1.The Evasion of the First Penalty55
2.The Evasion of the Second penalty57
3.Evasion of the Third Penalty 58
4.Evasion of the Fourth Penalty60
5.Evasion of the Fifth Penalty 61
13. Verdict on the Five Physical Penalty Evasions 62
14. Journal, First Entry 64

3.Dance:The Wanderer and The Furnace

15. The Athanor Home Manual 68
16. The Wanderings of Winderby I 69
17. A General Example, 73
18.The Wanderings of Winderby II 76
19.Supporting Document 77
20. The Wanderings of Winderby III 80
21 Police Notice of Disinstallation:84
22. The Wanderings of Winderby IV 85
23. Drawing the Love Lottery 89
24. The Wanderings of Winderby V 90
25. Attachments 94
26. The Wanderings of Winderby VI 95

4. File: Winderby Confounded

27. From Winderby’s Finite Journal 102
28. A Brief History of the Kythera Island 103
1.From The Cycladic Turtle-Shells.103
2.Appendix to Early Greek Shards Of Cycladic Two, A Monograph.103
3. Letters of Legal Dispatch, Containing an Account of the Extinction of the Aselph 104
Georgetown, May 10th 1760105
Georgetown May 11th 1760105
Georgetown, Kythera May 13tth 106
Georgetown, Kythera March 1800106
4. Summary Notes for Overseas Officers107
29.The Palace at 1.61 am 109
30,.The Further Wanderings of Winderby I 12
31. On the Design of the Adversary 118
32.From “The Windows 123
33. The Triumph of Opacity 126
34,. Message to the to the Cythera Ferry Master 130


5.Movement: The Birth of Flight

35..On Authority and Sameness 136
36. The Further Wanderings II 139
37. Second Appeal 143
38.On Futility and Omnipotence 144
39 From the Sempiternal Correspondance to Attwater 147
40. Request for PR Services from Hierophant et Cie 149
41. The Further Wanderings of Winderby III 150
42. Hand-Carried: 153


6. Picture: Winderby Pulls It Off

43.Three Non spatial Studies in Specificity 156
1.Winderby on Epic Consciousness and the Survival of Europe 156
2.Winderby on Deserts 156
3.Winderby On Heathlands 156
44. The Ultimate Determination of the Enemy,157
45 .What Norman Did in Greece.164
46 Timed Exercises in Self-Immolation, 167
47. Dispatch From Cythera, Concerning
the Disappearance of Frederick Attwater , 169
48.Notes On the Twofold Origins of the Self, 171
49. Deeds of Redemption 173
1.Ext. A Housing Estate. Day173
2. Ext. The Housing Estate. Evening 179
3.Int. The City. The Stairway of the House. Night 179
50.Fade-Negative: a paradigm 181
51. Epilogue to his Intended Muse 183 


1. Act: Pleading for Asylum

1. On the Union Blooms

The scene is set on East Street, Washington.
A thirty -year old woman in a long, grey
coat with a curled mass of black hair,
yet austerely made-up ,reads through a letter
she takes out of her bag:

“Two years ago, I wrote to condemn your boys
for hiding the mass graves of state, household flora.
Through my field-glasses, I notice the rebirth.
of the jumbo cheeseplants, plastic with fear.
As I yet I see no vale-plucked marigolds.
You know I saw the landing and H.G.Wells
was with me and I know it was
you sent the woman to spray me, as I
made my way to testify. You’re out
to make my life a fugitive’s.
So what am I
to make of your concern for peace?
I fear it’s no more sincere than
the night-disposal of geranium corpses.
The CIA has used hypnosis, deep suggestion
and clue -phrases on my dog, Warlock.
I attach excerpt, Amended Complaint,
pending in Federal Court that issued
all because I pulled a spike transmitter
from the fixture in my motel.
I know switches of themselves do not stare.
I saw the beam of light
and figures dancing in the New York Library
back alleyway. I heard the Aliens descend.
We’re born to wake and to remember!
I visited my mother's grave, hit by the same lightning.
You’ll find it there by the White House,
with that clinker and crap, what’s left of her house,
still smoking from Their plasma-fire.
I know now since your Marvel cultists came for me
in the crisis women’s centre which I enraged,
because I placed a clampshell on my doorknob
in that haven where rooms are left unlocked
and made them pound and scream at the doorway
from midnight until two o’clock a.m. and push
a paper under the jamb with cult figures
hidden in the numbers of the telephone
to demand I open and remove my lock.

I notice you use too many transitive verbs
in your speeches. You have a mania
for the complex familiar.
Excuse this personal approach,
but the damage to your brain is evident.
This makes you qualify for therapy,
full pardon and forgiveness, given
your tendered resignation and departure,
if not I will depart from the JFK Worldport
three hours after this letter is received.
you won’t know where I’ve gone
as love was born there and might still be found.
Leave the world to gentle peacemakers and to me.”

She closes her eyes and replaces the letter
in its envelope and, as if blind,
puts the letter into a post box and then runs
for the Union Station bus.

2. Attwater to Winderby 1

External shot; pathway leading
to Earmley Station. Attwater’s eyes
painted on his eyelids. Back projection still
of Winderby black and white
in 1950’s pin-stripe suit, listening.

Here in the peace of this English lane,
I have come to meet you, Winderby.
This will be my last case as Ontological
Investigator for the Secret Office.
Though you are dead, we share memories.
Emerging from Empire tetany,
we were born in some
Spencerham, or Jowettstead
from the Romantic position
that conceived us, to be moved
on to disinvested modernity
in Beveridgeworth or Bowlbyham.
We recollect hard streets,
cold playgrounds and waterless houses.
You to exorcize them: I to escape them.
Failure is endemic to your group
too frail for the village, too low for the manor.
The symptoms? An Oxford Second
and British Council wanderings,
the chatter of billiards from Gezira Island,
or the tap of a Player’s Navy Cut
on the plated tin-top in your case.
My symptoms? The rumble
of slow rusted coal-trucks
to steel works, a Trade Union card
and party membership with the
jargon of simple, unmet needs
that died with their poor.
Forgive me if I speak to you
as if you were blind, or stupid,
but the ESP team have let us down.
I find I have no words to say to the dead.
Yet since you proved Fermat’s Last Theorem
in the margin of your tedious Northcote,
all codes are now in theory broken and
we have kept you with us since.

Greet Sophie Germaine, Ernst Kummer,
Pythagoras, Diophantus, Gersonides,
the man himself and many others.
It sounds absurd, but are they
keeping well, and the Bernouille boys too,
abstracted with their famous abstractions?
Your dead memories are useful to us,
as you have complete simplicity
and our enemies cannot believe in you.

I have a problem I cannot solve.
Now that our culture is commoditised,
a run on it could empty the vaults
of Johnson and Arnold’s legacy-debt.
Let me put it in terms you’d grasp.

Assume the precise, implicit acts of decent,
averagely-sensuous people,
too long at war to calculate their loss
in sweetness-and-light-coupons,
before Classic ice re-froze the Keynesian levels
to fix less familial occupations.

Assume we wander now in Ricardan,
poisoned fields, with the Church, Crown Lands
and the Duke of Westminster’s stubborn rents,
too self-obsessed to redistribute wealth.
And labourers absorbed in leisure-centres.

Yet for the Durkheim folk,
equilibrium has become less stable
for prices, which gives the young
a culture of blind groping.

They barter everything except pleasure’s fiat,
for in the market-place, pleasure
is used as the exchange-medium.

Once love was the good
and pleasure the price;
now love is the price.
as a medium of exchange.
Now to love is to make clear examples
of our deities, to re-coin their images
and the young present themselves.

Excuse me, a plane is going overhead,
the Pan-Am Clipper New York Airbus,
if I’m not mistaken, I cannot hear myself…

Empty sky. Long-shot: swipe: aeroplane -left to right.
Winderby sees the descent of electrical paraphernalia
ejected from the Airbus toilet, the yield of a disbanded
set of headphones suspected of being bugged.

3. The Housing Estate at Dawn: Map-Grid A

Camera immobile

-slow motion.

Thin sunlight underlines
the tarmac footpaths,
the red, tessellated brick,
the oblong lawns
and picture windows.
Sunlight primly frames
the glowing Volvo
and the oil-stained driveway.
In the front garden
a feral pigeon picks
out dead seeds from dried offal
with a gnarled red beak.

Next door, with only a minor
variation of the prim sunlight,
the tarmac driveway,
the red, tessellated brick,
the oblong lawns
the Volvo-glow, picture windows
and the feral pigeon, picking
out dead seeds from dried offal.
with a gnarled red beak,
are underlined.
Next door, being the corner,
the tarmac driveway, the oblong lawns,
the picture windows
are being a metre wider.

While the sunlight is underlining
primly, a larger glowy Volvo,
which is standing
on an oil-stained driveway,
while a feral pigeon
that was picking out dead seeds
is lying dead, feather-strewn
by a passing cat.

Soon it is raining
on the housing estate,
driving home a senile,
muttering man.
Every drop of water
can be averaged to the same
description,
with added vectors to allow
for the convergence
of pigeon and dead seed,
or running senior,
dead pigeon and cat.

The house is still,
each buff tile straight.
The copper services are taut,
wiring clipped to painted
timber, deal in this case.
The staircase is
painted pine: the floors
are varnished glass.
A map-grid-
Negative-fade.

4. Attwater to Winderby 2
(As Scene 2)
Are you still with me?
I needed to shelter from
the rain it is your comfort
and your pain not to feel.
Even now, Cedric,
an Arch-couple,
the perfect consumers,
might live in some
new town or city centre,
or a Wates estate
who have been reached
by our enemies,
striking at their
weak rationality,
their class-ridden guilt
and upwardly mobile
cultural enervation.
They could be the average
we held could never be.
They are the audience.
our enemies could already
be moving in on with their machine
to make abstractions of us.
A team of dreamers lined up yet again
to rob us of participation
in the city of making.
Winderby, you are the only abstract entity
on our books I’m still in touch with.
Suppose such villains exist:
here are some identities;
this one has a shaven pate,
tobacco eyes, sometimes a moustache
which covers an ironic
mouth, a quizzical nose
but a fastidious, dimpled chin.
He could be a ring leader.
They dress respectably
black glossy patelots
brown trousers, patent leather shoes
according to Inspector Gautier,
a fastidious bishop,
according to Sergeant Mendès.
His accomplices are less well known.
One looks like a wino
in ecstasy, with an ugly, brutal face
and a wide hammer forehead,
long hands, feverish eyes.
He has another in tow
boy-like, fair haired with a snub-nose.
Behind them, obviously a courier
is a school teacher,
a bearded little man
who wears black, tries
to look like a captain
and has short-cropped hair,
but photographs respectable.
And then there’s the woman,
an actress, maybe a secretary,
with black curls,
barefoot children
and the unaccountable sadness
of skilled illusion.

Suppose they exist, then these
are arch-conspirators.
They are sincerely dangerous,
as they exist only on the page.

The forces of nonsense
grip the same handful
of genotypic earth, out of the inheritance
of Eighteenth century houses
under the rain, Victorian, or Empire
pattern- books, pine-boards,
bare as human skin
and cumbrous blue textiles,
close sulphurous brick,
as in your demolished demesne
In my case ,Yorkshire
back to-back-terraces freed from the fear
of transportation, or failed benefit of clergy.

The Anthropoets claim to pay for what they own,
in the short-term, but cannot find a voice for
their deepest dreams, like spiteful children
they remain uninterpreted
to keep their reservoirs bounded.
The Pastoral obsession leads me
to suppose they work
from somewhere like Cythera
where they manage a leisure
and inferiority complex.
The danger always comes from fused rhetoric,
glued to the brain-dead word.
The nine Muse-elements
should be kept from one another,
like warring peoples, combine them
and you allow the Supervenient
Machine to work on each.
Each era, a muse has been expressed,
then never heard again:
epic from the heroic age,
a war insured by the forfeit of Iphigenia
and redeemed by the guarantee of Polyxena.
Mediaeval hymns repaid the guarantee
for her in the Jephthaic mode,
of lamenting pastoral.
The lyric from the Provençal,
de-commissions the hymn to the pursuit
of preyed-on love in Callisto,
who wants justice from
Renaissance tragedy
that is Procris wronged.
Comedy from the Enlightenment,
Penthesilea upstaged
by the mirth of Thersites,
Voltaire and De Sade.
Music stolen after the Romantics,
through abducted Antiope.
Hippolyte had history stolen
as a trophy by Modernist lore
to be filed away in secrecy.
The enemy has sacrificed
every voice of poetry
to abstract fear,
save the stars, dance and silence.
Whatever these body-objects are;
only dance and the stars are still active
for our coming generation.
Somewhere they are still with us.
To rule the age, the enemy,
perhaps unknown to themselves,
must steal our silence,
as it is the last reserve of the poets ,
leaving culture to a last dance
in the ruin of the universe.
and you, senseless and disembodied,
have been asked to prevent them obtaining it.
If you render us this service
we promise our help in the
matter of your excommunication
for Modernism, that old thorn.
I am not just an old man,
talking to his shadow.
I am a power, Winderby
and I can free you from my mind.
Extra close-up

5. Two in the Housing Zone

Shot through mirror-window
from double room.

In the bedroom
a man and woman lie
on cobalt-blue sheets,
by a fallen duvet:
while…
(close-up)
….outside is the faint
muttering of an elderly voice.
Close up, head.

He, straightup,
a lad of peerless mead,
the fiftieth percentile.
Norman Scofield Cley.
His eyes dark, fundi normal
height sixteen sixty metres,
his soft abstracted air
raised to a cervical height
of fifteen hundred
and fifty metres.
Eighth-descendent of
Drummer Hodge,
his figure, spare,
shoulder height
fourteen forty-five,
his chest depth
two hundred and fifty
millimeters, a ploughman’s
rack of ribs.
Build tends to mesomorph,
visceral: Scholar Gypsy to
Shropshire Lad range,
and loathed melancholic,
of love, not much to show,
save the good minute.

Camera; vertical access.

She, Tracy Bulah Cley,
amber-dropping, rosy-headed,
blushful. with thigh-clearance
one hundred and forty
millimeters. Ninth great descendent
of Aurora Leigh. Sitting-eye height,
so soft. so calm,
yet eloquent.
Her elbow-rest height,
the pure snow,
equals her elbow-eye
vertical distance
with goodly vermill stayne
where a youthful hue sits
on her skin like morning dew.
her standing vertical reach
should she rise and heave
her rosie head is
a perfect average.
Head depth, with a pearly bite,
and hair, Celia-yellow, like ripe corn
under the thick-moted sunbeam
is equally an exact average.
The blazon of sweet beauty’s best.
of hand-breadth, eighty,
foot-length, two four five,
of lip, vermeil, of eye, lustrous.
of brow, with neck and breasts,
bright apples to be seen,
all again a perfect average.
Build tends to Corinna ectomorph.
Her type is cerebral:
Blessed Damozel to Mariana range.
Temperament, lethargic,
personality, cherubic contemplation.
(hand held shot)
Both wake to sleepwalk through a mirror
into studio desert.

6. Attwater to Winderby 3

Camera as scene 2

Yes, I hear the cat
clawing the pigeon too,
but I think there could also be
more than a mere
hedge-sparrow or a vole
distracting the quiet warmth
of our summer evening.
You think I underestimate?
That furtive rustling within the hawthorns
reminds me others are watchful.
Once I could have been sure
of your own opinion
in that upward glance of yours,
but disembodied now,
I see no gesture, no glances.
This is why you’ve survived extinction.
None can spy on an invisible man,
save the madman , who thinks he sees you,
or the Lord, who sees you think.
The enemy is abstraction,
a resource that feeds the masses.
There will always be those
willing to obey, to be thralled by
peddlers of fixity.
That each situation
should hold in strict order.
That each entity has
a perfect existence;
a tight interlocking
that requires an exact
accident to allow
for change. Each crack, each loss
holds an absolute space
made for it, shaped out
in advance by senseless
master-calculators.
Each fall has an absolute cadence
made for it, determined
in advance by a Supreme Calculation,
a dice throw that prints all the chances.
God's strategic apex
outweighed by the
techno-structure of his attributes;
as all is calm and cold,
hemmed in this perfect place.
Myths themselves grow mythic.
Barthes’ bad ideologue, the metaphor,
takes cover from Master Mallarmé’s démon.

Close-up. Night. British Library stacks.
open to show dotted eyes in the titles
as glowing eyes.

Past metaphysical double-agents
Mc Taggart, who handled Yeats
Bergson’s Lawrence, Bradley’s Eliot
Boutroux’s Montale and Orwell’s Larkin,
have completed the disinformation of reality
and distributed abstraction into our lives
in a dead chain of perfectly-named objects.
Only our grandparents knew things
and Rilke knew only Nietzsche.
Each agent is immortal, even in death,
for to be named not-to-be
is to be named, and to be
named implies a bearer.
They claim the dead bear the name
of dead-ones as perfect objects
and live conceptually,
for not to be so, they must be so
and we have lost them.
You shimmer on in your world
of relativity, as once
disembodied, we are cocooned
in the world we thought ourselves into.
Only you can get us back.

Now to the point, Winderby,
and even in the ether,
I would sooner you did not take notes.
Suppose a group of determined, dead
poets is seeking to sow this
landscape of intellectual ice
into our hearts.
While we choke on a tip
of ephemeral Ding Gedichten.
Imagine if these poets could persuade
through myths of self-fulfillment,
be busy seeking to construct
an infernal machine to
confer an immortality
on the body's imagination,
a cryogenics of the word.
It might be a virtual metaphysical device.
For centuries they could have
run civilization,
then bid to withdraw objects of beauty
into some power house
and might not have rested
until now the final piece is put
in their plan to seize
the wirework of the tribe.
Then the great work begins.
All culture is alchemy,
seeking to dredge sweet gold
from landfill scraps.

You think I’m joking?
Already young poets
are becoming exactly
alike to be immortal.
They compete perfectly
to fit the myth.
They seek an abundance
of goods in a hierarchy
of variable bliss.
The erotic pool
becomes inelastic,
chilled, but fully-employed.
Their hearts throb
to the Pigou-Bohm rates
for subjective preference,
as their now is the future.
Yet they crave anathema's
market dynamism despite
having lost old boundaries.

Together we must work
as surgeons and dissect
heroically that a model fiction
could provide the template
for an invasion of our souls.
so let us get down to it.
This Department has seen
five generations of vision
come to pitiful grief
strangling the passions of poets.
We are open to ruin aren’t we?
This ministry of secrets
seeks to defend the peaceful
transfer of rationality
from line to line and not the violence,
of metaphysical noises.
These enemies are inheritors
of a double desecration.
Still seeking the taboos of a stolen deity,
they hanker for the deification
of the ordinary, so oblivious to the past
that credit from Black Mountain
will not bail us out this time.

These men are dangerous
as they will steal our totems
and make a commodity
of our very souls.
Break their code, Winderby,
I beg you.
( Back shot. Close up on empty space)

7. The Arrest

(Studio)
Just back from a holiday,
with, close up, real suitcases
still unpacked.
The door-chimes sound.

“You get it, Trace. I’ve got to get tuh work.”
He reaches for his shirt.
“Oh all right.”
“Put summat on, Trace.”
“Aw riot!”
She wraps herself in a white sheet
goes down and answers
the questioning door.
Two men in black suits
run in to the house.
“Where is it then?”
“Wha?”
“The piano! Didn’t you get our card!”
We’re Demon Analogy,
the people about the new
free central heating.”

“Trace, if it’s about that woman
at the airport… I”

“No, Norm it’s the people
from D…demon analogy,
about the free Central Heating.”

“You see to them, Trace,
I’ve got to go to work. I remember now,
You’re offering free central heating
in exchange for showroom facilities.”

“Yes. That’s us. Sign here.”

“Demon analogy…

“Yes we’re a continental style,
operating from Kithera,
where our agents met you
on holiday. Less overheads you see.
Have you discussed this with your wife?’

“Yes, except so far we’re the only ones in it.”

“We’re avant garde.”

Norm’s sleep-heavy hand gropes for the thick form
and signs it as he leaves.

“Bye, Norm. See you tonight.”
(Leaves through set up door.
Shot left to right)
“Can we have it then?”

“Wha’?”

“The piano.”

“Woi?”

“The contract states’ No musical instruments’
because the vibrations affect the system.”

“I rather like the piano. It was mum’s.”

“Just think you’ll never pay a single
heating bill again in your life.”

“Well if it’s got to go. It’s got to go.”

(Location shot)
Outside, Tracy could see
a sullen herd of Bechsteins
munching at the verges.
She was surprised it had stopped raining.
(Simultaneous time. Norman passes
Attwater towards station)
The man has closely-shaved hair
of rich black, which falls
over a forehead of remarkable whiteness
which makes his head
look like a Saracen helmet.
His eyes, the colour of Spanish tobacco
have great profundity
and spirituality about them
and a distinct penetration
which was probably
a little too much so.

He asks her if
she has ever played the piano
and feel its boards
for the warmth of past sonatas.
The other man, with a mass of dark hair
and an immense forehead takes out a pistol.
Tracy, shocked, flings her arms
around the polished wood

“It won’ hurt it, will it?”

‘No. It’s only a piano. It won’t feel a thing
(Sound added: gunshot)
The sudden rasp of the stun-pistol
that smashes the hammer mechanisms
with a hum of dying strings
startles the estate. (ext. slow motion)
Next door, a cat
loses its prey, a feral pigeon
startled into flight.

To Tracy, it sounded like a
little whimper, doomed and despairing.
Tracy’s hug had steadied it only for death
as it staggered to the ground,
with an involuntary, staccato shudder.

Expertly the two men skin and joint
the instrument and take it out.

They return with a series of boxes.
(Vertical access speeded up)
Once they are all in the house
the taller man explains:

“It’s a self-assembly solar
central-heating system
called an ‘Athanor’. Do you know
anything about central heating?

Tracy shook her head, pulling
the sheet tighter around her.
The sunlight though prim,
was still spare.

“Nah.”

“Well, there are four packages,
the Sundew Tharmas, the Costa Urizen ,
the Vorsprung Urthona and the Café Luvah.
The Tharmas just emanates the water
round the radiators
with the hot water driving the out the cold.”

“Oh, Is that the one we’ve got? ”

“No. Now the Urizen uses pressure.
When the hot water cools ,
a valve lets it out and lets
the fresh water in.

“Oh, Is that the one we’ve got? ”

“No. The Urthona puts the water into a manifold,
or a sorter and then sends it
through thin pipes called
reflections to the heaters.”

“Oh, Is that the one we’ve got? ”

“No. With the Luvah Athanor you
reject abstract reasoning
you use
a special water it comes
from the earth’s magma…”

“Oh.”

“…and it’s cooled by
the light of the moon.”

“Oh.”

“Then a LED light turns black.
Only you won’t see it.
That’s for when the searching starts,
then it will turn white,
that’s to purify the system
and eventually it will turn red,
but we’ll tell you about that.”

“I’m not so sure of this, Sir.
It sounds like
some kind of
old fashioned stuff.
We have to do science now.”

The man became disdainful,
drooping his left hand
over his nose
he began to intone.

“Isn’t water precious?
Don’t you think it should be free?
I’ll tell you who the alchemists are,
it’s the water boards, they’re the ones
making gold out of the natural
resources of the world?
All life comes from water.
Water is a sacred right.
You must love it,
or it’ll be your enemy.”

The other man added his views,

“Think how the water
falls on the town
and cries in the heart, Madame.”

Tracy began to panic.

‘I don’t want water to be my enemy.
How could I manage the washing..
But I didn’t know we needed
the Water Board to cry.”

“Now now Ma’am
Just because Luvah costs more,
you get a free entry
for a lottery
First prize a trip to Kergyra,
a Greek island.”

I’ll talk to Norm tonight about it.”

The two men say goodbye,

(Location shot)
carry the dead piano away
and lead their herd of uprights
for slaughter down the street,

past an old man, wearing a frock coat
staring out at the railway tracks.

8.Attwater to Winderby 4.

(As Scene 2)

And you my teacher, my friend,
have not yet spoken, but being dead,
I know famous difficulties present themselves.
Yet you can still help us
protect the timbers of vision
against these wildfires of madness.
To be truly human, ecstasy
cannot be natural to us,
even though all our love seeks it to be so.
We must reinstate our titles to streams
whose sources and outwashes
run below the horizons of consumption.
In the long run we cannot survive
our own reality. Land, buildings,
corporate equities, consols
mature beyond our temporality.
Death is a weakness on the demand side.
When a man dies he has not
finished with interest.
If we thrill, it is mortality we clutch,
as time-speeded clouds race to senility;

The absolute-claimants
have made a right of this undeity.

(Fizzle to archive film,
the cellars of National Gallery
Night. Tom-Tom music added)

Swinging in its vacuum,
suppose some great referent,
untouched by Clarke,
Blunt or Cellini, is a permanent thing.
Perhaps it is a sculpture, or a score
which has swallowed every Rabelesian
second intention in history, and, as antique,
is lost largely to the collectors.
It must have been unsought in salerooms.
When the recessional bite of Treadwell’s
occult design and Heseltine’s democracy
lay bare a bitterer taste. Imagine culture
drained of everything we bring to it.

Yet a deal seems to have been made,
and lied about in the usual manner.
It came perhaps into the possession
of the Bollingen Foundation,
or Steiner, Paul Bourget,
even Wittgenstein père.
We have it from Ingarden that the reality
of the world is ontological.
The real work of art is thus
only its substrate and its perceiver
glued in an otherworld.
Suppose, my silent friend that
there was a mass substrate
or a substrate of substrates,
a supervenient machine that sucks:
such materials dry of their meaning.
That an artefact should remove itself
so fully from the language for 'to find'
could lead to a reduction in thought’s affective grid
and force down the price stimulation.
Jouissance, come on again, could reach heights
which Malraux advised for those 'well-placed.'
See how profitable the Situationis ecstasy has grown
from the natural and inexhaustible
power of cultural dupes so
timeless and unchangeable.
(Tom-tom music fades)

That standard language of abstraction
cannot satisfy us. To believe a myth
we need a truth. What if some school
of madness is poised to take over in the
name of some collective instinct,
an atavistic mania that drugs us to conform?
A sacrifice of innocence in the name
of fatal violence, a cycle to which
we lend ourselves like flare-stunned moths?
(Still shots)
Somewhere the muse dances
with a freedom than defines
To believe Alpha Centauri burns,
we need a truth for myth,
the accent and the attitude,
that give luminosity
to our fatal violence,
to which we are loosed,
like flare-stunned moths?
(Still shots)

We have only the stars
and dance in this age of silence.
The spectral types
are vanishing in the Doppler shift
of apparent magnitude.
What happened to Subligny,
or Taglioni beyond visible light?
The binary spectrum of
the Camargo sisters
became the myth of Minkus.
As such they could dance
the misread blue-shift in
Correggio’s Procris-cluster,
with a piqué-rebound.
Buchanan’s Jephthah
the flare-star tears
of a woman wrong-footed
on God, failli the right front
touches while the raised left
slides to the front
and the face turned in.
Garnier’s Hyppolita,
in the Soubresaut galaxy:
the stolen main belt leap
touches down on
the crossed death-cry
of her friends for revenge
that finishes her.
Racine’s dark asteroid,
tombée en avant , Iphigenia,
leans on the extended leg in plié.
Her breath given for a take on war,
Kleist’s occulted Penthesilea,
Her position taken on arms,
eclipsing her absolute magnitude
by distant Weimar novas.
Ozerov’s observed Polyxena,
orbiting the sun,
lock-stepped in
sweetheart position,
swinging to a stop.
What will happen
to Katherine Hepburn’s
eccentric Antiope,
in the main belt, changing sides,
that denouement of ankles?
Or Claudel’s, Ida Rubenstein?
Why couldn’t she dance,
Galileo’s Callisto,
the woman killed by her tribe,
a reverse turn on the natural,
with her face always Jovial.
Hughes’ flint-bodied Alcestis
In a pas de deux until the adagio
of the boat arrives on the dark river?
They’re lost in time’s stolen intertext,
back to back, spine against spine,
where statues dance and music
might build arches and words
say nothing to be expressive.
Against those death-woman's voices,
they sacrifice life
to their greatest love,
themselves, swapping
bonds for currency, unable
now to follow like voices.
Guilt and bliss are joined apart,
in our contour century.

You have to look long at Papa Westray,
(Archive)

to long for the Auk,
or Salisbury Plain for the Auroch,
or the Ardee Bog, for the Elk,
for the imperceptible ethos
of loss, to reconstruct their ecology
and read their silence into the present.
It is the same for les danseuses.
This how what seems to be absent
can haunt the culture of frailty.
The fusion of voices is too heavy
for this Post-War world.
The dance of burning brides
has slowed to a still
from an unmade film,
eclipsed in a pollution of lights.

(Attwater fades)

 


2. Chapter: The Storytellers

9. Winderby Haunts the Ashmolean Museum

Before taking the 1. 61
Train of Thought to Paddington in Kilometre/miles.

Before I died I thought this place
would be a palace for ghosts,
now I see only the junk
of dead protagonists,
too time-worn to haunt.
Texts without bodies
cannot linger, perfect numbers
without a tale of place

The shield of Achilles
was only ever an optimal design.
for the tender fallow field
and the ploughmen with their teams.
A magnetic shield,
surrounding the earth
and the heroic sharp sickles
among the swathes in the furrows
and the clusters
in the vineyards
of optimisation
and for the boy and girl with
honey-tasting fruit,
the supervenient machine
of time is a heat shield
against re-entry
through sundials, the
furnace of the hours.
to which the Ephebe
has long since disappeared
in the chlamys that
burst into flame
and the mourning girl’s
grave-offering
measured down to dust
and the theft of myth.


10. The Perils of Tracy

1.The first reality: fixed ratio
“Dear Mr and Mrs Cley:
With allusion to
your recent message,
I am signifying to connote
the construction of the Athanor
instrument Ref. Xn.Yn=Zn.
I would enjoy it if you could
exchange the text
received to day
with your sign.
I am frightened
that the price of
aqua permanens
insists that you adopt
voluntary signifieds
on your ankles
as the effective
fields are now volatile.
Please find yourselves enclosed.
Please contact us again
if you seek reference
to another meaning.
I predict
your future collusion.
Yours signified...”

The signatures were illegible,
Tracy said she could make out
‘Buddleia’ and ‘Vermin’.
The secretary had scribbled an apology.

“Sorry I am new language.”

It was three weeks
before another letter
came from
Hiérophants et Cie
in Kythera
claiming to
pay their
mortgage
so long
as the Athanor was built.
(Back shot)
Tracy remembers
the morning
when the door chimed
and two quick men
came in for the piano.
Then weeks later
the parts arrived,
(Vertical access, speeded up )
Pipes, stone lintels
and converters of prima materia
to aqua permanens.

They
sent them back.
Only for bills
and summonses
to flood the porch
along with redundancy notices
(Vertical access speeded up)
Casually
they would scan notes of
postings.
(Archive)
The Eysenck Job Centre
assessed only
one corporal
humour out of
the full four
in the personality test.

An offer came
at nighttime
when Norman hung drowsy
by the crackling
new receiver
(Sound added a French voice
droll and effete)
"Look after your dreams,
The media cannot
tune into them,”
(Close up)
The house is still still .
Each buff tile straight.
The copper pipes are taut
and the wiring exposed
against the now-stripped staircase
panels and walls of the house.
The Athanor fills the bare living-room.

Tracy feels for the electronic
toy on her ankle, but
at least the house is safe.
But the tests of the new technology
sent them shocks
which a only seemed to end when
they volunteered
to go to French Poetry classes,
in her case
and for Norman to give in
his notice at the
agricultural factory.
Every nine pieces installed,
began the good life again.
(Reverse shot)


2. The Second Reality. Continuous Ratio

(From Thorndyke’s unpublished
laboratory notes)
Next day came
a schedule for
food and happy appetites
every time they were working.
They considered other
vocations, wrote
to those in charge.
Frightened, they made
an appointment
at the time
to be told only those with
fictional
prospects would be
the ones worth
looking into
for staff-training.
(From Hull’s notes)
Sleep too
could be
regulated
by a memory
re-cycler,
placed under
the left
nipple.
Rhythms
became crossed
and they were restless.
Syncopated love
missed the offbeat,
offed the misbeat.


3.The Third Reality :Fixed interval

From Norman’s non-empty
“I went to the
abbatoir following the rumours
of Tracy’s piano.
At night as we hid
behind a plastic curtain
we saw the arch-silencer
at work with his researchers,
cutting the clear chords,
and carving clean notes
to cook the sound-boards
and wash what looked
like pink tears from a sink full of sounds
they’d gathered from the strings.
Those maids, my old girlfriends,
resented their hunger
they moaned as they
squeezed milk from the keys.
They closed doors on
Tracy’s old boy-friends
in cupboards glutted
with mouldered tunes.
Hull, the Vice-Silencer -
worked on into dead night
he chopped and he chopped
at the wooden-corpses.
His dreaming servants
laid silence in the refuse of music.
He collected and hacked at the frames
too big for the oven, clearing and paring
the language at the limits of deceit.
At dawn he brought silence
in a covered jars
to sting the still hammers
into deeper sleep
and threw them
into ovens of mould.

We came back
to find our frosted hearts
stood side by side
on the kitchen table
melting on a tray
And I woke andr ealized
I dreamed and ran to
the window to see if the old
man was still by the station
talking to himself.

The technicians come to fix the
adrenalin in our phials.
We could only sign up
for one emotional
reassurance per day.
And none without
work on the Great Opus.
The pieces are not enough
to build an Athanor.
And our first work
brings us no means.
Only our dreams are
beyond the pulse
of the security tag.


4. The Fourth Reality Variable Ratio

From Norman’s Bose-Einstein, Non-Solid files.
Tracy told me her dream:
“We became white stone,
shattered ,white stone.
Feet, hands, knuckle-bones
a forehead, all scattered
on the living-room floor.
As we tried to touch,
we found we had talons
instead of finger-nails,
feathers instead of skin.
Major and minor scales
grew over our feet.

We grew colder
at each arousal.
I went out for fuel in a field
where every bush and tree
on the field of your skin
had been chopped to cut branches.
by Graves ,Frazer. and Co.
I left oak-bark to mark my
pathways from the shudder
of our coming,
trodden through the reeds
along a river of empty space.
and a want that
urged me to swear.
When I returned
you had turned
into a mound of flutes.
Your skin as clean as silver:
your mouth, a definition of song;
your breathing was an orchestra.
Mice were stirring in the night.
I warmed your chrome
into the tune of stones,
hidden in white mud.
Scattered hair, eyes, flanks,
hearts bobbed to the surface.
Your branch dowsed itself in me
and we clung to our smoke.

I went out for more wood,
this time to the great Raine orchard.
Scattered in the reeds
the white stones again,
a broken kiss
and eyes and flanks,
like fruit covered in mosses.

The silences
have blossomed.
I hear the rumour
that shocked vines bled
in fimbrial soil and caught their breath.
It is hard to accept
and it is time
to go back.

This time I
cannot find you.
Though my peaches
have flowered.
They bled and fed me.
Spiders scattered
across the floorboards,
across eyes, flowers,
hair and a breast.

I find a letter
telling me that
your cherries too
have flowered;
fruited and fallen,
though the sense
of this escapes me.

Over the ground
they sway in clusters.
In the dawn,
swans were flying
through the golden handcuffs
of the sun, while,
crows pecked
at unshelled snails
plunged in the mud.

And then my chance
to wake came up.


5.The 5th Reality: Open Reiforcement: the desire for flight

From Norman’s Non-Real Papers of Non-Trivial Imaginings.

That day we were trees,
and practiced
every part of our limbs.
We were moved
by winds
and by the fear of winds.

We found our branches
lighter than air.
We grew old and crumbled,
but were blown into the stone.
Songs from the stripped stair
were caught by the silence.
Steel members,
we gripped you
and shook you.
We rattled
our mesh of tongues
to state you,
to deny you,
our, deacon-silencer,
Thorndyke.
In our cage
of daylight
we sought you
and said
that our care
was elsewhere,
not in these hairs
not in these eyes,
our bodyshape.
Who can contain our shoulders?
Who can prove our roses?
Who thirsts against us here,
beyond apartness?


11.Winderby Alone
(Emerging from backshot,
Turns to colour, Closeup, lips moving.)

Forgetting my deathfulness,
I think I wake. If you can hear this,
then you can believe in ghosts again.
The voice on the country path
puzzled me to an obedience
I did not want. Poets are ordinary demons.
This country lane on which I walk;
balmy, with the buzzing of winged beetles,
and growths of dogwood, hawthorn
and woodspurge, witnessed
the return of Browning.
Hopkins drew it in his notebook.
Hardy could be crouched on the gateway
and Houseman slept outside the Pub.
While Thomas walked to his last engagement
against Heym, Trakl, or Stadler ,
who in turn, could have gunned down
Gurney, or Appollinaire.
Benn or Junger could have hunted
Keith Douglas, Sydney Keyes or Victor West
the logical possibility of reciprocal extermination
lies in the buried blood-stained pages.
It is poets send out poets to die
from the camps of peace,
survivors, such as Masefield walked
back down the same road.
De la Mare would have cycled
on this path and Auden would have walked
and chattered under its leaves,
past Eliot, leaning on the verge
while Graves rode by dreaming
of a bedded muse and Betjeman stood
and believed his own handbook.
Poets who escaped the war
did not know the fighting stopped.
The new apocalypse never ended.
The movement still fought on,
reformed the group, led the revival
and extracted confessions from deserters.
Still if I go along with his nonsense,
there could be a chance
I may go free, as Esse leaves Posse,
Mime, leaves Alberich,
cause departs from effect,
Puck, from Oberon
and Ariel, Prospero and I need
no longer flicker on the edge
of this earthen mire
like a satellite commanding
worlds, yet kicked by a micro-pulse,
or a Laurel by a Hardy.
Attwater has not grasped the full
terror of his intuitions.
This is no national threat
to books and scores,
maquettes and ballet shoes.
A terror is slowing the earth
and freezing it into night.
I saw the Arch -Silencer
once, myself, a comfortable evil,
a creature only of relations,
as we are only numbers to him.
He comes from a place
where there is no call to love
and is jealous of human purpose
in its frail and rich reality.
All creation thirsts to be called.
The enemy will steal our call from us.
Now it gets to be like this.
What have we got of ourselves,
but stones , in the end?
Each so called civilisation
speaks to us in stone,
warms us with stone,
and we recollect its stones.
If we are born wholly to die,
then the final outcome will be
some inhuman drift,
and what we have done will
be only numbers.
The index of murder,
the rate of ecstasies,
the ratio of despair to oblivion,
of new ideas to indifference,
of words read to words unread.
Even the lovers, here, in that house
whose light has just gone out
Even the cost of their pain
will be no more than a coefficient
of futility in a time capsule
rolled over an entropic soup
which we briefly understood
and which it will never read
throughout the autopsy
of existence that is eternity.
Imagine some jealous entity
wanted our illusions for himself.
How easy it would be to speed up
our passing into the immortality
of pure number”!
Even now I cannot understand
why so many now want only
the certainty of personal extinction.
Will I get through to the people he wants?
I will go to Kythira,
though Atttwater forbids
the nine freedoms of air flight.
Now, let me go down the double hedgerows,
past the great horse chestnut,
to reach the station
with Sir Charles Fox’s girder bridge.
Let me spell you the perfume,
Dodder, Abraham, Flax Dodder,
Isaac, Jacob, Hound’s Tongue
Lamb’s Ear, Field Woundwort,
Cut-Leaved Deadnettle,
Lesser Skullcap, Twispur
and Honeysuckle. Yes let them all be there.
This used to be the South Eastern and Chatham railway
in this parish, the Reading and Reigate branch,
and the London and the
South Western Railway Company
had running powers on this line
from Wokingham to Reading,
a tradition lost because
it was thought about, not imitated.
For me it must be past to be.
I will invent a train of logical deduction,
links, copulas, couplets and concatenations
I will call it Leviathan and Hobbes will drive it,
with his consequence or train of thoughts.
If the rolling stock is old, it will
accommodate Swinburne’s
non-bodily components,
the dear philosopher that is,
whom I refuted once in Chelsea,
only to be thanked as if
I had done him a great favour ,
not the founder Male-Lesbian.
I will use pilcrows as signals.
and I shall stop at Enigma number stations.
Existence without the body
was always a logical possibility
on British trains, despite
Brunel’s timetabled Empiricism.
Descartes can take me
the rest of the way, once
the mid channel border is crossed
between Esse and Posse.
Then the shade of Severinus Boethius,
from Pavia to Brindisi.
Only in Britain does Europe
cease to be a possibility.
I will hum San Severino’s forma
to the tune of esse.
Then there’s Greece to argue
between the Platonic Daimons
of the broad gauge and the
narrow circulars of the Prime Mover.
I remember when I was very unwell
being told I had month to live.
It was winter and my book was unfinished.
and I admired the confidence which the Deacon
implied we can a live a life, despite its brevity.
(Back shot black and white)
I remember my visit to Deacon Northcote left me
surer of my book’s conclusions, but a natural beatitude
must still be accounted for in tradition.
Blessed are the born for they shall live
is a Wordsworthian tautology at best.
Basil’s muffins were delicious
and his roses had come out
Where the Lord takes us is another matter,
I told him, our redeemed nature
lies beyond our touch, as touch
is now beyond my right hand.
Did I always feel I
had the solution in my sights?
I heard Basil Northcote’s Bamptons
in the University Church .
“A pool that sometimes clears to reveal the spring beneath.”
he spoke of, as I sat in my new clericals
at his feet. I remember I never took off
my cycle-clips I was so excited and
had a new tin of tobacco
which I threw into the air.
(to talking lips)
It lies to be shown how natural desires
can, if given time and the right resources,
fulfill the knowledge of the hand that
formed them. What if there
were an hypothetically infinite man?
but immortal, simply unredeemed, but
of endless duration, his life could
be a proof that even he could
find a true Deity to worship.
The Catholic Church speaks
in the authority of Pius XIIth,
of separate beings on other worlds,
none called to salvation yet putatively
worshippers of a creative deity
on a separate planet.

It is time to catch my invention.

(Lips fade)


3.Dance:The Wanderer and The Furnace


15. The Athanor Home Manual

1. General Instruction
Conceal, or destroy all claims to the word's
notorious relations with reality, including affairs.
(Any oversight will obstruct alembic efficiency)
Papers, particularly those
in the form of love-letters, or brief notes
on the coherent transfer of logical meaning
should be hidden under floorboards,
buried in compost heaps at night
or concealed in ambiguous remarks.

Once this has been done completely,
consistently and you have tested your work,
you may commence reading.

You will come to a question, usually at dawn,
preceded by a dotted line of rapid eye movements,
indicating the place
where an answer should have been installed.

Then continue reading in sound sleep.


16. The Wanderings of Winderby 1

Then the woman in the room
speaks to me, suddenly and
persuasively. She wears antique
twentieth century dress.
She has a story to tell:
“Giuliano had come up from the village
with a few cans of beans and
the latest American magazines,
telling little of the Normandy evacuations.
Ever since the resistance had been holed up
in Kythera the little pony had taken
the road to the old quarry.
Padre's Silentio’s loyalties
were a little uncertain, but he could be
trusted with the girls, at least with Laura.
Simone would have to look after herself.
Not a man was to be trusted,
but in the present position
his place, hidden in the vaults
of the quarry was a useful one.
He wouldn't act until he had to,
and Guiliano alone had the information.
He also knew that the Padre had
supported Eleftherios Venizelos
and the Liberal party
before the Fascists took over,
which was a useful thing
to keep the man in check.
Pina, being a Communist
would listen to no-one.
That gave them a weakness which,
when the time came, would be useful.
He changed gear and hid the lorry
under the branches of the overgrown orchard.
The moment came sooner that Guiliano
had suspected. A week had gone by and
he had left the four of them
to get more supplies from Potamos.
In town his contact told him,
The Blackshirts wanted the
whole region clear of suspected
resistance. Potamos, especially
was too near the base for comfort.
Besides, Il Duce wanted the place
to entertain visiting Nazis.
La Primavera Hitleriana was due.
The Gestapo especially was fond
of Mozart and Gentile wanted
a performance of Il Re Pastore,
which Toscanini had been working on
before he left for New York.
Then Guiliano knew how he could
spring his trap on the resisters
whom he had left sunbathing
on the lawns, while Silenzio
was posted a look-out on the gate.
The party sent out its agents to look
the place over, cut the grass and
arranged for chairs and tables and
entertainment to be flown in.
It had the advantage of being
out of the way of the Gestapo,
and out of the way of History,
and yet less than a day from home.
The resisters waited in Padre Giovanni's vault
Simone and Pina, the singing girls
were hungry, restless, and
wanted to leave, but the Padre told
them it was safest to stay.
Giuliano’s brother, Luciano found
this gullibility amusing.
He had 'sprung' the lot of them
and waited for his reward.
The hour the Nazis arrived, Giulio
turned his revolver on the group
to pretend he knew nothing of them
and ordered them out to surrender
Yet the concert was already in session
and so they waited in silence. Laura
glaring sullenly at Giulio who
never returned their glances.
The Padre seemed as still as death.

The sound of a voice came from the cave
“Enough that my shepherd
should be my king…
All the bliss I wish to prove
is my shepherd's constant love.
And with joy to see him reign,
free from trouble, free from pain
but should his station change his heart
And my ideal from him depart.
What dreadful torments I would know
As my soul is rent with woe.”

The voice was barely audible,
but the Padre Silentio
picked up the spirit of the aria.
Everyone else joined in.
It seemed the safest thing to do.

“Hail the consented Duce,
the invitation from the sky,
dearer and dearer to our hearts.”

Then a stranger song started,
with a thin, piped accompaniment

“Maenad of dark flowers,
you close your eyes,
drunk with the dark,
seething with warmth, evoe,
you emerge, beautiful,
to join hands with the pallid visitor
who lingers, then reaches , evoe,
for your warm lips
and is silent.
Your skin dissolves shame
from your nakedness,
which basks, soft and dappled
in his blazing furnace.”

Laura stared at the horizon
of lemon trees and olives
The air felt heavier.
At the conclusion
of the opera, the girls came
out of the quarry
and shrieked in terror
at the gun in the hands of a traitor.
Guilio jerked
the gun, the group stood, as still
as leaves in a summer glade.
Suddenly Guilio noticed
they had not moved,
but were motionless,
like standing wax works.
Pina's blouse fluttered in the wind,
but the bodies beneath
were as stiff as plaster,
as several shots proved.
Giulio ran to get the SS officers.
On his return the statues were drifting
away, led by an English couple,
wearing strange Victorian clothes.
Wanting an arrest, the SS took Guilio.
and the entire scratch orchestra.
“Don’t you remember being there?”
the woman asked.”You were one of the Nazis.”
Suddenly I come into existence there
on that sunlit island. I cease and start again
in essence at least, a shadow of awareness.
Was I there then ? Part of a shabby massacre?
Dressed as Antigone, Pina comes to find me,
the troublemaker, with an intuition
about injustice, has come to protest.
I struggle with the keys to my room
until I realize I must lock the door to enter.
She is the party member, the campaign assistant,
the student, the Conservative, the Socialist, the Communist,
the Liberal, the Catholic, the Fascist youth, the Jew
shopped by her own side for moral emotivism.
She is the spectre of the Twentieth Century’
an icon of political failure, the dunce
in the schoolroom of history
whose corpse is found by Hippolyte,
under the glare of Theseus,
who waits in the hallway
with his security men.
She is taken out and tipped into a mass grave,
while the Queen’s latex girdle is posted that witnesses
in a techno-century should turn
into pole-dancers and be seen and not see.

The Queen, stops to speak to me
in Victorian clothes ,a crinoline dress
and a silk jacket with lace
I take her by the hands out
of the breeze of moment to hear her.
Her words are notes of music,
a descending modal sequence,
slow and expressive on a fortepiano...

17. A General Example

How many times did you respond
to the emotional needs
of any musical instrument you cannot play?

(Place your answer here)

Now visualise the emptiness of page two,
check your answer against
the answer printed there
while you were defacing it
(since removed by our service agents)
If you encounter difficulties here,
bear in mind that the same agents
will have repeated your name nationwide
Yet that famous identity of yours
was hardly managing its own existence
while you slept.
What is the status of your name
flashing in the cell phone?
Answer in sound sleep.
If your answer is correctly installed
you may proceed to the next item
which explains the operation
of a perfect insensitivity

If your installation is wrong
you must re-read the preceding word
and cross out our instruction
which is deliberately misleading
Then read it again
and repeat the imagination drill

(Place your answer here)

If your answer is correct this time,
you have crossed out
the wrong instruction.


18.The Wanderings of Winderby 2

”George and I cannot but wonder
at the enormous improvement to transport
brought about by Napoleon's road -builders.
Now, through a whole mountain-pass
a scorching plain and a unsafe sea
we are arrived at Potamos,
a dirty, dusty port where the
people are verminous
On the way we read Webster –
Yes old Dyce's edition.
The people here are too poor to nurture
the values of domestic privacy
We have often been told by our
worthy father that Popery is little better
than paganism; and I find it
to be true ever since I settled in the town
where ignorance, superstition and even
idolatry seem to reign in the most
sovereign manner.
We see little else in the street
besides the processions of priests
and monks or the bambini,
Their begging even at a young age,
is a constant irritation to our journey.
I have read Calvin on Adam's sin
and find myself confused
I stare into the blue eyes
of innocent children
and know they are depraved
and bidden to perdition,
but how did Adam fall?
If God can name the saved.
No! I do not doubt,
or is he just a being addicted to distance.
Today we are going to look at
the foundations of a ruined villa
which was once owned by
the great Silentio family. We are very
excited. We have just met Padre
Piero, himself a Silentio, who has
offered to be our guide. As he is at
the door, I must finish “
To the music of Empires,
Republics and Protectorates.
the slow Adagio of repression,
secrecy and hoarded lands rolls on.
“You were there with Silentio,
weren’t you Mr Winderby?”
I turn into a past become mine.
She hurries off; her daughter stays,
a woman officer of the British Blackshirts,
marching to the sound
of canned, ribald laughter.

19.. Supporting Document

"The Two in One Spirit Company (UK) Plc.
guarantee absolutely
that their patent 'Unio' Furnace
will realise all hopes,
human ambitions, wishes and
less specific desires
from which the customer may be suffering
and consolidate them all
in a fixed, ineradicable craving
for the impossible.

Your present not unedifying taste
for the human condition
will be manageably converted
into one consuming and simple craving.

Live the life of commmercials
in a suburb of green lawns now.
Wear eternal white flannels, or tracksuits
behind the clear security
of double glazed self-confidence.

Watch your chattels insure themselves
against the containerised outcome
of your hope.
Forget workaday ambition
learn to love the judgements
of abstract management.
Breathe the fragrance of
anodyne perfumes and
enjoy a fixed appetite.
Learn to glue yes and no together
without payment of tuition fees
Yet to achieve desire consolidation
the following visit to the authorities
must be complied with
if the customer is to gain
the specified result.
Excerpt:
How many times did you respond
to the emotional intuitions
of your local police?


20. The Wanderings of Winderby 3


The daughter begins to speak:
“My father told me about rubble, friable brick
a humid, gritty holocaust of dust,
George Peake Bart F.R.A it seems, went on
tunnelling, breaking apart dessicated
mortar, pounding at dead stucco
with his sleeper
He told me about that roar
with which the masonry gave way
and he found himself
staring through the ceiling
of the Capella Silentini.
The vaults had been built in the form
of a small capella,
He said he could see three tombs,
whose relief-work seemed to combine
on four walls. One of the tombs was empty.
At a glance the first
was in the style of the Mid Renaissance,
The work of Tullio Lombardo
or perhaps a pupil, but it showed
signs of Bregno workshop too.
Its design resembled the Foscari monument
which Perkins had seen in Venice.
He could see from the inscription
that the remains of Cardinal
Silentio were to be found here,
What perplexed him was the statuary.
Momentarily he told me he thought
of my mother, Emma, of me
and her sister Louisa Harding
who were picnicking on the
lawn by the ruins of a semicircular
colonnade. The vagabonds were very active
in these parts. Yet a minute later
according to a confession he made to me,
the image of the living Silentio came to his mind
and pausing no longer, he slid into the
chapel causing an uproar of dust.
Regaining his feet, he went over
to examine the iconography in closer detail.
The figure of the Holy Man was not in
ecclesiastical vestments, but in the
clothing of Orpheus or Bacchus.
It lay on a lightly moulded bed, underneath
which was the sarcophagus, upheld by
three crouching cataryids which resembled
maenads, were their arms not interlinked.
Two were facing outwards, while the
third, supporting the sepulcre with
outstretched arms faced the opposite
way and unlike the other two,
looked towards a figure of
Eurydice who stood with her finger
over her lips in a gesture
of beseeching silence.
My father told me he had a flash of insight.
His noble patron, would be
proud to know he had found a group that
at least alluded to the last triad of
the graces which used to stand in
the now ruined Cortile of the same Palazzo.
Yet the maenads seemed to be looking
to Antiope as if in reversal of the myth,
not Orpheus' killers but his worshippers.
On the tomb was carved the inscription
“The soul cannot wholly fall
without ascending into the whole.”

My father had felt his way towards the next
tomb in the fading light. The humid air
was arid with thick dust.
It gave him a permanent cough.
On the west wall of what obviously
was not a chapel, but a 'tempio.'
George could see the tomb of Silentio Silentini.
It was in Rococo style, markedly similar
to that of Pigalle's elaborate sarcophagus
for Maurice of Saxony
in the Eglise St Thomas in Strasbourg.
The inscription was carved on a relief Pyramid,
Canova style, against the wall.
The Holy Man strode erect towards his
open tomb with a slab of granite displaced
by the hand of Procris, or fortitude
wrapped in a thin white sheet
and in a marble winding sheet,
Callisto wearing a bear's skin
and a short tunic weeps by his tomb,
but Polyxena opens the tomb,
yet her figure is only a block of marble,
uncut by any chisel.
Below, on a plinth, Penthesilea
brings Alcestis and Iphigenia to see.
The whole is dominated by the figure of Erato
again only a name on a block
which dominates in flight
above the pyramid inscription:
'Ex bello pax' – from war, peace.
He told me that as he left he could hear
the curious crying of a child from within.
Foxes have been known to raise such cries.
My father would always listen out for them
back in Surrey.
He turned to what he thought was a
third tomb on the west wall opposite to Piero's.
At first it seemed to be a black façade,
but coming closer he said later he caught sight of
a face which reminded him of his wife's.
The third tomb was of Francesco Silentio,
Its style horrified him more than the
amazing resemblance of one of the figures,
it was in the most recent fashion,
quite brutally plain and seemed untouched
by dust, the three figures which reminded him
of the virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity
accompanied Chastity towards
a narrow door. Except my father confided to me
they expressed no such virtues.
He told me how much he wanted to get papers
for export at once. My father went
to where his wife and her sisietr had been waiting,
yet there was no sign of them. Nor was there ever a sign
to be seen of them. I was found crying in a nearby grove.
Despite his letters to Palmerston,
my father returned to Earmley House,a saddened man,
but you were there Mr Winderby.
You can explain. I saw you.”

Throughout her story, explosions of laughter
ripped through the narrative, sometimes
making it difficult to go on.
The woman fell to on the ground,
hit by a sudden brick thrown by someone
in the British anti-Fascist league.’
again to peals of helpless mirth.
To the chords of Wolf, Schoeck and Szymanowski,
she is carried off. The impossible poles
of love and violence reconciled only
in the music of an age of change.
The whole absurd charade just
an excuse for a bellylaugh
at the expense of kings and prelates.

21 Police Notice of Disinstallation:

Suspect: Norman Stanley Cley
Claim: disallowed
Reason:
Interrogation broken off
for robust exercise.
Insured accidentally sustained several eye wounds,
while using the boxing facilities at the station.
His wife in the meantime has been accepted.
She has left for Cythère,
enjoying our calm luxury, the Police Holiday Raffle.
Notice she has gone. Husband must not follow her.

22. The Wanderings of Winderby 4

A man in a black coat lifts off the mask
of Penthesilea’s face . I remember it was myself.
Now I understand the laughter.
It was Thersites the satririst.
(Hand held camera)
“I reached the Channel
(Cross cut, globe universal time)
And evaded the bearded Dover Patrol.
To seagulls and siren blasts,
the boat sailed soon enough,
its glossy windows picturing
my cropped, serious face
against the cold, leaden waves,
(close up)
which is all I remembered
before the sudden invocation
of the fog -horn.
(Dissolve)
Now an endless trundle
of Flanders thoughtscapes
(Stock shot Brabant)
and only this tall girl
I pictured,
with a laughing face,
who got on in Paris,
her supple birch learning to sway,
who sat opposite me,
wearing a Nineteenth Century
Arlecchino dress, with cloth rhombs.
and a Bergama cap.

(Cut to close up, Winderby)

She told the young man sitting next to her,
her father was a poet in Paris and she was travelling
as far as Héricy, for Valvins, having watched
Axel in Paris, when her father had gone
to Oxford to lecture.
She could not see the other women, who lay
now on my side of being.
It was strange to see such clothes,
but I gathered from her
friend she is to perform in
an amateur theatrical.
this evening, about which
she was very excited.
( Fizzle to close up. Cut away section
on studio train)
The train stopped at Héricy.
I saw the river, the Fontainebleau hills,
the bridge lost to the years
we pretend to call war.
I wondered would she notice if I too slept?
Swinburne’s snore in the mind can
disturb some sensitive souls:
she cannot hear or see me, so she sleeps
impetuously turning, unaware of
my unseen presence.
Her friend, a young, strapping man says
( Fizzle to the Valvins Theatre)
‘I’m Pathelin’ He speaks his
lines with a theatrical gusto,
staring, gesturing
and exclaiming.
(Close up)
‘Crowned out,
mother of Divinity
my creel, my Credo!
I want to excuse me,
enthuse me,
I denounce the Lord expat
I enounce the sward
The maw of omnipotence
I speak the sackbut.
Noise is forbidden,
compute instead.
Gag his money talk.
Capisco,
dearest swine
nearest mine?”
( Studio shot.
Enter Genevieve Mallarme as Guillemette)
“He had an uncle from Oxford
that’s why he prattles
so in metaphysics.”
(Re-enter the same man as the tailor
This time playing for laughs)
“He’s gone mental
with my cloth in his crotch”
The lady gasps and laughs.
The man resumes Pathelin
“Why enter, fine dame.
What are the reptiles after?
Alcestis, the girl in the box,
dallying wi’ the men.
Get lost, crap bags.
Ordain me at once.
At the double
I’ll be Old Nick,
Old Admetus,
in the seminary
of the senile.
When they belch
instead of intoning the Mass.
(Enter Genvieve Mallarme asAlcestis)
“Iolcus, country and house and virgin bedroom
of my forebears “
"I am ready," the girl says.
“I gaze upon the boat with with twin-oars,
andhe who ferries the dead, Charon,
shouts out at me fingering the the blade.
“what’s the point of being late,
you’re losing me time.
Bad tempered, he hurries me on,
as you saw yourself, Mr Winderby. “

(Song. Close up.)
“Come, golden one
whose tresses fair
are finer spun
than strands of sun.
Whoses ankles turned
are smooth and neat,
whose blooming skin
beams tints of wheat.
Offered whelp , show
me your narrow
way to sleep,
the sheer perfection
of your deep.
The gestures of your
speech are strange.
I am a stranger
to words, Alcestis,”
(The girl backlit)
The man leaps out of my mind
gibbering, to run down
the town of Moliere
in a Mediaeval smock.
The girl lies asleep in the aisle.
Alcestis played for laughs
with Death and the Enlightenment heroes,
Leibniz and Voltaire
at each other’s throats.
23. Drawing the Love Lottery

Dear Tracy,

Due to your unfailing efforts
over the assembly of the Athanor,
Central Heating Showroom,
you have won a free trip to Kythira.
Due to the fact that love is an universal urge,
you have zero words in which to express
your preferences on this island
of love-making and myth.
You do not need to activate
this message as we will carry you away.
Note the baggage limitations:
you must be lighter than air.

24. The Wanderings of Winderby 5

I hear a shape in a dying catalogue
of my mind: the set of published stones,
intersecting with flinching surfaces.
the hover by me with silent pleas to speak.

Scene: the hallway of a French provincial Chateau
in the late Eighteen th Century
Genevieve wants to take a part:

(Maidservant)
Tell me what troubles you, Lady?
Does his blow still smart?
and so does Pina
(La Baronne)
The blunt wound was not as painful
as his first mistrust, but more deadly.
It was the final pain, an emblem of
an option that could not be changed.
Here, in a country whose manners
I despise, whose climate spoils my servants.
and my trousseau and which…

(She rises, as if gently wounded
and holds her petticoats in her hands,
stooped before the cold grate
in the morning room.)
"Puissance d'amour",
(She mouths the words silently)
“As if a flint could be sparked
from that phrase of Prévost's,
which would set alight
the pretty clothes he has given me.
My first doubts years ago
had grown from the lethargy
of a humid summer
and too much whispering
after le secret du Roi.
The letters I sent to my mother
were read by the king's censors
before they arrived at Dijon.
This is why my husband did not come to Rome.
My spies have attested my fidelity.
I felt humiliated, yet I had
Cardinal Silenzio as my companion
for public occasions,
such as the opening night of Alceste.
It was the custom in the Papal States
and he was my confessor.
Yet Monsieur Le Comte
has sent my name to Versailles.
(Outside the sound of restless horses)
The servants are busy on the stairs
She opens the chiffonière
under the gilded mirror
and takes out a lace shawl.
Her husband opens the doors
and looks at her with a glance,
I see at once its myself.
she would once have taken as unkind)

(Le Comte)“Life will be quieter in the country.
Even Vergennes could not understand
why the king had recalled Necker.
It is going to be a troubling time.”
(She gets up to leave)
(La Baronne)” Do you remember the picture
of the death of Alcestis we saw once
in England?

(Silence. La Baronne turns
to see her husband is not there.
Servants request
Monsieur Le Comte’s presence )

I must go. There is news about Paris…
(To her servant)
I will not return. The King has been discovered
I must help Barnave. Make sure my daughters get away
Look after my foolish husband. At least he is harmless.”
(Leaves)

Scene Two.
Mesdemoiselle s Alcestis, and Callisto de Beauregard
and La Marquise, pass by the vegetable market
at midday. Effie raises the coach
window and hold salts to her nose,
“Why should I, a pupil of Maine de Biran at Grateloup
be expected to endure physiological extremes.
(Man's désir naturel being his happiness)”
Her sister sits hunched in an opposite
corner of the coach. The Chargé d'Affaires
has not even looked at her.
His wife had though, a piteous
but wilful glance, implying
all of the disgrace she already knew.
In the city's dream-life whirl
of dances, liaisons and disguise
the amours went on without
a thought of reputation.
Now Callisto carried another husband’s child
and felt the cold keenly these mornings.
She wrapped the bear-rug more closely around her.
While her sister leveled her a pharisaical stare.
Her efforts to resist the same
seducer had been much praised. Now it
seemed the renowned Antiope was making
a Hyppolytus for herself. Effie smiled.
The graces in the Palazzo Farnese
would be homeless too,
Don’t you remember Mr Winderby/”

Callisto stopped reading,
bored with marriage and finesse.
The train rolled on, geometric,
through the Burgundy countryside.
I had created
to forget her accusations.

25. Attachments
Notice for a Conference, a Press Release.

Polyxena Smith, a witness to an Epiphantic sighting,
will land at Brindisi Airport, Immigration desk.
Then and there she will declare herself a refugee
from forces in America that want to have her dead.
Her trials began when friends in Troy asked
if she could have a dinner date at which
a blind ecclesiastic turned out to be
a covert bomb expert and signaller
with two inches of ivory in a public place.
The reason why the marksman is a crack shot
lies in his having only one eye
and he can estimate by Tantric mysticism.
while genuflecting just once.
America has also used quite corrupt courts
to strip her of her precious savings
under trite excuses, such as rents.
There should be no interim exchange.
Smith will wear a black ensemble,
thick black briefcase and a tote-bag, also black.
Allow her to proceed direct to immigration
upon deboarding from her New York plane
and from thence to her hotel.

26. The Wanderings of Winderby 6

I can only tell at a distance,
as I am accelerating through time,
become more derivative and
observant only of phenotypes.
Thus, this time the real Callisto narrates
“The coach wound its way
out of Lyons to Turin.
The journey would be long
and uncomfortable, but the mood was
angry in Rome and the directory seemed
as much against the popolo minuto
as they were against the ancien régime.
We slept through awesome days
and nights of mountain passes
and village inns where the inhabitants
seemed to suffer from every imaginable
physical malady and spiritual misery.
The final descent into the plain
found us hot humid and thirsty.
At length we turned into
an avenue of blistered poplars
just before San Stefano Belbo.
We found Padré Silenzio’s
palazzo a little overgrown to justify
the stay. The long driveway was mined
with potholes which jolted one
of His Majesty's less luxurious coaches.

But its many, half-ruined rooms
at least provided privacy.
Servants were numerous, however,
as, knowing our good luck, few
were not prepared to fawn,
dismissal could mean disaster.

We had, at first,
found it disagreeable that the
Chargé's wife should also
be quartered with us , but
the tearful reconciliations had
been good for our souls,
which , as Effie did not accept
any argument for its immortality
argued well for natural virtue,
despite my sister's claims for Rousseau.

Silenzio was an obscure host though
and the locked-up buildings which loomed
above the theatro were depressing
and had an inhibiting effect on all of our parties.
Tonight he has planned entertainment
but the rumour is that though
a chance of amusement should not be forgone
as it entails a certain risk of discovery
in his circle’s Arcadian exile.

That night, the amphitheatre has been
full of certain pifferari and hired bandits
together with displaced carnival actors
who are to perform Il Pastor Fido
from a text carefully edited by Silenzio

My sister Effie is unimpressed
with the décor of the Palazzo Silenti.
But one group of statues holds her attention.
Three maenads, or graces, are gathered around
an old mounting block in the centre of
the turfed courtyard. Their arms interlinked
in a strange manner that gives
the impression of a restless energy.
Her teacher had told her of the fact
of a power of action and of will, proper
to the thinking being as being as evident
to the self as the very fact of his own existence.
Yet these statues have muscular action,
without the self, yet they are not sensitive beings.
They had no 'I'. Effie has never seen anything like them
One in particular, smaller than the rest, has
a look of serious calm, yet seems surprised,
or perhaps shocked, a nerve translated
into the sculptures, which are bronze,
by a certain tightening of the figure's shoulder muscles.
The figures are missing Callisto,
if the name carved in Greek below
the front of the mounting block is a title.

The amusements begin with the chorus from
Aminta; the chorus is a talented group
from the Institute which has occupied the
Palazzo next door to the Farnese.
Men and women in equal numbers intone:

“Happy, happy now the golden age
not simply for the milk that ran
in rivers, nor the honey glaze
that every tree displayed.
Not simply for the blossoming land
nor man by cars undismayed
nor snakes which had no venomous gland

...Thus these were only happy days
before that proud and lazy word,
that lascivious image of malaise
unveiled by the manic herd
and named honour, and its gaze
had every beast shouting its praise

Then it deigned to vandalise
the hearts of those who loved...”

I hear no more, I am infused
by the sentiment, the Rousseauesque
freedom of the world it speaks of,
enraptured, I holds up my head
and think of the Chargé d'Affairs,
who turns out to be Silentio’s relative.

His wife too is touched that such
simple sentiments should infringe
upon such anxious times
she has heard nothing of her husband
Only Effie so far is uninspired.
What had de Biran said to her at Grateloup?
“Rousseau speaks to my heart, but sometimes
his errors afflict me.”
The Vicaire Savoyard
should have no new disciple.

The chorus ends and is replaced
by the actors from Act Four
“If the hurt had been my blame
and the punishment my shame.”
and concludes with Guarino's version.

“You are gold,
you are fire
Your gaze is obedient
your glance into the west
You are summer.
You seek the salamander.
You melt. You move.
You come alive
You lead him to a fullness.
Your thick hair burns
to your crown,
Your long white torch
is slendered to the legs
Your arms incline within
Your fire is bound
by the tendons of your knee
Your breasts enclose the rose
while the boughs of your shoulders
hold up the hanging air.

All three of us are invited on to the stage
to accompany the procession.
Then I seem to stiffen.
My clothes are torn
by emerging stone.

There is a commotion
of voices and horses’ hooves,
Alcestis’s mouth stills to silence.
The servant speaks in a lilting
Parisian acent:
“The directory's troops found
only the servants.
The chorus ended:
The first scene was from Beccari's Sacrifizio
An actress from the Institute intoned the argument
“A shepherdess has offended Diana,
by witnessing her mysteries.
In punishment she must hunt the boar...”

I hid in the forest, alive with foliage,
legs free to run at the slightest sound
of a rush from behind.
My strategy had to be to pin
the unknown beast down on three sides.
Pacing through the forest I chose a site
bordering the lake with the orchard on one side
and the palace wall on the other.
I held the fourth side open to the garden.
I waited kneeling on one foot, with the spear's butt
placed against the ground parallel
to her poised, right thigh.
She heard in a rush in the herbarium
undergrowth, instinctively she froze
her eyes rested on the blackberries,
Erato's phial, the scent of sleep.”

Must you go on? Is there more?
Yes, the story still has episodes to run.


 


4 File: Winderby Confounded


27. From Winderby’s Finite Journal

Iremember now the stories are telling.
The train stopping suddenly and the man
urgent, ungentle, passes the sleeping woman
After a thunderous night passage
from the brick-walled depot of my mind
out to a railway guard who takes them
with a nodding acknowledgement
of routine infamy and its parallel silence.
Northrop Frye’s familiar sacrificial scenario
hovers above, droning for snatched away victims.
I saw an old man in a frock coat
standing in the rich hallway
and the depth charged mirrors
of The Antico Terra Hotel,
staring at the walls.
His eyes are shut. He seems to speak.
He gestures impassionedly,
but his voice makes no sound.
The servants call him Le Maitre.
Meanwhile I have to make sense of Brindisi,
as the women have disappeared.2
28. A Brief History of the Kythera Island

Dear Winderby , I have these few papers regarding your island

1.From The Cycladic Turtle-Shells.

“I hide, exulting that my spouse, a boy,
strikes out for the inland ravine,
as once he sailed in to the tug of storm.
He has set his face calmly to dark clouds.
The offshore winds have buffeted my hair,
which flies, washed free of ancestral combs.
The tresses sing of his return, bashful with success,
as he gripped the vibrant tails of marlin.
I set new fires in the thrill of my dream,
remembering the shelter of the night.
He came to me as an embarrassed child
my intimate , he stuttered the word we spoke.
only in love-play; aselph. Know, descendent,
I shimmered like pale clay, exposed in the
hollow of a parched river, naked as
never before, my dark cloak gathered up,
a mangrove bank round my shoulders
to be mastered by one who pleads consent
that is the tap-root of one, the red tear,
that re-dyes my childhood shroud in the bright
expensive crimson of the history-cloth.
I am the prayer of these, his hands, uttered
to the moist pot that ripens into birth.
while I shelter from the strange, quick strength
of changing winds. Fear makes me write openly,
unsure what preparations to make as
the prey of an unknown predator.”

2. Appendix to Early Greek Shards Of Cycladic Two, A Monograph.
From the notebook of Midshipman Bright
“At anchor, in the lee of the volcano,
the tattoo on the Bo'sun’s shoulder,
showed the incidence of mermaids
filigree as a Portolani chart,
as its arm rowed his formal passenger to shore.
The Rev Philip Berry D.D. stepped down,
telling me of his missing chronometer left on board,
“Still the archaic Greeks might have a timepiece
to leave behind, once the treaty is signed.”
In the blockhouse, which he reached by evening,
the black-suited clergyman came upon a chest.
It was piled with potsherds and nothing else,
save for a scrap of parchment sewn under the lid.
“ I Glaucon, near lost my life to find these fragments.
My boat foundered on the Rocks. There is evil here.”
That night to the baying of strange mammals,
he took out the acid to test the potsherds
and read on beneath the grime.
“ I, Amun Seth, outcast from Egypt, tell all
who draw near to read;
there is an island off the mainland
to which I fled with all my family.
Here lives one who is immortal and swore
to protect us all in return for our promise
we would neither leave nor relate
to any traveller the secrets of this place.
Strangers, I break the second vow.
Would the first have been easier to break.
Even the silence breeds malice.
Beware the creature that leaves the womb of the dead
to return at dawn.” I saw the prelate’s eyes
brighten “Such evidence of scripts here
and not in Mesopotamia nor Egypt!
Excited , he turned down the lamp
settled his mosquito net and no more,
except a dream in which he and his sister
were disturbed by a creature running
through a field of wheat, unseen save
for the furrow made by the parting stalks
that seemed to end at the door to
their Swanscombe family tombs,
as he did relate to me on awakening.”

3. Letters of Legal Dispatch, Containing an Account of the Extinction of the Aselph

Kythera, Friday January 10th 1760
I have dreadful news.
Our little brother is dead.
I fear the worst, but cannot speak.
I am racked with guilt, yet I know
no-one would believe me.


Georgetown, May 11 1760

“Beth, my parents and I,
have just returned from
Georgetown Jail.
The Governor will not
accept the testimony
of our maidservant
that she saw a creature
of the most hideous mien
turn little Lewis to stone
and drag him into a cave.
At least she will be deported
and not suffer a crueller fate.
I do not know whom to trust.”


Georgetown, Kythera, May13th 1760

“No-one need ever know, save you,
my demon, my angel of cold crystal.
Gretchen is to leave for the dismal shore.
My silence sent her there, an innocent,
yet where in the world of discovery
can pure malevolence
like yours be found.
Would they had hanged her
then all tongues would cease.

Georgetown, Kythera, March 1800

I, Erasmus Potts, poet, Social Philosopher
and naturalist of this Island
re-mould the image of innocence
and guilt, of pain and pleasure
I fashion new worlds of violent mind
to keep the secret of this cruel survivor
from ships’victuallers, who clear the island
of its Eden’s flesh., leaving only my fiend
which feeds on the carrion of culture.
Now since Gretchen Green died
in the Tasmanian Women’s colony
the gates to the Berry Cemetery lie open
and the stones of history are being thieved
by this Monster’s ghost s of time.
They populate and are immune
to scriptural, or local exorcisms.


4. Summary Notes for Overseas Officers

Plural Socialis m has reached its Nadir.
a law affecting the wearing of masks
must be seen to be flouted to play safe.
The people hanker for the old order,
but cannot define it, as every book crumbles,
every note of music vanishes, the paintings
become merely framed reality
and tragedy must be real to be believed.
The rottenness of cultural decay
has become a cipher for
undeliberate freedom.
Generations mix dangerously.
Officers are advised to ensure
more formal dress occasions
are volatile with sexual jealousy and spite.
Utopianism is the only opportunity
for the people to show their reasoning.
The Church of Extra Planetary Salvation
is grave with debate. Time has only
just begun to get going with the islanders
as a commodity and is in short supply
Stocks are disappearing fast. Astral Colleges
are the only form of higher education,
though illegal ghosts swell lecture halls.
A typical evening out in Port Seth
may begin in the Time Back Bars,
but soon revolves around the great houses
whose parties take myth, rumour and allusion
as well as the more usual drugs and beverages.
yet it is our advice to overlook
the presence of illegal, bootlegged time.
It is advised to be seen in public
with whimsical, spirited teenagers
lest the spectres suspect you are among them.
These girls can be spotted in gossamer silk,
with the lozenges and paint to show
they are aliens. It is a law that
the officially extinct Azelph
should not be imitated, as this confuses
the metaphysical meditations of the watch,
but apart from this you can be whom you want,
as no-one’s identity lasts for long.
Do not disturb those who study the graveyards
and drift to the great cave that covers
half the island, including the jailhouse
with its globalised Gretchen Green memorial
and fast food chains with perching ancestors.
The drifters are in retreat from this world
of casual pleasure. You will find them
lapidary and cold, yet dancing
in a form of prayer for the elsewhere ones.
They have abandoned identity
and crave the mystic opportunism
to be lured away by undiscovered ghosts.
With kindest regards Attwater


29.The Palace at 1.61 am

My Dear Cedric,
The Temporal Office has released this description
of the Kerkyra Villa.
It is attributed to the author of the Chronaca

“His father, himself an academic
of no mean repute,
in accordance with the prevailing fashion
desired a villa, not far from home.
Pierfrancesco Silentio, Vice Chancellor to three
popes, arbiter elgantiarum, legate to the Marshes,
Duke of Candia, Apostolic Pro-Notary and
Keeper of the remains of Santa Artemia:
from Vignola and a garden from Amannati
half a day's journey from the coast of Kythera
and hence in no need of bedrooms
or servant's quarters.

It's design was intended to occupy
a disused quarry and was never completed.
It aroused great admiration at the time,
yet was never lived in by its owner, but by
his son, Silentio Silentini, when exiled from the Sacred College.
The cortile was never enclosed,
leaving the Mezzogiorno exposed to the olive trees
and Pierfrancesco's arboretum
to set arbitrary standards around the fountain
which stood in its centre.
True to Mannerist insecurity the triglyphs
of the entablature slipped, one in three
down to the wall face on all facades
Before the garden, a gigantic portico
larger in fact than the entrance gate,
was suspended on columns, before
it lay a moat of fish-ponds crossed
by an elaborate bridge from which
the garden ran to a semi-circular
colonnade which enclosed an open lawn.

Thus forming a Teatro Olympico
in the manner of Pliny the Younger's description.

Behind this was a huddle of unfinished buildings
including a loggia with an apse
carved into a side of the quarry
in domical, quadripartite vaulting.
The two remaining bays were open to the sky.
The whole edifice was heightened
by an attic and corniche with chimneys
which rose above the colonnade like a
stupendous feat of theatrical design.
The building stood on an island
in the river and in times of
flooding was inaccessible.

Deserted by the family, it became a hunting
lodge, for the local petty nobility
Brigands and Pifferari took over
the parkland, to be turfed out or hired
whenever the hunting parties arrived.
Pierfrancesco's (wife) had left parts
of the North walls deliberately breached,
these were surmounted by obelisks, funerary urns
and trophies and made unlawful exit
and entrance through a concealed arch.
The interior decorations had been
entrusted to hirelings who had run amok
with stylistic license when they heard the old
man did not intend staying.
The statuary, despite rumours
to the contrary, was the work of tedious hands...

PS It is time the quidtuncs stopped
and you set sail for Cythera?

I am your obedient servant,
Frederick Attwater, Keeper of Enigmas.


30,.The Further Wanderings of Winderby 1

So you can go on with your tale:
“Rome in winter, Venus and Mars in quartile,
and Mars exhalting in its house,
the scorpion was in the ascendant.
The Lord, Sun had hidden his face
The configurations were influential,
but Silentio had tired of Ptolomy,
only the fixed stars of active intellect
and the god, whose chariot of crippled limbs,
His Circassian servant was pushing him
over the bridge, and would determine
the imperative will
and clothe again his passive bones
in the mysteries of pure nature
as Adam to Christ,
so Orpheus would be
a body, to suit a future God.

His circle feasted under the pruned vines
The sirocco was dying down,
leaving a still, dry cold in the gardens
as nightfall exposed Gaffurius’ heavens.
in sounds of polyphonic moisture.
Cold dew fell and
a coal fire was burned
in the Athanor, around
which the guests gathered round and rubbed
hands. They ate from
long tables set out in the cortile .
The quail, pigeon and lamb
being particularly praised.
Afterwards there were confetti
a group of the graces and muses
in the summerhouse, formed
exquisitely in a strange dance.

A peal of trumpets, announced
the beginning of the history of Orfeo
Politian’s words had carefully
revised by Giovanni
to allow for eutrapelia
Ludicrous oratory
and pleasure -making applauded
Silentio's entry.

The first acts were listened to
with amused silence,
but an interval was called
after Orpheus' descent to Hades.
Proserpina was feeling a little faint
and the Maenad graces, whose garments
did not suit October were still
warming themselves by the brasier.
The red light ruddied
their exposed thighs, calves
and shoulders.
Orpheus-Silentio had ceased to be convivial,
despite the encouragement
of Sir William Thorndyke,
his closest adept.
Silentio's massive head was draped
in laurels and his tunic was pinioned
by his arms to his side. Gauffurius, the
composer had offered to play for him.
He had been roughly pushed off.
Silentio stared at the skies.

Unnerved, the Maenads made a start,
the cold motivated a certain masterful
gymnastic style of acting.
Gathered at the Northern end
of the colonnades, which
formed the stage, they limbered up for
the chorus.

Giovanni looked at Eurydice, played by
his friend, the Marchionese
Giulia di Pompazzi
she returned it apprehensively.
(His real presence did not descend with her to Hades)
Non totum descendi anima quem descendit.
Then Orpheo began laughingly to speak the
words, and ended;
“hence forth I shall gather fresh flowers”
and held out his stubby arms
as the audience threw six wild roses at him.

The maenads, impatient at the waiting,
echoed, evoe, evoe...
“There is he who scorns our love”
the larger limbed leader took over the chorus
evoé let us give him death
and all three rushed from the collonades
towards the figure of Silentio strapped in his
moving fame,
“Seize the thyrsus”, cried the smallest,
her voice unsure,“break down that branch,”
came in the first a red-haired
daughter of a local trader,
threw down the faun and the skin.
In a frenzy all three began to strike
at Silentio who kept his hideous face
turned to the stars.
They thrust him to the ground
and Silentio roared to the thrill
of the spectators, servants included
Everything in soaked in his blood,
“Go now and scorn the wedding torch,”
they intoned together
Then all three interlocked arms
two bent outwards and one inwards.

'Ognun segua, Bacco, te'
Bacco Bacco eù, oè

The whole audience began to join in,
following the breathless maenads
in a frenzied procession
across the garden, over the bridge
through the loggia and into the
cortile popolaresco

All of us, all of us after Baccus!
Hurray, hurray, come after us.
I’m dead sleepy, almost dished.
Am I? Aren’t I? Am I pissed?
I can’t stand up. You’re just as a drunk.
Come on. Come on. Don’t play the monk.
Get sloshed with me, with me I say!
The voices died away into the house

All of us, all of us, go his way!

Orpheus lay supine
on the grainy amphitheatre.
his servant hesitating until
they disappeared. Then at a
sign from the withered heap,
the servant stepped forward
and righted the frame.
Silentio, mobile rushed to the brazier
burning in the ludus globi
balanced with a beryl on scales
and threw in the beryl,
and a scorpion then,
returned to his first position.
Concurrently screams
of terror could be heard in the Cortile.
éu, oé, eroe, oé. Where the feminine
voices were thick with terror
they faded slowly to silence
only to be responded
to by a whispering and the sound of
aristocrats ordering their coaches
and the clop of hooves stepping
and then galloping out of the countryside
into the Roman night.

In the Cortile the three Maenads
crouched in paralysis, still intertwined,
The skittish one facing the other two,
her arms upturned while the two pairs
of hands of her companions
held hers and each others.
They were processing, Charis emanating
by a surprised serious expression the message
to Euphrosyne, who rapt in an
expression of awesome beauty re emanated
as if turning back from the legend to look
to Thalia. It was one of haughty voluptuousness

Yet the space at which Charis was looking
was empty, above the square mounting-block
he had surrounded.

Orpheus appeared by the great doorway
and faced at them. His expression was
one of dissatisfaction, for the other
doorway, a maidservant appeared
with Guila, covered in a cloak.
she moved ,with her eyes on Giovanni.

In a dream, though she resisted a little
when the maid servant removed her
cloak which left her naked,
yet she looked on compliantly into
Orpheus' eyes. Both creatures danced
a swirl of fabric, violence and style.
An express calm came over them
again, she slipped in between
the paralysed arms, which
had a patina of sweat
and were turning blue and purple
with the frozen grip.
She stood on the mounting block
and turned towards the others.
Charis's stare was now on her.
She was the intermediary between
the region above the stars
and absolute movement.

Giovanni strained at his frame
then began to slip forward,
stronger and stronger his steps became
until his the flesh rose on the bone
and the muscles filled out,
a god, he stood there.
There was a clap of thunder,
and the figures turned to bronze
except Orpheus who vanished
as the rain begun to fall
drenching his four figures.

According to the Cronaca,
he disappeared. What now?

Or is that really the end?
You should know, Mr Winderby!”


31. On the Design of the Adversary

My dear Winderby,
From the Cronaca:
The Pope (In Rome, Il Papa) was, on orders of his own,
to be found dead, or, at least, in ecstasy, when it arrived.
Silentio, Giovanni, nato in Roma da e illustre
Pierfrancesco Card. Silentini
di antichissima famiglia nipote del Pont
Papa (et plusquam Papa)had never seen a day like it.
'No nephew of mine would be born a freak,'
or a daughter,” thus his Bullae, one affirming,
the other denying progeny.
The creature’s arrival would have been
viewed as providential
both to the narrative
(which got a quite a start)
and to his parents who could take
to the vaults now in abandon,
to gaze in effigy at opposite beatified ancestors.
To the Pope, too, whose Bull
had confiscated
the yet to be indexed
natal bed,
it must have been a relief,
needing no dogmatic utterance.
His priestly and episcopal formation
caused less anxiety than the evidence
of his birth to those who could not
quantify future conditionals.
The Social Services being
in Coelare Coelum
over his condition of health
and could only issue a library card,
rather than question the Bullae’s
consistency at the level of propositions.
Thus on November the 2nd,
they settled on a boy,
Silentio di Pierfrancesco
and argued the case for a truth function
that cohered with emotion in excess of sense.
Raised to the Cardinalate in only his third month
of conception, the chair of St Peter's
gran’ impulsivo was plauded by pundits,
‘creato Chierico di Camera,
Prefidenza delle Strade,
e poi Prete Cardinale de Arcadie.’
The Bulls were
both unclear on the questions of sex,
and sanity yet ratified his raising.
Thus the actus elicitus was enough
as whatever was imperative
would come to pass
as was the habit in the Papal States;
(Post natal care I was of a high quality
that year and the convent floor was scrubbed,
at least once that decade)
He grew, a member of a common blood-gossip,
but un-communicating, save in script
Hence, a boy, that will do, Silentio di Pierfrancesco.
That the proportions of his skull
where much in excess of custom
and that his lifeless legs wasted
their flesh in a month, might have been
seen by the family as a stumbling block
to his career, but they need not be
considered part of the public narrative,
for whatever history wants will come to pass
in the Papal States and in Europe.
regardless of monstrous, private life

A gross, protruding forehead,
which splays his eyes,
allowing the patrician nose a slow incline,
or too much space to rise.
His cylindrical breast which heaved
at each effortful wheeze,
the irrelevant legs
were upstaged
by the incredible power of his shoulders
despite his inability to speak.

His clothing compensated
in sumptuous Renaissance silk;
it hangs on his shape
an oversized Christening gown,
his cassock, cloak and pallium
covered five speeded up
layers of sacramental privilege
(the earlier
hysterical hatred of music concealed
in silence)
He would have sharpened his heavy skull
to a deadly poignard, his teeth to needles
and have had hooks made, to Vitruvian design,
for his stubby hands,
but it was not deemed fitting
until after the official portrait
was painted by Costa.
Amassed in Baroque acrobatics
he towered on empty clouds.
He slept only two hours a night
rose, said Mass, privately,
or with his Humanist circle,
followed by his breviary.
Then took to his study to scribble
at his defence of Cajetan,
at his compilation of how Suarez
fell short of the Blessed Cajetan,
whose commentries had inspired him,
at Padua,and The Sapientia.
He had connexions with the Roman circle
of inflammatory vision with whom he shared
a vow of silence and an obscure
belief in metempsychosis.
His thesis defended the
inability of natural reason
to prove the immortality of the soul
and held that Cajetan’s
commentary on
ln Primam questione
duo, articulum duum
‘I do not see that natural created truth
desires to see God.
did not clash with the
Angelic Doctor's Summa
Contra Gentiles at three fifty seven p.m.
His own beliefs added the view that
Christ took Adam's body after He rose.
and was hidden in it
as Pan to Proteus and Zeus to Eloi
And accordingly was fulminated
with the anathema by the same, uncle the Pope
and privated of the dignity of the Cardinalature.
as quoted in private audience
by the English ambassador,
“Heresy, you stubborn, apostate dolt,
is a family matter.”
Yet his natured self could not naturalize
itself even to Adam, with this effort
he remained content
and one day was transferred (transferito)
either to an abbey,
or to his father's villa never to be seen since,
buried perhaps in the church
“ebbene, sepoltura nell Chiesa, o a sentimento di altri,
or in the grounds of the Villa... nella
Villa Silentini, senza alcuna memoria.’

Though Rome rumoured that his recreations
were broadly devoid of observable goodness,
a natural divinity in immanent ecstasy
for Adam as Christ, had expelled his heart.
Whereupon the course of his life was interrupted
by an importunate death encountered privately
not without suspicion of poison
(non senza sospetto di veleno)
prepared if it can be believed, domestically
and breathed in as incense.

32.From “The Windows”

Dear Attwater,

Quid tunc!
Sad youth with a white lie
What then? Cried the dramatic years,
the persons taking the part of time,
the hospital hours?
So Alberti's eye has taken wing
from its case in Bloomsbury.
(Hill’s Corpus, one six one)
The curators are dumbfounded,
yet the story has no time for them.
The break -in, mentioned now
can come at the end
in the sequence of events.
Then what?
Wait, if you want, for the security
officer's report, encoded for paper people.
Take Les Fenêtres,
old men who die kissing the glass.
What then? cried the windows, open on the spaces.
Mallarmé’s angel glides in on Cayley’s ‘New Flyer.’
How are we to get through all this sight?
Appollinaire, in enamels,
sits at the Delauneys’ windows.
His train flies over with Wilbur and Orville,
Earmley, Blackfriars, Rome, Paris ,Lyon, Brindisi, Kythera
let alone Vancouver, Hyères, Maintenon,
Harmondsworth, Les Antilles.
How many tears does it take
for the poor youth to dab them
with a white tie?
How many spiders wove in the light?
Then what? cried the reader,
whose higher skills are under employed
or should it be the thirties still
take the 2.30 from Howth Station
and take Yeats’ ghost to read with you
So what then? cried the poet
like any other, he changed his shirts regularly
like any other critical myth,
hunted a cipher
to a reputed discourse,
he made friends, he wrote,
he dreamt, he died.
Then what?
What effort counts,
if pain is the price?
What shame not worth it
to be finished with pain.?
What then?
and what if the spurned Virgilian lover got even?
What then?
So the world is under threat from number?
So what?
Seeing all thing and distinguishing each separate one.
So what if you drink the pearls dissolved in vinegar?
Can you taste them?
Or if it is the Critique of Last Judgement
So what?
The narrative is determined,
Alberti’s eye is on the wing.
Yet the story is not time bound,
We can begin at the end if we want

So then what?
The story is unpredictable,
we can expand, give references,
bring in actors to meet the characters,
tell you more, tell you less...

What then?
The windows are open.

What then?
The light is winding in.

Yours sincerely,
Cedric Winderby M.A. (Oxon) M.D.(Freiburg)

33. The Triumph of Opacity

The maidservant survived to tell
about a another woman,
who got in at Blackfriars
wearing Elizabethan clothes,
A man wearing a frock coat
and a long black cloak
whom I recognize as me,
climbs in after her.
The woman takes out a script and
shows it to her new companion.
This time they rehearse
Webster’s unfinished play;

(Fizzleshot: show title-page)
Diomedes and Penthesilea.)
(Through window)
‘My part? I'm supposed to be Penthesilea
Well just for a joke. Yours is Achilles.
It's all written down here. Would You
awfully, mind if I practised on you.’

(Jump cut. Flash back to Elizabethan stage)
Diomedes: "Why did you have the message in your pocket?"

Penthesileia:"I...I...took it from Ulysses in case it
came to any harm. In case it tore, or
someone might have stolen it "
Diomedes:" Then why didn't you give it back
Penthesliea: I felt faint... I was taken with an illness, Sir?
Diomedes: Why did you go back to return to bed so quickly?
Penthesilea: It was a sudden chill, sir. I thought it felt cold

Diomedes: Light these lights!
Penthesilea Thou comest to bring good news
(Enter Achilles)
Achilles: No, lady, I bring a grave message
Penthesilea What news?
Achilles: Bring the weapons here.
Penthesilea What grave, lover, you mock me.
Achilles: No. I do not mock. Your mouth shall hollow thy grave.
Penthesilea How can a mouth dig earth?
Achilles: A dirge, ma'am digs the grave, to reach the earth
Penthesilea And Earth is no more.
Achilles: I have a gift from Calchas to replace it
Prothoe,: What? Lords! and Tapers
Calchas: (Arming Penthesileia)
Aye, and a fair garland of lily flowers have I tied here as
your last garland. See, they’re pink and white, with red beneath for treachery.
Penthesileia: (Aside to servant) Run, cry, this soldier seeks my death and bid farewell the sister of my joy.
Calchas: Stop her mouth and take her hence
Penthesileia: She is my servant and waits on me,
Calchas: Then bid her depart, dear Lady, or she will be sent
Prothoe,: Farewell.
Penthesilea: Look to my garden and water it well.
What my blood has committed,
may the labour of my hands absolve.
Calchas: No stay, be a second in this duel.
(Penthesilea and Diomedes fight)
Prothoe,: (Penthesleia wounds Diomedes) What full met the dirge!
Calchas: Sweet Achilles, avenge your burning rage.
Penthesileia: Then fight, fight!
Calchas: Thou should’st have a horror of this clash.
Penthesilea. (Achilles and Penthesileia fight)
It doeth not affright. My warmed blood shall flush
out fear from my tearless cheeks
Calchas: Stay, my ditty yet should set thee trembling
(Pipes)
The whispering clay invites thee to stay.
Worm, ant and owl smell out the way.
While friend Robin-red-breast
robs your tresses for a nest,
The wolf shall not harm your peace,
for he shall dwell in your grave for lease.
Death will turn your beauty into dung
and pluck the sweet berry of your tongue.
Traitress of the brave, appeal no more!
at Achilles’ blows, your coil swills to gore.
Penthesileia: Go my friend, bless me in my shroud
for his blow ends me, my sword’s unstained.
(Dies)
Achilles: Now go. My eyes are misted, heaven fall to me.
I noticed the willow herbs’ startling colour
and is that a fieldfare in the hawthorn?
Yet nothing rivals the face I have killed.”
(Jump cut to Winderby on the train)
I find it difficult to speak to the man.
What I had wanted to say is now
out of place in a rehearsal .
Then I see it is the same man.
The Silencer addresses me:
( Jump cut to Webster, sitting next to Winderby on the train)

‘For the action of the Play turns well generally,
I must recall the industry of my friend
Mistress Noyes, whose true imitation of life,
gave a tragic quality to value, if not to preserve.
(Tracking shot of train travelling at night. Voiceover Winderby)
The girl, wearing an Elizabethan costume,
with strange armour lies on the seat.
It must have been him who pulled the chord
which is all I remember before the sudden squeal
of breaks on steel. The man I know to be The Silencer
becomes feral, runs along the corridor and jumps .
The engine is Descartes Machine Class without Ryle’s ghost,
driven by Turing under manic but achievable orders.


34,. Message to the
to the Cythera Ferry Master

Hoarse with a blockage of baked ash,
the upper airs caught the volcano’s solidarity.
The isotherms have a wearied defence
which displace the eruptions,
dried in a shower of classical semen,
and strike at the river bed
and strangle its tidal slack.
Yes I admit I died long since.

Remembering the cost to the Appeal Courts,
what I want to say depends
on finding the code in which I can
make contact with Headquarters,
yet the ciphers are busy
this afternoon in Brindisi.
I am a trusted passenger,
eighty years on and still in cloth.
I still do Attwater the odd turn
and the Ministry of Secret Threatenings
(and the children will they be throwing
pebbles to shatter the night tide,
which might only have one bank,
carbonised against the setting sun
which prints Ensor's 'I' onto the swim.)
Thus it is possible that everything said
is being cracked open, or that the
monitors back in the friendly country
have packed up for the day, or for ever.
Yes I admit ghosts have little motive
for physical lovemaking.

What is needed for this narrative
is a term without any relevant cause,
a parentage to refer to, but only to stress its isolation.
The events of the journey and the women
who are still bricked up in my memory.
(The predestined for example,
could only have been so raised
at only the third month of conception
as a soul without a heart
is indeed an abstract thing.)
Earlier this very day I have looked for
tin openers, (their constant undermining is
raising questions about the hotel kitchen utensils
whose closed grasp of analysis needs be kept sharp)
where I read the tomato tin's label
'Prodotto in Italia a norma di legge'
Which gave me time to look at the
label, its image, a painted code, concealed
my intentional object, only the lissom
cutting edge could cipher the message which
my tongue could taste.
why does an imagined tin
still need to be opened?
Why do old ghosts lust?

The painted images, red and lustrous,
have coded signified and signifier,
the thing itself needs an opener,
burning behind De Saussure’s pate.

Thus even to raise a character
a travelling companion,
could produce the taste for uncertainty
which, the openers not being available,
could more the less frustrate the listeners
into a sullen attention.
The woman lying by my bed,
wearing Nineteenth Century costume.
Bunkered though, to the west of the city,
I want to tell my loved ones of promotion,
which may have been mine long ago,
but jammed in a previous transmission.
They do not read Troeltsch, or Weber
in these climes, the I Ching
is in everyone's hands;
the material providence is passed on here
in Materialistic Puglia.
I have been reunited to my sinning church.

Across the tight sky
the jets of a Clipper,
travelling to Potamos,
cut the misty sun above the Piazza Mercato,
no longer ascending,
but levelled for Cythera.
I am there in the real daring
of fancy, by their side.
in the seat next to me
sits Leconte de Lisle
sucking Villier’s candy again, this
time with no displaced imagination.
He has it blocked with my lost
British Museum reading card
which is why I write to you
for clearance and space
to be accompanied by my lover,
an open stranger.
 


5.Movement: The Birth of Flight


35 On Authority and Sameness

Reply to Attwater.
I am alerted by your message,
but its bareness has brought about
a break in my cover.
Sub specie aeternitatis,
the streets are alive with
troops, some, with assignats to spend
are from the directory, looking for the
Chastel de Beaureguard Sisters
and the Pomponazzi woman,
whom I think to be the woman in my room.
They have warrants for their arrest,
but ask constantly about sculpture,
regretting Blondel and Pigalle’s invasion
of Strasbourg, or sidle up to the issue by
remarks about the Critique of Teleological Judgment
or Schelling's doctrine of the Absolute.

In the rotting vegetable markets
and just round the corner in the port
the ambassador was considering the effects
of the constant erotic passage to the island.
In the Hotel, the ladies were preparing
to leave for the midsummer retreat
Word had it that a large, disused residence
has a superb colonnade that would
feature them in their rendering of Guarini.
Rome left with them, downing their masks
as the sumptuous coaches took the sea
for the Island.
Hours later, they returned,
the Directory's troops having invaded
and fled to their own hills
the fate of les demoiselles
not being the concern
of any particular noble

Others, merely Napoleonic, are content
to hang around, roaming about
not looking for Madame de Stael, Constant and
Chateaubriand, though they have
De Maistre in their pockets,
but for American dissemblers
and the English who shelter Pleyels.
The Nazis are the best behaved.
They talk about Kunst
and Bernstein, which I take to be amber.
As they seem to know what I am talking about
and have my records, they leave me alone.
They have no instruments
for measuring the distance
between death and obedience.
What worries me is what they will do
when they realise they are not getting anywhere.
The whole request is a thought –experiment.
It bears no relation to reality.
Because the last thing, Cythera wants
is only to be found this way.
Each day the tension mounts
on the breaking of the poet's code,
on agents of rationality trying to reduce to
sense what is a though –experiment,
rationalising and fossilizing what
should have had no relationship to reality.
Feudal, Renaissance, Napoleonic, Fascist
scenes borrow each others’ props
like Darwin’s organs.
They mutter the name of a
heterodox Renaissance humanist,
as if it cure them of doubt.
What can you say when they want
to arrest someone called Amaryllis?
This is no time to make news
of one’s travelling.
Yours sincerely etc Winderby


36. The Further Wanderings 2
A Railway Chronicle
Oxford to Paddington,
or A Mediaeval Jig Revived.
(Camera immobile
horizontal to tracks
revealed as train
departs. Train slow fade,
extreme longshot.
Sound added, a train
travelling from before to after)

(Voice over )

At Oxford General station,
I imagine for company,
a woman who wears
the three ravens badge of
of the Association for the Education
of Women at Oxford.
(Shot through train window)
She gets on the train.
She cannot see me.
The girl is no more than twenty
has a small, oval face
and a long, slender body.
Her hair is light brown
curled quite closely
around her head,
allowing the sunlight
to whiten the brown a little,
but tinged with auburn.
Her hands are thin,
and long, but graceful and deft.
Her eyes are a faint, piercing blue.
She wears a long dress with a crinoline,
and has a mantle.

(Studio set up)

Followed by a man imagined knows her
and seems to be her drama tutor.
She’s to be ‘Moll’ to his ‘Filch’
in the Jig of ‘Blind Harry Hunker
and the Cheaters Cheated’
for a revival at the New Masonic Hall.
They traipse up and down
the corridors,
practicing slapstick scholarship.
with theft and countertheft.
They talk of the old bear
(Archive)
who lies now in some
Elizabethan rubbish pit,
her scapulars pocked
with the claws of mastiffs
while her skull ears heard
the Shoreditch crowd bellow
for the cut of the whip,
a bloodied Lear with a paper crown,
a goaded Hamlet , cursed Faustus…
the sole female performer
on the wooden O.

The man begins to sing
in a strange counter-tenor.
(Sound added)
The girl is mesmerised.
‘Dark one, a pelt grows in
your supple flanks.
Its texture glazes
your breasts
and brings a bright
gleam of light
on your calves.
Its whirlpools
gather by your dimples
to run off to your legs.
Each shoulder
is turning to shadow.
Every finger flows
in curling locks
from your wrist.
Your waist is
rushing to the earth
and your loins
have plashed
with the
torrent of your hair.
I cannot touch
you more, Callisto.’

(Through train window)
and the man leaves
in a black cloak
and a cloud of steam
as the train draws
into Paddington.
I see her body
turn to fine bloodied fur
shade by shade
mimicking the contours
of her clothing.
I try to call out
but no-one can hear me.
I have no dialogue
with my own inventions.

(Fade to lips)(Is this the same woman
I saw growl at my spectre,
in an Attic bridal peplus,
shriek of fate, in khaki reliefs,
make vows of vengeance,
in mediaeval lappets and sleeves,
accept God’s will, in corseted waists,
deep décolletage and Renaissance taffeta?
She taunts my patriarchal shade.
I must write again to Attwater
My diary fans its pages, helped by the sea wind
'What then? I rasped out loud.
How can we get through all this?
Was I in Oxford? Am I now in Brindisi?
and the whole journey nothing more
than an awareness of a woman
and the accidents of a planet.


37. Second Appeal

You think I'm fooling you,
Then who do you think I am?
I can’t stay in Horace’s stinking canal.
An engineer to one end,
to fulfill the theory of value Marx's, or Ricardo’,
that the reader should waste as much time
as I have writing, which is
a domestic chore uncelebrated
by the praisers of the little way,
the dish-mop and hoover
and me, the scribbler?
I don't care if you started
on I.T.A. You must have got through
Quintilian, Colet, Comenius,
Burt-Schonell or someone lost
to be here at all
en face, left, right, black left, right,
sad left right, island,
So it’s a sad, black island,
fit for the dead, then get on with it,
my honest heart.

38.On Futility and Omnipotence

Dear Cedric,
This is what I have put together
with that sly man, Panizzi’s, assistance.
Word of the four walled room
no matter by whom it was first put about,
was recorded by Boissard in his
Topographica Romanae Urbis,
by which time its triad graces
with clasping hands had been imitated
by Germaine Pilon, to guard the heart of Louis
The crowning virtue too, was hinted at
in Biard's athletic 'La Renommé'
Thus Bologna could be looked to for the original
(He was known to the family)
but Vasari speaks vaguely of
a candelabra base, claimed for Cellini
separately by Francesco D'Ollonda.
Pilon clothed Mesdemoiselles,
but Boissard has them
traditionally nude,
perhaps a fountain.
Other sources, such as Heemsherck's drawing
in the Hague, point to an earlier date still,
but a fondness for counterfeit antiquities
among the humanists confounds the critics,
leaving only Focillon to point out the detour.
Its shape, too, has for long been disputed.
Some favouring the view of Wickhoff,
that the design of the figure of the muse
followed that of the right hand figure
of victory in Bertholdo's battaglia in the Bargello,
her feet therefore resting on the crouched
shoulders of three graces, while the fawn
silence, balances the other two
with a slight variation on the interlinked motif
and a finger held mysteriously to its mouth.

The candle, according to D'Ollando, being
placed in a horn of plenty which virtue
holds aloft in her right hand
as in the angel of Francesco di Giorgio.
Her left hand in this case
descending to touch the horn of plenty.
A more distinct authority is Winckelmann
whose writings, whilst making no mention of the group
are bathed in its non-existence. From them, it can
be safely concluded, we can consider
the whole extent of authentic and historical
literature. It too is impregnated with a
precise silence on this group of female statues.
The significance of this can be further
deduced when we consider that
over no other work of art has such a silence
ever been passed. Even the Amber Room
can be reconstructed. This argues for a specific
intention, even a deliberate plot in
intellectual history to oppose its meaning.
Which leaves the question of the pieces' specific
design. The variants are a deliberate attempt
to sow confusion. Claims for its design conflict
more widely among recent authorities. Muckowsky
says the floor figures are caryatides
to a four-sided fountain. Oberlin has it they
are the four legs of a table. Both are
agreed that the nymph's heads are represented
as fabulous animals, yet there is no agreement
as to which Leonardo's Windsor drawing 161 of
monsters is copied for the terrible face, or if
copied at all. Others quote the traditional
Biblical tetramorphs. The lion, the eagle, the bull
and the winged man. Others refer to hunted
animals such as the hare, the doe, the swan
and the vixen
Others again of elemental animals, the salamander,
the fish, the bird and the bear.
For Soto, the animals symbolise the seasons, whereas
for Topsesel, they refer to incarnations of Zeus.
Aratus claims they are the transformations
of Artemis' followers, Callisto, a bear,
Penthesilea, Procris and Antiope,
Agreement is not part of the game here, but the piece
is local and can be found , we can report
with Gombrich rationality has
been established - once the person
is secure, we are in pursuit.
Keep me informed of every existent
and nonexistent state of affairs.
I am, Sir,
your obedient servant, Frederick Attwater.
Master of the Office of Enigma
in the Ministry of Special (Ontological)secrets.


39 From the Sempiternal Correspondance to Attwater.

Dear Frederick,
They say what they want to, mostly,
as the forces of order which represent the States of affairs
are sensitive and know a thousand ways to waive
any of the bylaws they still remember
(Imprisonment for blasphemy, mild flogging
for wearing a mask and libel
are all the propositions they insist on)

Yet the States are abuzz with character
assassinations, foul talk
and no-one can tell who the other is ,
especially at mid-day.
Only at carnival are faces revealed.
Yet you had a complaint about me
delivered this morning. I found it in the letterbox
along with bills and greeting cards -
it was a good place to disguise it.
My code may be too precise, but
in a place where norms are vague,
it is in our interest

Here plague, banditry and anathema
are the casual dangers, breaking
another's ideolect is looked on as a
competitive sport.
An English woman in
polka-dot shorts is trying
to rescue an old piano from the bar.

Mission control must learn to understand
the conditions under which your agents have to work.
Your refusal of promotion is all too predictable.
Obscurity is for all to hear and see,
none to publish,
published and not in print,
famous and out of print,
promoted and still, still as still.

Yours sincerely,
Cedric Winderby (Disembodied)


40. Request for PR Services from Hierophant et Cie

May I commission services from you?
I speak for the woman, Tracy Cley, a Mystic
Alchemist, piano councilor and frenzied theologian,
whom I found wandering the airport,
with French Poets who didn’t exist,
and her new guardian, Frederick Attwater:
someone you would call dead and another
woman whom I would call alive but still.
I sought you out from dozens in the book.
I have been accused of crude seductions of old men
to make a profit from their dotage, especially
in the case of H.G.Wells and failed.
On being “jilted” I went mad, deluded
about Martians and litigious.
All this is libel just to get my silence
as I saw a golden light and gods descending,
beautiful, lofty thoughts, but deadly
for humans. I was not the only one,
H.G.Wells, a witness too,
has been kidnapped and has been held
against his wishes in a private
Government museum of covert desires.

41. The Further Wanderings of Winderby 3

“The audience applauded and the music,
care of Gabrieli, began.
After an interval, the actors
walked on to the ampitheatre again:
The second scene was from Correggio's Cefalo
The argument was intoned
Procris has doubted the fidelity of her husband,
Cepahlo, who hides in the bushes
while her husband is out hunting...

Madame la Marquise, hunched closer and closer
into the bushes. She strained for the
sound of her husband and peered through
a mass of thick and thorny blackcurrent
bushes. She could hear no voices, but
behind her suddenly she heard a sound.

Applause and the final act began
at once. The actors intoned the argument
of the fourth act of Aminta.
Effie found herself facing the most
hideous face she had ever seen.
She had been standing under a willow tree
Now she found she could not move
Her hair was stiff and hurt when she
struggled to move.”

“The problem with strangers
is that they must always
tell their own tale.”
“If you say so Mr Winderby,
as you saw yourself.”

“In silk she moved,
her hair in ringlets,
Her broad face proved
by her singlet.
Her orange tree
had learnt to walk,
a well-formed base
for her boughs to talk
moulding her chaste
shoulders and hips.
Voluptas, a baccante
shepherdess to the throng
casts aside her flock
and takes to the
peschiera,

Who found you there,
who led you down
through the loggia?
A masked cripple
who was speechless,
spoke in Pico's
riddles of silence
and gestured you
take refuge as Tacita,
finger to mouth,

He wears the costume
of Aminto, her shepherd,
Procris.

All three froze into a living freeze:
Madame La Marquise had
seen the others only briefly
and after the memory of the blunt wound
had been led into metempsychosis
to awaken into stone. The Erato stepping
gently onto her right shoulder.
Callisto had seen La Marquise in the bushes
and had stood there waiting for
the rush, her sister had preserved
her from harm and had led
her to the left position.
Alcestis, had felt herself released
by a crippled man with a deformed
forehead who led her to it and
by the still crouching figures of
La Marquise and her daughter.
They saw an unhewn block
called Erato, standing victorious
above them. She held out her arms
to support the figures
and awoke into stone.
Silentio passed by glowing as the sun,
but still crippled.”

That’s enough, girl.
like all dream landscapes,
yours has a harsh climate.
yet you are the only survivor.


42. Hand-Carried: to the Very Reverend
Silentio Silentini, Bandit-King
of Unknown whereabouts, Kerkyra.C/o The Vatican.

The documents included with this letter
show that I have been a target since I saw
you and your associates descend
to the New York Library backlot
in golden epiphany and metaphor.
I have seen a young man called Norman
walk out of the sea like a God
to his wife who was sorely vexed to see him
and dropped ice-cream on her bikini top
before he parted the skies and left with her,
like a streak of diesel fuel against the sky.
Death is now near. Its place is now my choice.
Although I am a Buddhist, I would welcome
any opportunity to take the veil, as it
would make it hard for CIA to spot me in crowds.
I have bought a Martian language tape
and will quickly learn your diction.
having sought to be a Refugee in Oxford
and in Paris and in Brindisi, I turn to you now
knowing you may dispose of me,
but I could be your hostage and
the subject of investigations.
I live in the USA, but if you can suggest
a meeting-place, I have a screwdriver
and can dismantle any lights
to disable monitoring and any telephone
to configure the ether and have contact.
I am sane. I do not believe in the official myths,
the Grassy Knoll Sniper, The Second Red Scare,
The Crown Contract on Princess Di.
I saw them land. I saw the dives flow
with ice-cream. I saw the wine-filled port.
They had ivy and the city was filled with popcorn.
Why would children laugh from birth if they had not?
Why do the mountains make room for us?
Haven’t you noticed, the sun rises more exactly
every day?
 


6.Picture: Winderby Pulls It Off

43.Three Non spatial Studies in Specificity

1.Winderby on Epic Consciousness and the Survival of Europe

The dark waves crash and recede from the shore.
The poets intone by the fires, wanting a meal
more than applause. Polyxena and Iphigenia
hold hands across the page of invented script.
Permission and redress bloody the fatal narrative:
the cheeks of a young girl bronzed in the firelight:
the thigh of another in the scorch of a northeast wind.
The posture of combat unfurls from the camps.

2.Winderby on Deserts

The sands prick the faces of the monks
who have returned to Mistra
from Asia, bearing the relics
of the martyred girls from Aulis, Troy
and the finger bone of Jephtha’s daughter.
To the tunes of the Hypolydian
a hymn to silence.


3.Winderby On Heathlands

Music: Holst, Egdon Heath

I had defined myself to dust. Each particle
withdrew from a name that wanted to numb it,
yet broke down into a smaller one
only to bend at the angry buzz of redefinition.
Supervenient machines combed the blue skies
leaving interlaced ropes of spent implication.
I hid from their deadly logic,
watching the thud of axioms
on innocent experience.
Here on this bracken heathland
of inhospitable literary climates,
I hid with Tess, escaped with Cordelia,
stuck straight with Jane. They faded to Isolde.
who spoke:

“ I am unwrapped from the mystery of the churches.
what is left but the chase and the capture.
My body is an allegory of lust. That thrill
of male Troubadours whose task is discovery.
The lark in the clear morning, the gleam
of sunlight where primroses grow
on the green lawn and my smooth young skin,
fresh as the rain that falls by the riverbank.
I, Aziman recoil in fear and you ask for mercy?
I shudder, wrapped in the dread of man’s treasure
and you speak of wounds? Isolde faded to Callisto,
“I am stricken with the poison dart of unyielding
secular delight.” and my dust turned to flesh


44. The Ultimate Determination of the Enemy,


Once settled in the place,
I found I could shimmer
and glide like the populous
spectres you would find
on any Greek island,
though Graves and the Durrells
are the loudest spirits.
One day, without speaking,
Polyxena began to sleepwalk
into the sea and disappeared.
The locals were whispering
a few weeks later about
a woman who had emerged
out of the waves on a small
island in the distant view
of the bay.
I left behind all excuses and
made for the island,
walking the submarine valley
impelled by a strange desire
to save the madwoman.
Winter currents from the Adriatic
ending the dry period,
were causing the gravels
to shift in the submarine valley.
I was swimming through flint,
agate, quartz, gneiss and granite,
sensing the stress of that
old continent, falling beneath me
and the young rock pushing
from the east.
I followed her into a deep chasm
and emerged in a huge cavern.
In the murky heights.
I could make out a triangle
in the centre of the dome.
Small fine stars streamed out.
Three cupolas held up
Baccho, Orpheo and Apollo Silentio,
seated on thrones.
The cupolas were held up
by three naked female figures.
I saw the Chastel sisters La Marquise
and la Baronne.
The person of Euphrosyne was turned
to gaze in ecstasy at Aglaia
who in a gesture of shock
looked to Thalia’s calm eyes
of pleasure. This rhythm transmitted
itself to three groups of three figures
each turned to each other.
A figure I recognised as Iphigenia
with the symbols of Calliope,
the muse of epic, was turned
to support the right foot of Mirth
with both hands, opposite her,
Alcestis with the symbols of Erato,
the muse of lyric poetry,
held Mirth’s left foot in the same way .
Both figures were turned to Antiope,
who held up both arms linking
with the hands of the others
and supporting the outstretched feet
of Mirth with both hands.
Mirth held up Bacchus.
Similarly the figure of Aglaia,
was supported by Penthesilea,
with the symbols of Euterpe,
the muse of music
who stood opposite Jephtha’s daughter,
with the symbols of Polyhymnia,
the muse of sacred song.
In the centre, stood Procris
with the symbols of tragedy,
holding up Aglaia, the grace of beauty,
who supported Orpheus.
The group closest to us
contained Callisto, as Terpsichore,
the muse of dance and Eurydice, as Thalia,
the muse of comedy in the middle.
Instead of the figure of Polyxena
an unhewn block of stone
supported Thalia’s left foot.
The two figures of Thalia
had the first finger of their right hands
raised to their lips, reducing Apollo’s support.
The groups were arranged as a triangle,
so that the three Silentii gazed at each other.
On the four walls, I could see frescos.
On the back wall,
a summer landscape of a valley,
presided over by Angerona,
with the River Tigris, was burning with sunlight.
The trees were bent away from the South wind,
while fire consumed a raging Semele
in a field of bronze wheat.
The blessed were pouring
out of their graves led by the man of Ezekiel,
the angel Gabriel, the horseman of war
and the figure of Sarah.
On the East wall a darkened
fresco depicted evening.
The coastal landscape was autumnal,
presided over by Tacita with the River Oxus,
the earth was full of fallen leaves,
under a glowing sunset.
The East wind was blowing and
a melancholy Danae was soaked in golden rain.
The land was full of the penitents of Purgatory,
led by Raphael and Rebecca ,
the horseman of famine
and the eagle of the tetramorph.
On the west wall a spring landscape
of a plain was invigorated by the Zephyr.
The land was presided over by Silentium
with the river Euphrates .
The water was flooding, in an early dawn.
A phlegmatic Leda was wrestling
with a swan on silver water.
The plain was full of the children and pagans
of Limbo, led by Rachel, Michael ,
the horse man of plague
and the Lion of the Tetramorph.
Behind them on the Northern wall,
a winter landscape of mountains
and snow was darkened in night.
The wind was blowing the bare trees
towards them. A bull was carrying sanguine
Europa away.
The scene was judged by Harpocrates .
The mists were descending on the river Indus .
The damned were being led into Hell by Azrael ,
Leah, the horseman of capital death
and the bull of the tetramorph
through the door we had come through.
Suddenly I was distracted by a wonderful music .
The statues were singing in fourths
and in common time. It was a
spellbinding incantation.
I saw the dancing feet of Callisto
and remembered the play on the train.
As I heard the laughter of Eurydice
in the garden and the strength of Penthesilea.
The Harding sisters were smiling
at each other and they led me
to the awful visage of Silentio,
his drunkeness took me by force.
I saw the stars and the universe
flowing with the four categories of the stoics,
the four causes of Aristotle,
the efficient , the material,
the teleological and the formal,
with subcategories dancing on the feet
of the muses on the floor.
I saw the Zoas prove themselves.
I saw the categories of Kant creating the world.
I saw the dimension of time exploding
and the height, breadth and length
of the cave expand until I could see
infinity with a mortal eye
and I could see it beaming into
gravity, electromagnetism,
dense nuclear force
and binding nuclear force,
then a fear gripped me. I could hear
the sound of substances being counted
like the echo of a million wings.
Every event and all matter
and all life was being counted,
and once a number was assigned it ceased
to exist except as an abstract object.
A date had been assigned
to the beginning of time
and the past was closing down
as each unit of time was counted out.
Every sigh, every thought, every heart beat
was being calculated and dusted away into
more and more exact equations.
I was thrilled by the power and economy
of my vision which contained me
and explained me and I felt every
part of my body being dispersed into
this vast beauty, become an ecstasy
that glowed with the slow certainty of happiness.
I was falling in love with sleep.
Then I grasped, I was falling asleep with love.
Her hand was still in mine, but I was gripping stone.
Only the girl’s finger tip still throbbed.
I began to stroke the marble edge
of her knuckles, staring into her fixed eyes
until I sensed a wrestling with cold and
a pitched conflict with some being.
The girl was coming towards me,
in terror of drowning in stone.
I could hear her voice begin
to emerge from the crush of marble.
Water began to course
down the side of the cavern.
She was becoming less in our eyes.
Each clammy, unappealing touch
wearing down in attrition,
for her the business of a micro –second
For me an eternity of burning touch,
for her, trite seconds
that interrupt the smooth
contemplation of her
eternal, ripeness,
her absolute hide:
To love is to hear the waterfall through
the single drop of the loved one
and yet to hear the drop through the waterfall
and to see the waterfall as the drop
and to see the drop as the waterfall.
The tremor that had
revealed the cave returned.
Suddenly the statues had
become skeletons, like an anatomy
class before falling into a huge rift
in the side of the cave.
We ran through the cave with thunder behind us.
until we reached the beach. The boat was just about to depart .
we both swam out, I clutched the rudder and helped
Polyxena on board. Her legs were ice-cold
and grey but as the winter sun came out
they began to warm. I massaged them with a towel.
By holding on to Polyxena I had reversed the terrible
determinism of number and had sent their
infernal machine into an ever
reducing infinite contraction.
And yet I knew Attwater would want
to rescue some evidence for his fame.
He must know now I am free
of excommunication.

45 .What Norman Did in Greece.

A letter to Anyone who Can Help..
I explained to Trace
how it wasn’t right,
her going off like that
with the French firm.
Her American friend
had vanished.
If anything, she seemed
pleased to see me.
Their office was empty,
but we wanted to get
to the bottom of this.
We set out from the town
and learned from a local
that the ‘evil place’
was on an island
off the North West shore.
We walked for about half a day
through trees Tracy said were
myrtle, cypress, lemon
and olive to Kapsali.
It took time to haggle,
with a fisherman,
but soon we were sailing
over the cobalt blue sea
under a sky that was indigo.
Only the white trehandiri boat
and its sail divided the pure air,
as the tiny island came into view
we saw the entrance to a small cave.
The man refused to land
and we had to go into it on foot
to be picked up that evening.
We came into a passage open to the sky.
I could smell the acrid odour
of the clay, of pine and the sea air,
and looked for a crevice through the
white, purple and pink
of flowers Tracy called
Campanella and others,
the smalt blue of Delphiniums.
We heard tremors below.
Tracy was already
growing bronze from the sun.
She had nothing but a full smile
on her face as she busied herself
with the pick axe and shovel.
I dug through gravel.
The island
is subject to earthquakes.
Suddenly, a landfall brought
the entrance into view .
We broke through
the lead seals on the door.
The bronze doors fell open.
There was a grim darkness
and silence was acute.
We found ourselves
looking at an immense dome.

As I turned I saw a slab of stone
was beginning to glow
with a blood red hue .
Before my eyes I saw Trace
turn the same colour
and she was bursting from her clothes,
black shorts and a white shirt
tied at the front.
she cried out to me and
I grasped her scorching hand
the stone was pouring into
the shape of my wife.
There was another tremor
and I saw the American woman.
She had been trapped in a cave
Some ghost seemed to lead her away.
I’ve never seen a ghost before
but the woman was real.
I ran out as quickly as I could,
grabbing Tracy.
Later we heard the island itself
fell into the sea during
a violent earthquake.
We flew back to Heathrow.
I picked up the car and
we got back to Earmley.
Only to find we could not
get out again The Athanor
is burning red hot.
The police are blocking the door.
and some funny balls are
bouncing in a pair of scales
Scorpions are crawling
all over the walls.


46 Timed Exercises in Self-Immolation, or Winderby Pulls it Off

A Minute for Minute to the Ministers of the Unreal

Out there, away from our skies,
the Silent ones, Blake’s great eternals,
scud across the void,
back to the heavens of spiritual hypothesis.

Perhaps the enemy all along
was the great adversary,
a Moriarty on a Barbary Island
in the Northern universe.
And I had slipped into the role
of the quest romance hero
with a surfeit of rescued women
“Some twist in the plot enabled
the hero to have his will.”

Now he is no more than a relation
between non-absent particles .
I, Winderby have sent
the great enemy home
reduced to a phonetic system,
to catch the explosion of the allophones.

It was I who walked with the women
to the Palazzo’s ruin.
I broke into the tombs
and found the eight statues,
Giulia vanished into the dark.
I found her later, even the wrinkles
on her forehead written into stone.
The Harding sisters were immutably
transformed, petrified into stiffness.
I held onto Polyxena, her cute
American madness
of sentiment and violence
allured and kept her with me.
Even though she struggled.
As if anticipating consummation
the tombs began to glow
waiting for Tracy to climb to the heights,
to the top plinth, missed by
Peake’s excavation.
Yet Tracy has gone now,
back to her shattered house.
And I offered you, Attwater, instead
as an anti -sacrificial tactic.
to hang on the old Baudelaire gibbet.
Do not think your drunken ship
will hold in this translation.
When they will come for you,
the universal silence of Harpocrates
will be shadowed by half again of
Angeronas’copied quietude,
which will be followed
by a quarter of Silentia’s
followed on by an eighth
of Calcagnini’s hush,
after which Tacita’s peace
will take half again.
Porphyry’s hymn of muteness
shall split the unit of absence again,
carrying the numbed relations
into the infinitesimal subdivisions
of silent time
generating fraction
to the smaller pieces of the
and the primitive propositions.
will put their fingers
to their eternal mouths.


47. Dispatch From Cythera, Concerning
the Disappearance of Frederick Attwater

Dear Sirs,
We do not ask to know what end
made you steal us into this arid place.
An estate had yielded new sculptures,
which had been sent to you.
Out of duty to the lure of the glassy sea,
we watched the splendid ship part
the hard meniscus over depths
so empty we kept the guess pure.
Then it steered windward
and blasted into, pungent, awful flame.
We watched as hair-line fires
threaded the sundered forms.
The thunder of the ship found us
by the quay among naked pearl fishers.
Strong light fading had annealed
the men and women’s wearied skins,
whose lassitude gave them a casual sexuality.
They make a game of their trade,
watch the fugitive ship burn out
while the harbour booms to edicts
in praise of chance events whose style
lies at the whim of some disgraced ordainer.
Such is the fate of your agent, who
was travelling with the ennead of statues.
The local vicious are honoured here
as holy men; their instincts inspire us;
We cherish their rule for consistency.
The investigation continues its spectacle of show trials
and their dramas or holy rage force a sense on
the public mind; the rituals of humiliation
are become entertainments. The gibbets
are eternal for the sake of social theory.
In concrete suspicion we await the anthropologists
to declare our M.G.M volcano redundant,
in which we stirred and faked our being.
Our tears are frozen to the curves of Victorian sinks
while nightly our tapers are extinguished
in a gust of wings, dragging the strings
of flensed Pleyels in the killing-yard.
Naturally no culprit will be found.

48.Notes On the Twofold Origins of the Self

The innocent subjects return
to the native pastoral.
Here is the modern floor.
To come back to my self,
I come back myself.
and back myself.
Here is the future door.
For yourself, my love,
to return herself,
she herself returns
and backs herself
and we, ourselves, arrive.
In Earmley itself, there is a dulling
of the mechanism itself,
where live feet walked in.
Itself a detonator,
not self-detonating,
it falls to the pavement
itself and the former door
swings itself open to reveal
a frightened couple,
themselves disheveled,
staring, emaciated,
re-imprisoned by themselves.
Here, they once sat in chairs
smiling into the oven
while they who held them,
judged them higher and higher.
They rush our selves, embrace us,
stumble onwards
into the selfsame Wates’ sunlight.

“How can we bring ourselves to help you?”
“Don’t trouble yourselves, you’ve done enough.”
“We believe ourselves able to help.”
The friends support themselves and each other.
“We’ll make ourselves available to the local services .”
Like children in a dream,
Norman will find his self himself.
Trace found her self, herself.
They look away.
They make their selves themselves,
themselves,
leaving the house itself empty.
Hollowed and thin,
in self-exchange for Attwater’s Reliques,
my unseen-self , a dream
and now we look away.

49. Deeds of Redemption

1.Ext. A Housing Estate. Day

Norman and Tracy's social worker
pushed the door of the phone-box ajar,
tilted himself on one foot
and shouted, "It's alright."
"They're sending a transit van."

Tired of the week's alarms,
he was, despite this, unsettled
that the end should be
a matter of such calm.

The haggard couple
stood by the gate of the house,
surrounded by the clutter
of rescued belongings.
The van would come and that
would be the end of his case.
The Department had been round
the night before to make it clear
the house was uninhabitable
and that they had to get out.

The Social worker liked apotheoses,
climaxes, codas to Romantic symphonies
the dictatorship of the proletariat,
coming on the Last Judgment, and great stirrings
of hard-fought victories
That the plane trees moved less
in the breezeless sky than ever before
and that the surburban development
had to find itself some work to do
to-day the same as any other
unnerved him.

"It's not our fault," came a (blind) murmur.
He was heard in silence,
even by the man who held his wife’s hand.
The women scanned the street
for prying eyes
"I wonder what the new place will be like,"
she chirped.
"I know, Norman, I know, but you can't go on
eating nuts and berries, flat out in the dust.
How do you know what It'll really be like
until you really see it, face to face I mean"

("It's coming," muttered the SocialWorker)
"Are you sure we've got everything?" / asked
Mrs Cley
"We can't go back, the bus is coming,"
said the man
"How do you know, them Symbolists
haven’t been given the nod by someone"
jibed his wife.
"Here it comes. I'll take some of the bags"
All turned in expectation
they shuffled towards the blue Morris
as it braked outside the gateposts.
"Remember to phone my clerk
if there are any snags"
"Yes of course, love, and thanks"
"Goodbye."
"Goodbye"
“I suppose it's better than being carried out,”
Norman muttered.
The driver shut the side-door
stepped into the seat, started his van
and drove off, soon hidden by the bend in the Grange


2. Ext. The Housing Estate. Evening.

The Social worker slouched away
towards the post-modern town
surveilling a cheap breakfast
and considering the implications
of a lightened work-load.


3.Int. The City. The Stairway of the House. Night

In the top flat at the front
lived Herr Gedanke and Frau Herz.
Him of obscure instinctive connections
She a sprightly being from the
Halloway road.
Beneath dwelt old señor Voluntad,
single, but never alone.
Blind, but always with
a young hand to lead him.
And then that fruitful couple
the Mémoires who possessed
the view across the rear garden
which since Norm had paved over
had become a dumping ground
which only winter frost
and wild midsummer grass obscured.

Then there was Mrs Alma Geist
who does not enter the story
Though her implied exit
led out to the end.
Their judgement, though erratic
was collective what one
measured fussily for
another would guess well.
Their security too
was a joint one.
The Gedanken, great conversers
spoke of the day when she
and her sister Pam
stood tiptoe by the great home
and never guessed
the luxury they peered at
would be tenanted by her one day.
They needed to be together
for the harassment never stopped
Mornings would dry out
the pipe that watered the whole house.
Though moisture was abundant
either from below
or above, where a leak
ran streamlets to erode
Victorian paintwork.
Light too was fading.
A day time raid
in the hallway phone-box
plunged their lives
in darkness.
None stepped out after sunset
for fear of the steps
or into the cellar drop beneath them.


48 Int. The Lower Staircase. Night
The old house is empty.
Each strategy of thought
has been confounded
by the usage of too many souls.
Each nail has been loosened
Each defence has been
refuted by the passage
of plural experience.
Grime glazes its windows.
Each argument against
violence lies rusted.
Its steps are unsteady
Worn flags are cracked and
gape to the cellar drop.
The lethargy of guilt
will show letters
from yellowed parentage
hidden from the eyes
of an adopted child.
The gutters have been stripped
and walls stand naked
in rooms that are empty
The listed stucco hangs
mortal from the eves.
Smashed light bulbs dangle

their lowered pendulums
to tell of their lost sight
to the dark, now that the hall
has let on to the wallpaper
ears which flap in the wind.
The veins of time and confusion
has decimated the mental day
The guilt of commission
looks into the unfinished repairs.
Each design has been splintered
by the tempted heart.
The frames are rooted.
Each effort has foundered
and each attempt has left
its refrain of failure
Steel pins hold a gable
dislodged by Zeppelins
and the front roof
is braced by blistered nails
whose strain alone
shores up like blitzkrieg blast
Rust seeps through the piping.
Red pools that appear
or disappear overnight.
Silent damp saturates
the soil-stained foundations

The death's watch has ravaged
the joists and chopped wires
trail from the plaster which chokes
the passage-ways and piles up
against the framework joints
In the rooms here carpet scraps
Here, a doll, books, meters,
pipes, a pram's wheels,
curtain cloth, a woman's shoes
and boxes of clothes, flex
an old overcoat,
three rusted umbrellas
and yellow newspapers
It has left its debris
everywhere, the tenant heart
that paid a penniless wealth
to resist the siege.
Conversions never took away
the stubborn shape of the place.
Glutted and spewed,
they fall on the floor,
the glued and the fattened.
A stuck door delivers
a past age of households,
a pasturage of postage,
pasted and dried

the dark cellar is fettered
with its past.
Yet whatever the letters
required was due.
The Council had published
its oracles.
Messages from the month
Dry tongues held in the
passageway of torpor
and an unclean thing:-
a compost of flesh
staled in the refuse
This is the only part
freshly searched,
turn up, like a vandalised
flower bed,
dark and moist
a gash in the dust
in the shape of a dead man.

5.Ext. The Street outside. Night
Yet the voice of their petition
was crisp and clear.

“We look for the double-glazed horizons
within the broken window frame.

Understand us, take our ravings now
and use their words to tell
you cannot save yourselves
from your dreams.
Look your train is coming, run.
Leave us and live with us.”


50.Fade-Negative: a paradigm

Glass varnished,
are floors: the painted pine
is staircase ‘the’
Case this in deal, timber,
painted to clipped wiring.
Still is house, the cat
pigeon, dead
or seed .Same the’ to’ averaged
be. Can dead and pigeon
of convergence ,the for
allow to vectors added
with description.
same the two averaged be can
water of drop every
man muttering, senile
home driving
estate housing the on
raining is it soon?
Cat passing a by
strewn feather dead lying
was pigeon feral awhile
driveway stained oil an on
standing is which
Volvo glowy, larger a primly
underlining is sunlight the while
wider metre a being are.
Windows picture the
lawns oblong the driveway tarmac the corner
is the being next door.
underlined are beak red gnarled
a with offal dried from seeds dead out
picking pigeon feral the and
windows picture glow Volvo the
lawns oblong brick tessellated, the red
driveway tarmac the sunlight
prim the of variation
minor a only with
beak red, gnarled a with
offal dried from seeds dead out
picks pigeon a feral
garden front the in driveway
stained oil the and
Volvo glowing the
frames primly sunlight
windows picture and
lawns oblong brick tessellated red
the footpaths tarmac the underline
sunlight thin.
Motion slow immobile camera
Dawn, At Estate Housing’ the.’

51. Epilogue to his Intended Muse

Earmley at last, dear old Earmley,
and the chuchyard still unmowed.
We turn the corner on the green,
to the husk of a house that is our new home.

All day our flocks have strayed
by the transmitting beacons.
The sheep are grown sophisticated,
cautious about appearing too reflexive,
given the conditions
for being authentic are limited.
They fear too much and understand
better than ourselves, the non-necessity of survival.
We claim renunciation and appended
melancholy, a minority right.
The sheep are cynical about our need
for pure water welling in brooks
and feed words such as “crystalline”
into pocket computers
and cannot sympathise with our taste
for blackberries and honey from
bees that visit only myrtle.
They have negotiated
synthetic a priori rights
to basic shelter and crop grass.
but even they admit a scholarship
gets lost under the dung.
They feel we are superfluous
in wanting to bed outdoors.

What then?

They keep our child, whom they call a swain,
born from stone from playing
with the lamb, as integration
at this level has not been known
to result in successful social adjustment.

For our part, we preserve a role
as Shepherd and Shepherdess,
so lovingly restored in Chesterton,
but are barely tolerated
in matters of husbandry.
The domestic animals,
grown feral with neglect.
demand some kind of answer.
Warlock, the dog has become
a thought-werwolf.
We rise with the starry void,
but have forgotten the spheres
by midday and cultivate natural
concerns for the sake of
which even if they did not exist
would have to be invented for the patency.

At a fixed interval our
needs are meet, narrowed to a
frugal aestheticism, that will not admit
denial, or ecstasy.
We lie minimised among the plasterboards
of the new estate. Gyproc holds our
universe and fine plaster lays
a grisaille rinse to our skins,
dulling my gems, blushing her flower.
In calculated eroticism,
we lie balanced and at ease,
on foam-backed presumption.
We have all our needs.
Promises of interviews
bring on casual patronage
to accept the irony
of state aristocracy,
and the bullet in
the second chamber
of legalized roulette.
The Athanor burns with a steady
power, its bills paid weekly
from the child's allowance
while my plashing bride
is discovered, a grace
gone upstairs to clasp hands
with diligent ecstasy.
Thickening to stone, you are become clever,
and a climate of darkness
hangs in the massed houseplants of the bathroom.
The texture of our love is naive,
observed ,complete, my existence
modified in your essence to shift
to the concrete with our century.

Within, my transplant pineal,
is earthed to the door.
Abstract rhetoric, all along was our
consummate enemy, the Inquisitor of taste.
His agents, purpose and application
have made the final connections.
The enemy you feared,
mute, inglorious Attwater
is yourself. As for the Reality Machine
if there is any truth in it, I have sent
the ghouls catapulted
on a track from time zero to infinity,
while you sink into the niveau mentale.

No hand can touch the miniature
abstraction that adorns the past.
This is the final instruction
in alexandrine fastidiousness.
Each street, each city, in each region
branching out from Cythera, Brindisi,
Rome, Paris, Earmley the grid of speech
is flexed, tautening its stress
while at scheduled intervals
the sheep depart to assimilate
to an exacting depth.
The satellites beam back
the day’s symbolic yields
in Washoe's dialect.
While gold pours into our
infant’s breakfast plates in exact
Premackian proportion.
Stronger stimulus
sucks all competing desire
into the purity of natural joy.
And yet, I hear reality coming near
with Bill Empson and Ken Burke.

Homeless, we travel under
the fixed stars and sway
to the Musagetes trio.
Beauty has fixed her light
to the music of bland gazoos
and pure nature taken to the skies
is silenced on earth.
The eternal ones,
prize winners of natural
immortality have no time for us.

Systematic, micro-chip mortality
presupposes isolation.
Wimsatt and Beardsley
would blow this
Waites house pastoral
to the trees, in a blast of
orange and bloody sunsets,
their justice more keen than death.
I kiss my American bride
with lips that are raw with the pain
of rediscovered ecstasy.
as she vanishes.
I have won, Attwater,

Woken, I have quit
you, my shadow, with success
in my final case.

I can consider the pain
of the real without
the comfort of cure.
Poetry is the art of knowing
how far to go before the reader
guesses you have gone
far enough to hide conclusion.
I hope for an explosion
of the tongue.
as there is fire everywhere:
burning at its
heart, the glowing
argument of sexual ritual
converting passion
to more passionate gold.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 20.01.2011

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