Barefoot in the Head Page 21

  Soon the ribble-rabble were hearing the glad news of stentorian tone glandruffling immensity Charteris was son of god and would groove a hand in the march on Frankfurt and Bonn and Berlin estabellish a new odour and cheers from the unbelieving believers saying on to Moscow what about Moscow assisted of course by his pop those present and the secret weapong Hydrogenous 12 and and new ornamated selfrepelled Supersex mascodistic marchers but whatever the band played each had his own nine.

  ‘These hyenas no longer have any respect for the state,’ angrily crying Laundrei.

  ‘Nor the individual either’ — Wechsel turning into a cockatoo and brightly fluttering into the tropical foliage underhead.

  Under the sawn-off planes he passed with a certain tread certain tread certain tread patterning their well-drawn branches spick span spick span how long to pass this one memorise its meaning shape how long to pass this one memorise its meaning shape how long to pass or its internal shape the banal is grotesque

  these trees automated in their neat dressing

  roots ploughing through eternal metal and asphalt cracking

  three old figures cryptic

  robing me robbing me

  the lights of other daze

  grotesque is trees with their winter crewcut

  into each second the eternal nanoccurrences of isness and these trees is there just one tree I keep perceiving as I permeate more of the metzian webtime or all particles of myself springing from me on random time trajectories

  all the words I have said or spoken were minced of my blood my semen my moan-barrow of weeping tissue in disinegation

  what is I in truth is in their locality not here

  trees ruin me too particular

  and the specified woman

  anonymous

  all anonymous that felty well in the lanquid dark against thighs of unknown speech and every faculty distended to some farther shore like aface with nothing personal in it just the big chemical loot-in of eternal burn-down

  in the nerved networks and elastic roadways of me is the traffic passing for thought but this eternal recurrence of trees signals me that no decision is possible that decision is impossible for everything will come again back to the same centre

  alternatives must be more multi-valued than that I either go with Kommandant on his hosanno dominotion or speed with Angel south but if one crossed martyranny if the other another series of eitherors with death always the first choice

  somewhere find a new word new animal

  transgress

  in their heads they have only old words insisting that history repeats itself

  the stale hydrogénés of a previous combustion rolling in an old river and elder landscape footprinted to the last tree gnarled landscape of I stamped flat by the limbous brain

  its their behaviour and its geared experience is lessening and cuts me down to sighs morality nostalgia sentiment closure falsight all I have to drive through their old faded photograph of life

  how that crumbling nightdream thunderclouds round my orizons

  He looked up hand on the trunk of the last tree before the square opened heavy swaddled and spring held jacksifed in the winds.

  Growing in the Rhine perspective was fumirealdrapery sly and dry figurative —

  the confructation? the momentum of truth? It grew and in the daggered sublight clearly personed the familiar was the merely familiar Crass the once-agent exdrapist pusher scampfollower lost or fled when Brussels blurned showing his teeth now in a smile of grating.

  ‘The eternal returns’ said Charteris. Up and down the bare bole spring’s first flies crawled across the corse of winter. Over the supplicatory amputree they hastened towards infinite points of intersexion and in the top cropped branches thudded his great blackmacked bird leashing its vulturine feathers claws beaks calling through its raw red wurst of neck.

  ‘Master forgive me you must have thought my feet were in the eternal flying dust and the impaled rose from my sumpturanean stool.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk of decay.’

  The fustian feathers held a small vibration. Who knows what will talk or decay when all people your paradise of multi-valour. I have kept under my wigspan and my grations led me here to you. Your servant still.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk Cass so come down from that Judas tree the looming decision of all direction and to make something new devise from under that old moustache while the wescivilians of lost possibilities drawn into deeper dusk where the parallel bars have no in or out.’

  So Cass took his arm and said, ‘I know of your systemstrain You’re hung up on a curve. Earlier when the mists were shipping to the tugladen mouth I saw and signalled you across the flux but you had other directions. I am too poorly without potension to flutter up into your tree of notice but you are as rich as a new Christ in populous and you must not park here by the rivenstribe but autocass on to domination and the world your word.’

  ‘Cass off! Back into the bare branches!’

  ‘No I tell you winging the way to my master your humble serpent boarded with an old widowed impoverished official who in his long-rowed rooms above the Aizette ravines lodges two coachdrivers and a filling station owner he tells me how the continent fills into small strifes for lack of leadership — ’

  ‘Cass — ’

  ‘Speak at the world’s megaphone Master. These small strifes are your larger battlefield or the states your pulpit. Pay the big taxi fare to a Rome address! Talk out the lungs cancer. Rocket right up the lordly astralbahn. Flush the worlds motions into your own bowl and I’ll back you.’

  The door of the big square refrigerator burst open as Angeline came in upon her inetatarsals her chicken bones and plum eyes and the whole different meaning of sunlit succour sumpt.

  ‘Hello Cass I thought we’d lost you doing the suttee act in sparky Brussels.’

  Lips bone-infested — ‘You still campfollowing you widowed mite!’

  ‘Colin the fat commander is letting the boys unlocked in a sort of panjandramonica and what are we going to do?’

  Flighting off the carrion cross he took her and half-kissed her murmuring nonnegotiably relishing the bold bare bones in her like branches.

  ‘Oh Angeline I see you’re among the favoured yet I wish you’d tell the master to unpack his oysterand smash the saviourpart into a real cruscade.’

  ‘That’s all nonsense. We’re trying to turn into human beings first Cass and don’t need your snow-job for aid.’

  Beady he preened among his black scales. ‘Body’s so womanish and nothing beyond. You want him all to yourself don’t you you selfish bitch but times change and he’s got nothing to lose it’s not like I mean the Germany’s not the Holy Land in any sense — ’

  But blank. World of total silence. Box off. A last mindbowing dislocation. He had his fix with the elemental and the deep dischian roots under the eternal subsurface where they sleepwalked and the elegant connections between love and death. He saw through. Dropped. Turned human.

  To them he grew bearded beaded and feathered. Primal. Behind them the old grey square and fineformed town hall of an earlier dockage rich in history sauce now served in bright plumage as it flowered to his wisdom.

  ‘Listen the multi-valued answer. All resolved. I had it in my dream turning down the old clothes.’ Then mute in his wonderment so she asked him darling?

  ‘Whatever you all think you think you all think in the old stale repeating masadistrick Judeo-Christian rhythm because its in your bloodshed. Your heritage taken or rejected dorminant. Be rich as Christ indeed. But Croesus Christ is to me pauperised an old figment and just another capitalist lackey whose had our heads isn’t it? It’s the bistiric recess over and over a western eternal recurrence of hope and word and blood and sword and Croesus vitimises your thinkstreams.’ Continued in this blastheme of Christ Plutocrat schekelgrabbing bled-white christendamn till Cass fluttered.

  ‘I don’t believe in him either Master you know that.’

&n
bsp; ‘No difference. History jellied and you can’t drip out. You’re hooked in his circuit and the current circulates.’ Bigger than the first tiny Metz web so it grew in his mind another layer yet of Europlexion and walking along Troitsky Street he saw the old dimensions all shagged out and Christ on the clockwork cross with in his sly brown eyes that frantic glimpse of progress on the astralplane and from our deathbeds that vanvogtian upward surge into heaven’s arms. The cult of the third day the White House open to any mother-loving son. All transdacted in the following lanes to metaphysical materials of the insurance steam shovelling society and the space race.

  Heaven is money in the bank. Your cash helps our cathedral. Jesus saves his flesh negotiable anywhere.

  ‘Colin love the world doesn’t just begin anew my baby will have to have the past to build on and rebuild.’

  ‘Breathing the old west dust and breathing out the old west dust. No. That old ethic-ethnic LSD has automated us two thousand years and now the fracture there’s been a mizlocation so let’s jump it from the steamcross and say for ever farewell to that crazy nailedup propheteer. Look girl I don’t refuse to go your way or refuse to go Laundrei’s way or refuse to go Cass’ way or refuse to go any way. I refuse to hit the worn-out Creased or anti-creased way. For me new tracks and stuff the old ding-dong the belfrey-belt.’

  Cass laughing poorly, ‘No no if there’s an opportunity you get in first that’s nature!’

  She was shaking her head running her toe in the dust as if tracing out a hieroglimpse of some secret there.

  ‘You’re mad Colin Honey it not just Christ and all that it’s a bit different for you cos you’re a Serb there are mountains in between but the West thing we’re still on a Greek trajectory of ordering knowledge Phil told me that.’

  ‘The Greek thing was okay but it would have got nowhere without the sufferinfusion of our nazerining friend embodying the rags to riches poorman’s son outalk outsmart white-house-in-the-sky trouble-stirring miracle-working superman and then pow-wow-kersplat-but-oh-boy-on-the-third-day punchline echoed ever since by every comicstirup.’

  ‘Master Master you can’t change all that.’ Trembling out a little reefer and suckling on a long light in viperbeak. ‘Only through leading. You can’t change history. We’re what we are.’

  ‘We’re also what we’re not. See Cass I can’t change the churn of history but it changed itself when the sprinklerbombs came now we live in a wornout mode and the old Glenn Miller musicrap still canting us out of a new canticle in the old worn wesciv groove.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. Lead us only away Master we’ll follow in blind belief!’

  ‘Leading is out makes blindness and the old swingdom of heaven is just slopporific. Opium of the pupil.’

  She saw him new on a fought decision. She saw him. She saw he saw himself. He saw himself new. Still lying but deeper lies? Mirror distortions embedded? Every moment its equivocation like a tile pattern she saw him new. In the omniparacusis she heard him defrock Christ. A womb-shelled thing broke and bled. She stood outside herself her scars her incompletion. Her first vision of the current time explosure.

  From Cass’ ears smoke poured and the tiny chambers even the metatarsals in a big big scald like the church of England burning up its bullion of belief and he craftily slipping out of the transvestory vanishing into the haze as if exorcised.

  She had been conjured. Limply by one arm taking him she moved up to a nearby passing mountain and there cried solemn anger that he ploughed up every midnight corpse that ever fell to make them die again for his psychosis. Charteris laughed knowing she had never seen inside a church. She swore. The oaths in banners marched the mountainside. She owned her aggression at last. She had born him long enough his womanising his slobishness his selfhood and the godding. Now he must cut his act to play a human off-stage role.

  He pushed her. ‘Your act comes from the same cass pageant the cult of individuals but it’s a mass life and death get it? Phases not people! Drop out that’s all, Angelbird. Dig that everything else has already dropped. Play to a new music right and dance to another measure down your long within. Cass off and shack with Ruby or take me on my own road but I cant stand halfway up this mutterhorn.’

  Scratching her head covering up sad for all losses she alone locatered for. ‘Its Cass Colin Cass I’m afraid of you’re so helpless he just a paracide to any order he might do for you you know he emanates the old iscarrot role. If the present’s already past like you say Cass’ll have you nailed.’

  People were coming he heard and was glad to distract her.

  He gestured to the band as they materilaised into the plass. ‘I’ve the job for Cass.’

  Jailgates gaped wide and the tumblebellies on the bangledrums were all in advance with brashing autos percussed cymballically all heads on the anonymass.

  So now he warmed on the ticking of another prayer wheel turning in his stream and all the faces blowing to him were with their petals and the bloom of youthair checking them. So now was he not crusoed a footfall further in this islanded desertion and some would carry onto his farshore. So now though his carriage had never taken him beyond the stony trees he sent his mark scudding across the printless beaches. So now he grew her elbowing arm as the force pressed at the instress of his radiance.

  Hurryburlying Laundrei came on the surge with the autociples but Charteris stopped them. Climbed onto a bench under a sign that told the miles to Frankfurt old cosy sign made metal from the long attic store in thought. Waved his arms caught cheers. People scuddling like leaves under his farsight the whole seas surge of them.

  Told them: I was in another vision. I broke free and discarded myself my former selves my sleep chained I.

  Here through me the world tumbled to a new terminator.

  Here we begin a new age the postpsychotomimetic age free from anshirt shittoleths and the grey grimmages stripped off.

  Here the old programming of Godspain got its long last playback in the searoots of our occulture.

  Here the nails scattered from my hands and fingers.

  In the square they milled and sledded letting their origins down with mood music thrombic. The body hair buttressed and limbs rebuddied. Metamorphin slipper waker-slip. What they heard they herded and sluice-juices ran underfoot. As he luted their animinds. Ages went down into oceanic undertow. Civilians poured in and the old grey and biscuit buildings titaniced down into a glacial cobblesea. Inunvation of hands, plattening feet of limbic brand. Churning flowermotion with eddying scruffles sob-streperous among the onebacked beats.

  To one side apart Ruby with an own thing to peddle. Also Elsbeth sailing all in selfmassage grown apart her two stout legs foliaging flesh belonging to the fused moment under the strain of canvas her salience gybes to generationing point her wild delicacy a sapiutan as she fixes on him rattling from his orificial platform.

  Now from his purgent words the mucous remembranes of the sinking swimmers distend to farcy forms and the saprophagous outpour transfluxes the time’s ergot so that while it floats into her labyrinthine passages she feels the smooth buddoming trunks and timber shafts wheel and wheedle into grander growth in her skeleton the sapling stalked stuff supplanting bone nodes of branch staring under skin at hip and pelvis shin breast and elbow her obnubil features suddenly the whole unatomy its soft syruped holes its husks hairs and horned teeth beats

  into greenamelled leaf!

  Laundrei always more antiflowered broke his spate asked ‘What’s the vision on when we move to conquer?’

  ‘The broken off gods chumble over into obscrudity — ‘

  ‘Okay, very satisfactory to know ‘but there’s still the Berlin question.’

  His old sly smile. ‘Now its your blastoff down the astrabahn to the straits of power while the wind blows favourable on your high traject. All go who will and nobody constrained in any form. I stay here. Our photographs peel separate here.’

  ‘No’ — ship without figurehind and he launched into the long ma
chineries of a vocal gripe while others also had their temperature and again mazed denizens pander to the labyrinths until finally Cbarteris barks again.

  ‘It was my vision Laundrei you astracade it while it just sustains me while you image yourself into your machine-dream-role.’

  ‘Scheisskopf! You haven’t the face to back your prognosis!’ Hirst fluttering and swatching behind with birdlife gestures of ascent.

  ‘You take with you my second-in-commandant the Cass here as my man in your camp.’

  ‘Wechsel is my aide-de-camp.’ Peaching his plumage.

  ‘Cass makes liaison. Cass your new commander keeps him in a mind of miracles the claws pruned and darkness at the ninth hour.’

  Dark brown pantry eyes glistering up the mottled cliff of medalled white seeking lodgement. ‘Meinherr glad to be of service and tote the — ’

  ‘Action man and the junkered footfill all autobreasted with all joints in my pistongrip right? Right. It’s a decision then. Herr Charteris we go to escalade in the name of glory and unity. We shall meet again. Men! Men! Follow men! Action! Scramble! Form paltroons! Clap to ventricles! Astrabahin and Utopia!’ Cass and Wechsel astraddlediddle as the revvrevvrevving struts and pattern merges from the millrace.

  ‘Hydrogen 12 be with you’ pronounced.

  Saluters.

  Now espousing their autos the deutschlanded gentry marry boot to rod hand to bar knee to rod bum to seat helter to skelter in a barrackroar of infective warcalls. The autocaders also spark their plugged enzymes and batter backwards into the crass planes curling bumpers and blue monoxide wolves through the pack like feral till everyone legs or wheels like tight little humans under hair astride. But Army Burton comes to Charteris ‘Hey you want your little master race girl any longer?’