Writer, essayist. Psychologist

18. A Museum of Western Approaches

She was intricately embroidered, her tattoos an account of ancient maritime histories and haunted isolations of an institutionalised life; large bitumen crosses on the heavily freckled concave of her chest, images seen and drawn on beaches and in chapels of Moorish Sardinian landscapes. Her nipples and fingernails were brown and large, her fingers noticeably long and hesitant. She wore old philosophies and cashmere jumpers; slacks bought from the men’s collection of a department store in St Christopher’s Place. She collected books and read them in the dark. Her left arm and leg were inked in their entireties; birds, mermaids, ships, gunpowder and soot, alchemical and circular symbols, some divided by distinct lines into more crosses, some hardened into cartographies, each one a record of something that was owed to the dead. A dandelion, a snake, a peacock feather covering her thigh. She had a sea monster; a feathered whale across her shoulders, its tail falling along her spine. Her round mouth would become wet when busy, her lips exaggerated into archetypes of womanhood, his a desire to be swallowed whole and never to be seen again. She had a submarine logic and a shamanic education, she would talk in sentences punctuated by sailors, sonar, sirens, inertial systems and instruments. She was centrifugal, double hulled, she used search grids as grinding flirtations. She had been raised in a commune, in a semi derelict former school, stone topped pillars and a gatehouse, surrounded by Scots Pine and Copper Birch, Rhododendrons leading a mile up to the permanently unlocked front door. There were always dogs. She was French Italian, her mother technically Swiss and she struggled to name things she hadn’t found in books, at times she heard colours and tended to speak in short sentences, becoming nervous in words that required complex or nuanced placement, or that might otherwise give her away. She found it difficult to dance. She was intolerant of movement and light, a visual processing disorder that required her to wear glasses with gently coloured lenses. They were steel rimmed and he liked it when she wore them. If they went out, she wore penny loafers, an oversized coat that she loved and a pair of his white underwear. Walking the house, he listened to speech as if it were wave patterns, leeching linear meaning and binary information and instead of music, he heard libraries and centuries and the slow measurements of the Fates. 

When it was enough, when there was enough form, enough weight to put it into words, when the room had settled into a stasis around him, he could only then pick it up. He was in the kitchen of his house, two tables had been pushed together, forming a whole. One a large extendable table permanently assembled at full size, names scratched over time into its layered white leaves. Different paints had been used over time, a strip of post office yellow quietly prominent on one corner. The other he thought there since the buildings were first occupied, a three plank elm table, with turned legs and one side drawer, standing on a H shaped stretcher base, it smelled of spiced oils, themselves suggesting a sluicing of knowledge, of earth moving in increments beneath its legs. It happened when he relaxed, when he was staring at the gun, dismantled, cleaned, reassembled and humming on the oversized tables. It’s repetition and engineering regulated and absorbed him. An inertia return system, high intensity short recoil, a conservation of equal momentum, each movement of its mechanism a return. In reduced neural activity when stimuli are repeated; each is a suppression of neuronal responses, a social adaptation, his a unique association with self‑injury. Repetition destroys meaning through over precision, becomes a maladaptive plasticity, a closed mechanical loop. A brutal dyad, a field strip, a pilot.

England is haunted she said, the Romans knew this; Istanbul is the centre of the world. She spoke in laminates of inherited migrations, a grotesquerie without purpose, a sternal hollow that she filled with electrical width, she had become a resonance chamber in dispersals of surplus engineering, of structures that evolved for one environment but persist in another. She was a diaspora of algorithmic artefacts, a computational analogue of her biological drift, of noise mistaken for signal. She said that electricity had ruined us and that technology has failed us, that there is a straight line to the Bosphorus Strait. In logics of pepper and salt; a charged insurgent, multi-scalar, from tiny to vast. In ivory, aromatics, holy wisdoms and whalebone; she was an insurgency decommissioning non-local stimuli. She appeared in shrapnel and flechettes, as hand stitched bidirectional restraints. Sex had become a safe pursuit, a retreat, a pastoral pursuit, a pale homestead in frontiers of affect, a theocracy in topographies of blame. Self possessed and autonomous, his teeth and jaw broken, he was kept awake by his dreams.

16. The Invention of Reading

Requiring a position in his resistance, in his distribution; he was meticulous, a microscopy seen in his microbiology, in what he gave his attention to; a ball of cells that forming early in development and in axes, mediated a reduction in the precision weighting of priors. He was touch encrypted and for now, he had to be alone. It was a two-storey brick and plastered house and an adjoining outbuilding with a brick-faced bottom storey. It had been weatherboarded with steep pitched roof now of black corrugated iron. A small door hung low in a rear wall with an overhanging sack hoist on detached, blue brackets. Part of a wall had collapsed, still supporting a water tank. You go to meet the meaning. It doesn’t come to you. He became a cure for uncertainty, a standard model of being, internally coherent within recursive failures of inference, a thousand things to worry about; the unknown was rampant here, a thirteen on a ten scale. The only one ever used in flight, it was tiny in its inconsistency, frail in its gold laminate sails. At first, he thought they would be asphyxiated or burned to death, but in it, he flew between worlds distinct in their heuristics; in networks of safety, of excitement and days spent in oversized beds, in evolutionary models of an insistent life. A loam smell he knew, petrichor, beetroot, tomato leaves, her neck, her muscular back rising in winter sun. Sweet, wet, her Zurich bought watch worn loose; she wore shorts, a photographer’s bag, heavy silver. Geranium, artichoke, musk, cucumber; fresh notes on vellus skin and dark hematite pulses. In elaborated models of predictability, in spatial representations of hope, it had a rotating complication that held the escapement and balance wheel, continually changing their positions to mitigate errors caused by gravity, its internal logic having been held in a vertical position for too long. She valued accuracy and insisted on touch, she would eat damsons in early morning markets; Nine Elms, Columbia Road. Drifting lean-to tents in marsh wick woodland along the Lea Valley, housing migrant workers who sped fork lifts at New Spitalfields, darting like video games in dark milk and two sugar mornings. She held stories like others held cash. She said;

“It’s how they designed it, it’s why it works” 

What appeared as a cellular division was atomised, a dismantling of a cartel, a pragmatism of systems regulating an eventual stasis. An aphasia, a hagioptasia, a sublimation of volatile materials; his was a phenomenology held in systems working within networks, in architectures of survival, operating in neither higher or lower praxes, just more complicated and contextualised in a chaos of delight. A spectral brightness in luminous molecules held together by a singular resistance, in trajectory refinement, reduced speed and photoluminescence. Intimacy displaced, a stratified shifting towards an inner solar system, leaving de facto high register cascades where a body should be. In what had been a telemetry, a heritable, transgenerational differential; a collection and transmission of data, a powered descent in an elliptical orbit, became an absence of data in an artificial gravity, a demineralisation that in time had become inevitable. The crash, a high gain antenna operating in a near perfect vacuum; an inheritance, would come slowly and then all at once.