A and B

A man was in the habit of travelling from A to B. A little later he would follow this by coming back. Time spent in A, then back to B, and so on.The pauses between movement varied a little but not greatly, as did the durations of travelling between each. If when on the journey the man was asked where he was, say he'd been phoned by his wife, he would promptly respond, 'I am between A and B', or if on the return journey, 'I am between B and A.' Where on the journey he might be was irrelevant, near the start or finish, the answer would always be the same: between one point and the other. If his wife rang when he had arrived at B, 'I am at B' is what he would happily inform.

One day he set out from A, informed his wife along the way where he was - between A and B - but when he got to the place where B always was there was no B. B and the place had of course been inseparable, one and the same, but now there was only the place, though in the absence of B you could hardly recognise it, and with the difficulty in recognising this was the unconvincing solace he tried to offer himself, that he wasn't in the right place, and B was in truth somewhere else around, in the spot it always was. His wife called in the midst of all his perplexity - 'Where are you now?' she asking, but there was no response. From his end just quietness. Baffling.

Though he wandered on and around, hoping that he had indeed somehow erred, there was no mistake and B failed or refused to surface. Finally and disconsolately he turned to return to A. Again while in transit his wife rang, asking the usual question on the way but again, stymied presumably by the impossibility of telling her he was between B and A, she met with silence. He did though, to her relief and perhaps his, arrive home, and the first thing he did upon entering was to say, was it with a little defiance and without his customary lightness of tone, 'I am in A!' He knew, whatever you tried to claim, exactly where he was. He hadn't even been asked.

Full Stop

A man reached a full stop. 'And what did he do when he got there?' He stopped, what else could he do. 'He might have tried to climb over it.' No,there was no climbing over. He accepted it.

unbroken

Generous

They were very generous: they ascribed greatness to those they perceived as precursors to themselves. They had shown, those precious few and however dimly, the way.

Vacuum

He imagined he lived in a vacuum, but it turned out, and of course, that he didn't..

onwords

Square

A square.
'And inside the square a circle?'
No, no circle.

scratched

Sticks

A long path led away from the town and up a steep climb; not the most well-trodden of paths especially the further it went, but still far from unwalked. It continued on up to the top of the climb and, while the path became fainter and fainter as the climb progressed, its existence could still be discerned, even if fading as it progressed to little more than the steps themselves - that is the steps and path became one and the same.

A man appeared in the town, seemingly more used to urban living, not the most physically imposing or impressive, glasses beneath which greedy, bird-like eyes darting about him. He had a kind of carnivorous look of trying to extract some inner marrow of whoever he was talking to, though given the nature of himself and his staccato, disconnected attempts at conversing, I don’t think he was having much success with the locals in that line, though you never know, maybe he was penetrating them to the core.

He came across the path one day, by chance or however, and it seemed he grew very excited by it. He was soon to be seen coming and going from the town, and on his goings carrying bundles of long pointed sticks, atop of which he had managed to tie flags, and it turned out he was sticking these flagged sticks into the ground at regular intervals, or at least what was probably meant to be regular intervals, up along the ascending path. Back he would come to the town and then away again with another bundle atop his obedient if not very sturdy back. He had the look, it was said, all this time of someone who’d been awaiting all his life for something special, some great moment, and now it had arrived, and so now there he was merging with it for all he was worth.

With word of what he was doing when I next went along that walk I expected to see it indented from start to finish with his flagged sticks, and indeed for some distance it was heavily scoured. The sticks though tended not to be much in the way of being particularly upright, instead at odd angles to each other creating a haphazard rhythm, while quite a few were already perilously close to toppling over outright and a few having already done so. At times the sticks departed the path and struck out at some tangent for a few yards before these digressions coming to abrupt halts, occasionally one or two sticks then making unconvincing looking efforts to bridge and rejoin the apparently re-found path a little further. Maybe he thought he was effecting some short-cuts or, unused to such uncivilized terrains, his eyes simply found it difficult at times, say of fading light, to discern what was path and what not.

At first the disfigured vista seemed to me a bit amusing but then I began to get annoyed at the thought and sight of this wild, quiet place being made look ridiculous, and by this stupid outsider - not that his being an outsider probably made any difference, though of course only an outsider would have behaved like this in the first place.

Walking on after a while just where the incline began to get a bit more serious I came an end of the sticks, and a few yards further on lay the very man, stretched out and gasping, still with a couple of sticks in the bundle tied to himself. I’m afraid he didn’t provoke much in the way of compassion in me, he’d be all right in a while, but I could hardly just walk on, much as I might have wished, and so having asked him was he all right, to which he was unable to reply, I stayed by him a bit, and with the help of a drink of water he slowly began to recover himself.

“Are you feeling better now?”
“I am improving. It is the same every time.”
”What is?”
”This is as far as my body goes. I cannot go myself any further. But you, you don’t think you could . . .”

In short what he was telling me, while not losing that greediness to his look though with now I thought an added tone of some secret comradeship, that his path-marking was coming up against something of a brick-wall and that being his body’s collapsing in exhaustion somewhere around this point. The walk was bad enough, but with the weight of the sticks added to the load . . . But me, might I not wish to involve myself, to mark out the rest of the path? … ‘I’m afraid not.’ He seemed to find this incomprehensible - not to be a colleague in this great work - but rather than explain myself,  I said good luck and headed off up the path.

I came across him similarly stretched out and gasping over the next few days, back or forward a few yards from the same point, but usually back a bit: the weight of the added sticks he’d added to his pile and having to carry the entire already attained distance presumably too much for him. He didn’t ask me again to help him, but added to his embittered looks me was some latent pleading along with, deeper again, some uncomprehending sense of betrayal, whatever mystery about which he must have thought we were in league.

I suppose you had to admire his efforts with these flagged sticks, at least in theory you did, but in practice to be honest I didn’t. He failed to ever manage to get much farther with his sticks along the path, and soon, these limits to his endurance unsurpassed, he disappeared altogether. In his absence quite a few more of his sticks he’d stuck in the ground toppled over.

It wasn't the end of things though and soon enough other men, diluted versions you could say of the first, began appearing. And why? To see The Sticks for themselves (their pronunciation somehow included the capitals). Sent on their way up the path, they were as excited about what they came across as the first man had been, and in their own ways turned out to be just as busy – this time not sticks but maps, measuring tapes, graphs, cameras . . . If in the midst of their activities someone happened to walk past them heading off up the incline, out past the limits of the sticks, these men wouldn’t it seemed even notice him. Even if said hello in passing he still wouldn't appear to register.

Their activities proved endless. You might think they’d soon enough exhaust all they could do but there was no end to distances and angles of and between sticks that could be measured. Incidentally any stick that in the meantime fell was left where it was and no more interest paid it.

As time went on the fame of the original man and his sticks, and some of the later men, grew and grew. No mention though ever seemed to be made of the path.

KLF

Madrugada Eternal Club Mix

And in its album form.

scrawled

Seated Venerables

As a child I was shown into a dimly lit room, where sat several elderly and unhealthy looking men in differing armchairs - some elegantly upholstered and in quite good condition, others threadbare, even if also perhaps at one time elegant.I was ushered in, in hushed voices, entrusted by my elders with the apparently important and honoured task of bringing these gentlemen – for men seems too prosaic – their afternoon coffees.

They were all silent; some reading, some writing - though doing more in the way of looking seriously at the facing page than actually writing, and some merely staring into space, whether purposefully or purposelessly I had no idea and, being a mere child, the purposefulness or lessness of adults' staring mightn’t have been the kind of thing to set me wondering.

I noticed a circumference of chalk around each armchair, and asked the adult accompanying me what was the chalk about. “If they rise and step beyond the chalk, then they will perish.” Why that might have been the case I didn't think to ask; I simply took it as truth, which maybe it was. There was space for the sitters to take about one step forward from the chairs before meeting these chalk boundaries. There were several strong types standing around on guard, and with these precautions I expected to see sudden stirrings, risings of these seated gents, and then these guards springing into action to offset calamity. However, though I came daily for quite a while, and though the guards were ever poised and alert, nothing remotely like that ever occurred. In fact, they hardly stirred an inch - little movements of hands and even less of heads the only contradictions to immobility. To be honest, never mind the guards, I don’t know why they even bothered with the chalk.

hierarchy

Was Out

The word was out. What word? I don't know, but whatever one it was, it was out.

3

Positive

"Have you anything positive to say?"
"Yes."