Bark, Frostbite, Bark

He had barely finished apologising before he swung a brazen, princely arc of piss across me. It struck me low, but I was already on my knees, so it spread across my shirt and down to the top of my trousers, big and hot, like a confession. I clasped his hands and he told me that his sister’s dog had just had a hysterectomy, but I didn’t believe him, and didn’t see the difference it might have made, even if I had.

For the first six weeks I was able to proceed more or less as normal, with him at my ankle, and largely had no reason to disturb my routine, my habits, my necessities. 444444444 4 yep, that one's fine. A steady trickle down my socks, yes: but that is my cross to bear.

Were difficulties had? Of course. He took some calming down after the announcement of the Booker shortlist, and we sometimes clashed over relative advantages of natural disasters. Yet from one another we appreciated in perseverance and tolerance. To accept a man at the cut of brow and jaw, in torrid times and squalid environs, is an act of love. And so he never gave up. He pissed down my leg with the easy abandon of a Saudi friend of a friend.

People wonder how it happened. They ask me, How did it happen? How did it come to be, come to pass? This pissing animal flailing on your every stride with a smile on his face, where did he come from, how did it begin?

And do you know what I tell them? Nothing. When they harry and harangue me for answers in the half-dark of dawn, I say nothing. When creeping summer encroaches to deceive the gullible, I say nothing. Whether I pay or steal I say nothing, nada, niente, gar nichts. In a house of prayer I say not a word. To those who come or are brought to me I say: our tongues here, flamed in communion with the dead, have no better purpose, no direction, nor sacrifice certainly, but only now you have come. And now is now long in the past longing, by now.

So I say nothing. But I think: where are your heroes? How far will you go to see them live or plan to die? Where is the piss on your leg? All fools are flesh, and all flesh is foolish. That’s philosophy, I think.

*

I can’t remember. What? What can I not remember, what is it that I cannot remember? The question is ab initio and ipso facto absurd, for what can I say about that which is unavailable to recollection? What can I remember of that which memory has lost, or is lost to it? Can I know, even, that what the memorial instinct or cognisance has left behind has indeed been left behind, sundered? How can I know what I have forgotten, given its being forgotten? You ask me to remember what I cannot remember; you ask me to revive a past which is gone; and, what’s more, a past of whose apparent existence I know and could know nothing now, anyway.

Having said that, that being said, I (which is to say I, having said that, that having been said) am an autosensational man. Man, yes. I suscept myself to certain strange discrepancies and ignore their implications. I seek to distinguish with clarity the probable from the im[why waste your time?] and often fail. Fall short. Strike out. Wait while I consult my thesaurus. Flounder, fold. Blunder, miscarry. I back the wrong horse, go up in smoke. Some treasure these idioms are. Cretinous all. That’s what I do, though, at times.

At the still point – wait: allow my actor's plagiarism first; allow me first to copy (copycopy) before rendering judgement; evaluate my theft, per favore, on its own merits – of the. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. Did that throw you off? Will you no longer dance there?

At the still point are certain shifts. Magnetic polarity shifts abound where stillness ostensibly reigns, where all is silent save the crying, save the imploring: quiet, quiet, you must be quiet. You have been here before. Most have, or, mutatis mutandis, will be. Il cammino sotterraneo. Dog, rat. Thief. Adulterer, envier, pretender. Slob. Treasonous and treacherous assailant of the body politic. Beneath floorboards in Woolwich, cursed.

The next time you interview me I will likely be dead. I intend to die of frostbite.