One Falls

One falls into debt when one lives beyond one's means.
One falls into death when one doesn't live beyond one's means.

He Was Convinced

He was convinced he existed in the form he imagined himself to exist, but this was, alas and of course, merely a creature of his own imagining.

He Was Sinking

He was sinking and sinking and sinking in the mud. But suddenly he wasn't sinking, and there wasn't even any mud.

Bag

"She opened her bag."
"What was in it?"
"Nothing of interest."
A shame. I had high hopes for this bag.

A Man & Falseness

There was a man who insisted everything was false. Whenever someone would try and tell him something, "Not true!" he would respond. Why, he was asked, did he refute everything? "Because this way noone deceives me."
But perhaps it was he himself, who it would have to be admitted was also a someone, who was deceiving himself, and even most abominably. Or if not quite he or just he doing the deceiving, someone or something more subtle again, a someone or something with whom he was unconsciously in collusion- for however you look at it he wasn't an entirely passive agent in the process, if process it was.

If I Don't

If I don't write this, someone else will surely.

Empty Chair

In the deepening gloom of an empty room sat a solitary and unoccupied chair, not that it was necessarily gloomy in the inner sense; it was just growing darker, and the gloom or otherwise all depends on one's attitude to darkness. Is darkness intrinsically gloomy, requires light to offset its morose nature, or is it the necessity for light itself that is gloomy or depressing? Against nature so to speak.
So in the middle of this room sat this chair atop which sat noone. But what is a seat atop which sits no sitter? Humiliation! Though mightn't that be a bit strong, hysterical even? Granted, to some slavish champion of the work ethic everything justifies itself by its utility, and so an unoccupied chair is a mockery of human progress and endeavour, and while, yes, it might be unreasonable to expect everything to be in a state of permanent Darwinian, Protestant efficiency, or some such, still even if this impossibility is reluctantly allowed, that doesn't mean one should have to wallow in these victories for sloth, accidental or not, such as are embodied in unoccupied solitary chairs. One should simply avert one's gaze from the offending article, even if its offence is in all apparent innocence. But what, our Calvinist tinged observer might remark, is innocence?

The Seeker

Reality always lies out of reach of a seeker because, by definition, a seeker never finds what he seeks, otherwise he would not be a seeker.

His Legs

His legs were just long enough to reach the ground. Any shorter and he'd have been hovering in mid-air.
"No, no! You can't say that!"
Why not? What's wrong with it?
"You're defying gravity, physics. And maybe even biology."

He Exists

"He exists in a realm of pure thought."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"I mean he's completely insane."

Debated Furiously

This is a work on which much has been written, debated, furiously and otherwise; this adverbial "otherwise" including an educated, civilized icy gloss which in truth contained even more fury, or something worse than fury, for the fury was at least honest, unconcealed, laid its cards on the table for all to see, even if in the most wild manner, whereas this cool educated gloss was simply a handed down method, the device of a class of people, an inherited form, which enabled them to assert their superiority over their implied boorish lessers; and so this method was impersonal, abstract, inhuman even, whereas the abandonment of form within the impassioned fury of the other speaker was the unfeigned and natural outpouring of his felt core.

But, of course, such is the wisdom and strength of this urbane, "civilized" method, that the furious one will lose by his lack of restraint, even if he has truth, or something more closely resembling truth, on his side. He will leave an unsavoury impression on the audience, and even if one sees he has truth and the civilized man falseness, still one will feel an uneasy embarrassment for him, and the man's growing isolation will imperceptibly deepen, felt by all, and so falseness wins out merely because it has method, elegant form. The audience, even if faintly recognising the falseness, will still reluctantly and with some bitterness bow down to the polished method.

But what has been written on this work, and debated so furiously and otherwise? The same old debate I'm sure that always rears its unsubtle head: "What does it mean?" To which I would be tempted to say, it "means" whatever you experience in the reading of it and the aftermath of the reading of it, which "meaning" may have become something else altogether once transformed or forced into some secondhand linguistic substance.

Mirror Mirror

From directly behind a see-through mirror a man looks out, and in perfect alignment to this mirror, a few feet across the room, is another mirror. What does he see? Light bouncing this way and that, this mirror reflecting that mirror, that mirror reflecting this mirror, this again reflecting that, and on and on and on.

Forgotten

A cellar full of stuff - various junk and valuables - in a deserted house, all covered naturally enough in layers of dust, floating particles of which multitudes sparkle in the golden beam of a shaft of sunlight through a humble, hopelessly dirty window - or something poetic anyway like that. A forgotten world. But then someone descends, lifts a bolt and enters, and it's a forgotten world no more.

Away They

There were words and they grouped them together, laboured away and made structures out of them, and in they got and away they sailed across the seas.
Some sank, many sank, they all sank.

Bit of a Rehash

This was originally written in English, then mistranslated into French, and then mistranslated again back into English.

Expected

He expected something from them. What? God only knows. And why? Perhaps not even God knows.

Balanced Pole

A man was holding up a great big pole, a pole which from his perspective must have seemed to extend to the most impossible height, and though this "impossible height" would of course have been nothing but exaggeration and cliché, still it was a real and considerable height, and so the pole's balance difficult to maintain, or if not necessarily difficult to balance, potentially very easy to unbalance. This balancing was much more than simply a matter of muscles and willpower, for however determined and focused, tensed muscles will eventually, and even soon enough, strain, and no amount of determination will hold off the moment when they give way altogether, and so disaster.

No, it took more than just a big determined lump of flesh; wise body position was vital to provide greatest stability of self and pole, and also, in happy symbiosis, to provide for a minimum of unstressed bodily effort, but even then if attention drifts, the mind slipping away off somewhere, the vital gravitational centre imperceptibly shifts and the precariously balanced pole, now precariously unbalanced, its precious and perilous equilibrium lost, starts to topple sideways and return to earth. Though all is not necessarily yet quite lost for no matter how momentarily distracted, the very beginnings of such movement will be sure to bring the man's alarmed attention back to the reality of the pole and himself and he may yet retrieve the situation, returning the pole to its axis of stability rather than of calamitous instability.

But if it does fall? Disaster? I don't know. It's only a pole, though perhaps it may crash into something of greater significance- knock a house, break a window. And even if it merely falls harmlessly, still the man was balancing it surely for some good reason, unless that is he was merely balancing it so as to prevent the calamity of its falling, but even that he will argue is a good reason. But anyway if he did have it in the air for some good reason he would now have to get it back up there again, and such a manoeuvre from ground to air of a great big pole and one solitary man could be a most difficult one and perhaps even beyond him altogether.

Cacophony

A floating cacophony descended upon us. We were taken by surprise, even though naturally we'd heard it coming. We underestimated the damage its noise could do. We couldn't sleep, couldn't think, we didn't know ourselves. For anything to get heard we had to shout so loud whatever it was we had to say lost all elegance and dignity, became one with the cacophony. Everything was on its terms. Any attempts to drown it out merely added to it, and even if they had succeeded, what good would that do? We'd merely have exchanged one cacophony for an even greater one. What could we do? We moved on. It's not as if there were a shortage of places to go.
Though admittedly some seemed to find the cacophony to their liking, the relieving of a burden perhaps, not that they were aware of a burden to be relieved in the first place until the arrival of the cacophony, and with its arrival they were even more unlikely to be aware of it, and so our departure merely included those of us whose departure it actually included, rather than actually all of us.

Into the Wind

The wind blows. All nature can but respond and go with it. Except that there is one plant, stubborn, straining itself to the utmost, trying not to yield, to purposely go against this windy grain. Why? What could be worth so much dreadful effort? What kind of truth does it think it is asserting? The truth of itself? What kind of truth is that?

Truth Isn't

Truth isn't a matter of gradations of falseness. 2+3=11 is no more true than 2+3=178945.

Forgetting

There was a man whose life was all but ruined by the verb to forget, ruined at least subjectively from the vantage point of a certain kind of external observer, a sane man if you will. "A verb is an active process," this ruined man would begin to rant. "But what's so active about forgetting? Forgetting isn't doing anything. It's the absence of doing something. It's not a verb! Remembering is a verb, an action, and bodily actions even more so, or more obviously so. If you had the equipment you could even observe and analyse the cognitive processes of remembering, the lighting up of whatever areas of the brain are engaged in the remembering, which is just thinking about whatever it is you were intending to think about. But forgetting?! What cognitive proceses would there be to observe? None because nothing happens! It's a word that doesn't refer to anything, and what kind of damned word is that?!"
"So what," people would laugh and ask him," do you suggest? Not use the word? What would we do then?"
"But that's it exactly!" he would answer furiously. "The word should be expunged. It's an insult! Instead of saying I forgot, just say something like I didn't remember. To forget implies you did something. And the whole problem is that you didn't do something!"
"But not remembering is also not doing something, so how would that be any better?"
"But there's no pretence that you did do something. It's more honest. More sensible."
It became ever more his mission to get people to understand all this but sadly the mission brought him no peace or pleasure. Instead it all ever more fuelled the fires of his frustration and misery at the vast hopelessness of the task. If only he could get some famous writers, politicians even, to endorse what he was saying. But who was he? A nobody, that's who, and what's worse, an unhinged nobody.

Dripping Tap

There was a dripping tap which...but no, what's there to be said about a dripping tap: it dripped and dripped.
There was a tap which didn't drip...but that's worse again, there's even less to say. At least the first tap dripped.

Coughs and Barks

Coughs and barks. More barks than coughs. The coughs occasional, sparse; the barks incessant, incessant that is within a certain, for now ongoing, duration. You can tell that it is early night-time: by the general quietness and how the occasional sounds within carry with so little resistance. How each sound emerges from, sits atop, and slips back into a field of quietness, tonally one, like an Oriental watercolour, with that bed of almost silence. Even that barking, now stopped, felt not as a harsh dissonance but a punctuation of that movement into darkness and sleep. This isn't the middle of a desert after all. It's a world of mildnesses, not harsh absolutes. A car door closes. A figure heads down the street. The dog is off again. A distant rapping on a window.

A Row of Steps

There was a row of steps which led upwards or downwards, depending on which way you looked at them, or indeed which way you were going. If going upwards they led upwards, if downwards then downwards. But the steps themselves of course didn't go anywhere. They were entirely stationary. It was merely the beings who used them who would be going up or down. Though admittedly, given the modern world, perhaps there should be no of course about these steps' immobility. But anyway these were old-fashioned steps and didn't move about.

But these steps were not quite what one might wish them to be for though they looked solid enough, as soon as one put one's foot on one it would begin to crumble, and so one would have to move quickly onto the next which in turn would behave in the same disintegratory manner, and so on and on one would be forced to go so as to avoid collapse with the crumbling rubble. So if you were intending on going upwards that is the direction you had better set out in, lest, having gone for some reason downwards- perhaps on a whim- you find between yourself and your destination only the memories of steps, as it were, rather than steps.

It would of course be alot easier, in this absence of steps, to descend from above to below rather than ascend from below to above; descent merely involving a movement into freefall whilst ascent involving an altogether more involved and arduous process, and the deeper the descent the more difficult the upwards journey becomes, perhaps even to the ultimate point of absolute impossibility.
Do the steps downwards and upwards continue infinitely or at last end in a final step which crumbles beneath one's weight? I can't say as I know.

Very Clever

There was a very clever man who successfully undertook to write a great book in which he re-arranged the letters of the alphabet in every linguistically conceivable way; all twenty six letters placed in sequences of every possible order, and, as said, he was successful in his undertaking, though it did take him a great length of time, but such durations very often are the very measure of greatness. Every possible order- such ingenuity, even if admittedly the practicalities of realising such an idea could hardly have been more banal and tedious.
But not to him. Happily he found in this interminable rearranging of letters the utmost satisfaction- a veritable life-time's work, and how many of us can be said to have been lucky enough to have found such a notion, and an exalted one at that, worthy of serving to such levels of devotion and tenacity? It was fascinating in itself, this absolute focusing of attention on such precise operations to whose overall thematic success imprecision of execution was definitively fatal. It was fascinating in itself, but to think every now and then of the great idea which was being served- O joy! And naturally this joy was more than shared by the great hordes who are ever willing from the sidelines to cheer on such artistic successes, and who bought in their hordes the great work when it did finally appear in several large volumes.

In Bed

"What's that fella doing in the bed surrounded by all the paper?"
"He's capturing the past."
"But it's past, isn't it?"
"Oh, he has it all written down."