dunxd.com

At anyone time, many important things are happening.

A sperm meets and egg.

Someone eats a drugged sweetie given them by a stranger on a bus. They will find themselves encrusted in dung, wandering the streets of an unfamiliar city one or two days later.

A woman tries to hide her face as she enters the throes of orgasm, tries to muffle her voice, but people hear and her co-sexee sees.

A radio programmer falls asleep, missing the point where one show should end and another begin, broadcasting silence for ten minutes.

A man falls asleep for the first time without noticing the sound of insects, two days after returning to his rural birthplace, after many years living in the different constant hum of the city.

A rare plant blooms its first flower for thirty years, deep within a rainforest, unseen by any person.

At a subductive zone, the destructive margin between two continental plates, a large chunk of the once giant supercontinent Pangea that has been slowly melting under enormous heat and pressure for millions of years, finally breaks free of the solid crust above and begins a slow descent into the mantle, destined to be molten into the homogenous lava before it reaches the core as liquid.

A child utters its first word.

A parrot’s pointy tongue reaches forward in its beak as it grabs as mineral rich clay on a cliff face.

A nipple becomes firm, from cold, not arousal.

The last smelter in an iron foundry reaches the temperature where it can finally be abandoned.

Milk is drawn from the teat of a yak.

The president of the United States of America focuses all his attention on blasting a lump of shit stuck to the porcelain of his private toilet bowl with a stream of urine that is no longer as powerful as it once was. Disheartened by this, he returns his mind to the frustrations of foreign policy he is also powerless to effect.

Like tuning a shortwave radio, we select the events that are in a language we understand, and that are relevant to us. In many cases we simply stop on what seems to be the strongest signal.

Tonight I sit here in this dim hotel room, with its harsh white fluorescent light. Something in the design and decor of the room results in the light having taken on brown tinge by the time it reaches the floor. I am alone. Lonely. I failed to tune the radio. I can’t have both the fan and the radio. Something in the wiring disrupts the signal, and the humidity and mosquitoes forced my hand to choose the fan. So I sit on my bed listening only to the mini hurricane winds cast off by the fan’s blades, hearing the oscillating chatter that lies behind the whooshes. As much as it cools me, the fan affects most things in the room. The radio. Scraps of paper blown from the desk, that now rush to the perimeters of the room. My clothes over the back of the chair, dancing rhythmically.

I once took a shower at five in the morning in a hotel room in Amsterdam. I must have been the only person in the building showering at the time, as I got the full possible force of water pressure from that shower. The cubicle was close to air tight, and the jets of water created a vortex of air with me at its centre, the wind sucked back out of my lungs.

Here the vortex is not so powerful, but there is more for it to effect than just me. I hope it is pinning the mosquitoes to the floor, those that have survived after I circled the room, spraying Rungu brand dudu killer in every direction, before retreating and barricading them in with the noxious fumes.

That cooling air laps over my face, more, so it seems, when I close my eyes.

At dinner I met a man. He first met his angel when, at fourteen or fifteen, a woman he knew decided she wanted to introduce him to adulthood. They were in her house playing cards. She might have been a cousin or an aunt, he did not say. After playing several hands, she departed to the other room in the house. After some time he heard her call to him. He moved into the other room, and found that she was suddenly asleep. She lay there naked, her loins covered by a kanga. She appeared to be peacefully asleep. His heart started beating fast and powerfully in his chest. For whatever he did now, he would cross into the realm of manhood. This woman had called him across the gulf and he had crossed out of curiosity. He decided he wanted to return to the other side, and ran through to deal himself another hand of patience, but his heart still pounded and sent blood rushing rhythmically, surging through his ears. His face felt hot. His ears tingled, burned. He looked up to the ceiling and saw a pair of hands reaching down to him, coming closer and closer. Reaching to him, but not for him. The came down and stopped before his face, palms out, pressed together like an open book. He stared at the hands, tried to read the stanzas written in the lines of those palms and fingers. They were powerful hands, large, yet the fingers were slender. Something about their stillness suggested total power over the boy, and the power to take away. The power to soothe, and the power to punish. Then a voice came to him. “If you ever sleep with another man’s wife, you will die.” Although the voice was loud and resonant, he knew that those words had come from within his own body. He closed his eyes, trying to see the face that produced this terrible voice that spoke truly, but no features were to be seen behind his eyelids. When he opened his eyes the hands had gone. He walked to the other room. The woman was still lying there, her breasts full and beckoning. Here eyes were open, and she looked to him with desire. “Come here” she beckoned, but he shook his head. “I must go” he said, and walked out of the house, into the night.

There is a sound from outside. People coming up the stairs. A man’s voice. A woman’s voice. “But I wouldn’t want to be walking back to your hotel alone” he says. She giggles and says something back I don’t make out. I know who they are. I saw them earlier outside a small kiosk stocked to the roof with everything you might want. Especially some certain things you might want to buy if you had just met someone you found attractive and were staying in a place distant from your responsibilities and commitments if you had them. I stood in the darkness and watched her buying the condoms, as he stood dumbfounded to one side. She pointed with the full length of her arm to the box and the vendor extracted the requested number. It made me feel alone and I asked myself, where is my vivacious and lusty woman taking control of the situation?

By now I am standing on my pillow and staring through the mosquito netting and louvered glass window to see her face, as they reach my floor. I realise suddenly that I will be visible this close to the glass and as they reach the top step I duck out of sight, shocked and embarrassed by myself. They are giggling to each other, but I am too caught in my own voyeurism to hear what they say. I sneak another look, but don’t see their faces as they turn to walk down the corridor to their room. He has his arm around her waist, and she walks with a slight skip, leaning into him. A walk as if they had been together for many months or even years, but somehow it betrays that they have just met over a cheap meal or a couple of beers. Her hair is pulled into plaited bunches. She wears a t-shirt and britches that show her ankles and lower calves off to the mosquitoes. He is dressed in the formal attire of the young traveller – light cotton trousers with a pocket on each thigh, but not combat trousers. And a khaki shirt, not tucked in. His hair is carefully tousled, and he walks with a practiced swagger, having gained a confidence that escaped him when she was buying the protection. They sway together into the penumbra of the corridor beyond their giggles are too far to make it over the roar of my fan. I slip back down on the bed I have been standing on to spy. Slump with my body stretched out, my head against the wall, forcing my chin into my chest. I could put my trousers on, slip out into the corridor, and follow them to their room. I could stand nearby, as if looking through the perforated wall at the city lights outside, but focus my attention on the sounds from their room. First the confident conversation melting back into awkwardness, followed by the quiet smack of a first kiss, followed no doubt by the sound of her pressing her lips onto his and making the decisions once again. How long might I stand out there before I heard belt buckles rattling into the tiled floor, and the smooching noises accompanied by a rising in their breathing. By that point I would be tempted to stand on my tiptoes to gaze in through their mosquito netting to see if I could make out anything through the darkness. Or maybe she would have snapped the light back on in order to see.

I won’t do any of that. I will sleep alone, waiting to be bitten by mosquitoes and be woken by mosques.

There are moments that stay with you for the rest of your life. There are no acts of remembrance involved, for they remain in your thoughts at all times although we cannot always seem them. If we can find those moments they are the key to unlock the meaning of any event.

At the boundary you expect there to be some kind of gulf, or a wall, or at least an imposing wire fence – but on reaching it you realise that the crossings are the only guarded places. No-man’s land blends into us and them until there is no telling the difference.

Looking left and then right no line disapears into the distance. There is just the unbroken horizon.

The crossings themselves are not heavily fortified. It takes just one man to swing open the gate to let large vehicles cross.

Here you stand at the border, and all it takes to cross is a few sheets of paper, stapled together and inky stamps inside.

The funny thing about the border is it becomes more real and concrete the further you get from it. Standing on the verge you see it is nothing more than a line on a map.

The hobby horse was a child’s toy that had somehow escaped the notice of adults. Somehow adults bought this device for their children without realising it’s potential for them.

Running on only four AA batteries, this silver plastic box had a small black saddle, rudimentary handle bars, and a long extendable antenna.

Sliding a switch on the side of the body activated complex chemical reactions within a shielded and inpenetrable box. The hobby horse would take on a life of its own, rising into the air to a height of three metres if not held down by a child’s weight. An adult’s weight would push the hobby horse down to the ground rendering it useless. By turning a small dial located next to the on switch, the power of the horse’s lift could be adjusted – without this a small child might find herself lifted to a dangerous height.

Once set to a height where the child’s feet could reach the ground the hobby horse could be propelled along by running and skipping.

How was it that the discovery of anti-gravity hadn’t propelled mankind further than a simple child propulsion device? No one was really sure who had discovered the processes needed for the levitation effect. Neither was it known how the box inside had been manufactured in such a way as to prevent any tampering or discovery of what actually happened inside. Nor did anyone really know who manufactured the box – the hobby horse was built and manufactured by a Taiwanese company that dealt in no other products – they themselves ordered the anti-gravity mechanisms by sending morse code messages at a particular short wave frequency. No other company had been able to place an order by this or any other method.

Enthusiasts bought numerous horses, dismantled them and combined the boxes in an attempt to make an adult carrying version of the horse. Somehow though combing boxes did not result in an increased levitation effect. In fact, combining more than three boxes together negated the anti-gravity altogether and the boxes together seemed to weigh more than the sum of the parts.

The revolution that this device might bring to humanity was limited to the hobby horse, bootleg wheel-less perambulators that sweat-panted yuppies would push before them on their off-road jogging sprees, and various diversions such as floating drink holders. Mankind stayed motionless until the man who had hidden at the end of a ham radio decided it was time to step forward and then everything changed forever…

They came for the railings with hammers, chisels, saws and files. Each street was visited in turn by sad eyed men and horses and carts loaded high with metal work destined for the smelt. Each iron rod had the potential to tear apart the enemy, but it couldn’t do so whilst dividing the private from the public. Not in that form. So they had to be transformed by the munitions factories.

For a short period an organised work force systematically hacked down the iron railings of the land form all but the people who could afford to pay. They were replaced with nothing.

From a demarcated country we became a land of foot high walls studded with curious squares of metal work which bore testament to the haste and apparent urgency with which we created killing devices and sent our sons abroad to use them. Who at the time would have forseen that the railings in the majority of cases would never be replaced. Their presence would be forgotten and hedges grown in their place.

The removal of the railings marked a change from one period to another. From confidence and abundance to anxiety and scarcity. In protecting ourselves violently, we destroyed our small local protection. The urban landscape was forever changed. The difference has been forgotten, and the remaining studs only puzzle children.

The fighter returned one year to the town of his youth. Each step down the high street brought comparisons between the here and now and the here and then. So much had changed in so few years. The shop fronts had transformed along with the shops inside. New configurations and utility brought recollections of the rythmns of hum drum youthful wanderings around the town with assorted, now distant, friends. As he walked along, the fighter looked into the faces of people out shopping, looking for familiarity. Although he saw no one he recognised, the town hadn’t changed so much that they types of face had become unrecognisable. People still had the same expressions of purpose. He didn’t know if this was a comfort or a mark of the continuation of limitations he himself had fled. At least these faces brought no regrets.

The pub in which the fighter had made his first tentative steps into the adult world loomed at one side. He stepped in to find somewhere more sanitized than he remembered. The tables into which he and his mates had carved their names, into the repeatedly rutted palimpsests, had been replaced by cleanly varnished pine tables. The old place mat fox-hunting scenes that had decorated the walls had been switched for abstract poster shop art prints. The atmosphere of risk and delight had become tasteful and comfort free, no longer of any specific place. “Who will have any memories of this place now?” he thought to himself, leaving without even a polite drink.

No matter how well things are going now when it comes to love and even sex there are things you regret from the past. Most other things can be made up for. The fighter found that most past insecurities could be put behind him in the act of giving and taking blows with well matched opponents. But a missed sexual opportunity could never be made up for. Even sleeping with past crushes was hopeless, as the individual now was not the person desired before, physically, mentally or historically.

Walking through the town created new missed opportunities. Trysts that he had not contemplated till now, but ones that would have prevented past mistakes, that might have filled a yearning spurned by his actual target.

The fighter felt old, despite the fact he was some years from gaining any respect for maturity. He saw boyish men he would once have shied away from, intimidated by their new found confidence, gathering harems of giggling girls around them. It would all switch around in a few years. These boys interesting to the girls would spread into mundane oblivion, and the girls would turn out to be boring too. He had never noticed the girls at school and on jaunts around town who had become interesting women. Missed opportunities.

The fighter suddenly remembered his purpose, and tried to recall the face of tonight opponent. Nothing came, but the name was familiar.

I had been getting fed up with urban life and the constant stream of distracting noise that entered my sphere of experience. That was the part of me that is addicted to self-control, that feels the need for purpose in thought and action.

Ads are bad,
They make me sad,
When I think of thoughts I might have had.

To and fro on public transport, that dead time in the transit between work and home, between my public self and private self. A great place to think. The atmosphere of people ignoring each other bizarre. Quiet, warmth and movement. I could read so much travelling this way. Except for the words tearing through the silence. Adverts for car insurance, beer, cheap international phone calls, educational opportunities. Newspaper headlines; the challenge of reading articles over the shoulder of the determined non-sharer. And the free papers, left behind, tempting me with their lies of the present.

Hypnotic like the imperceivable fleeting flicker of a telivision screen, I took in all the lies around me because I felt no lines of escape open to me. Once I had seen the ad it engaged me. I was forced by some intellectual tourettes syndrome to contemplate the advert. To form an opinion, although usually not the intended I suppose. The constant adverts and vacuous newspaper surveys demanded my attention. Because of the words. Visual noise shattering my mental nirvana, my concentration on what I thought I wanted to be doing.

Then one day, during a moment of actual conciousness of what I was reading I discovered the posibilty of freedom. I was reading Time, The Hunter by Italo Calvino, and discovered a character who had taught himself how not to read. He had unlearnt the ability.

To achieve this could be a road to tranquility. A visit to Japan confirmed this. I couldn’t read a thing and could concentrate on the real rather than the printed simulacra of the world that occupied me for so long at home. It was beautiful.

Words are marks, invented by humans. We have an in built ability to recognise certain reprasentations, but written words do not fall into this category like the most basic representation of a human face even turned on its side Reading requires learning. I started my project by trying to see all words as squiggles on a page. Of course that didn’t work. Too simple. If only it were that easy. I then tried not reading at all, but the words fight their way through. Then I discovered the key. Concentrate on reading. When you try and understand the process of reading at the same time as doing it you find that you have read several pages, but cannot recall any of it. Perhaps it is in there, in the unconscious, waiting to slip out as if my own spontaneous thought. However this only works for things I want to read. The minutae input from everyday life slips in without any conscious effort. The phrases and meanings are short. So a form of conscious disinterest is required to shut out the unwanted stories.

Unfortunately all this requires such concentration that not being able to read in itself makes it impossible to do the things I hoped would become possible as a result. My thoughts are still full of the subject of reading. I don’t know how to achieve full intellectual independance from the mundane. My experiment may point in some other directions.

• Develop unconscious determination to shut out what is unnessecary and a waste of my time.
• Move to a place where you are not subjected to mundane promotions and base media lies. The countryside.
• A foreign city where you can’t begin to interpret the language (how long would that last, before you started to learn again…)
• Put out my eyes, an extreme solution that shuts out so much more than words.

Now of course I discover that I can’t write and I lose my train of thought. Perhaps my destiny is a cork lined room. Shut away in my own solipsism, refusing to deal with the world I inhabit. Is that a nirvana worth seeking?

Walter the cat started out life bedraggled and tiny, a still born runt of the litter who turned out to be alive. The owners of his mother lived in the old terraced red brick houses behind the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle. In light of his scrawny appearance they christend him Thin Lizzy, a theme they continued in naming the other kitten my family acquired Chubby Checker on account of his comparative bulk.

The owners of Walter and Smokey’s mother had contacted the Cats’ Protection League offering the kittens to a good home. We, after a suitable period of time after the passing of Mothball, had contacted the Cats’ Protection League seeking a kitten. Due to beliefs about the differing nature of male and female cats we were hoping for two female kittens. The owners of Walter’s mum misjudged the sex of the kittens as did we. From the litter we chose two girls who seemed inquisitive and adorable. Thin Lizzy, scrawny with bulging eyes and a sniffing nose, and Chubby Checker, a ball of fluff chasing anything that moved. As soon as we had left Denton Holme with the kittens the names had to go, and it would not be long before the kittens’ sexes would also be revised.

The now nameless kittens took well to their new home, Randleson House, near the Moat in Brampton. I don’t know if they could, but we never cast our minds to the fate of their mother and siblings. The two kittens immediately became a part of the family as far as my sister and I were concerned. A visit to the vet determined them both as males. I would never refer to them as Toms.

As we got to know them better names presented themselves. Smokey bore a resemblance to the Smokey the Bear poster I had on my wall. The name Walter came fomr nowhere, but immediately suited Walter, a quirky unpredictable and eccentric kitten. For a short while in 1990 Walter hid under the assumed name of Bacon (or was it Streaky) as a visitor to the town from Tanzania was also called Walter, and we were unsure if a cat sharing the same name would seem somehow rude or strange.

Early memories of Walter and Smokey are Smokey waking me up in the morning biting my chin or toes, and Walter climbing up a trellis in the back yard.

When the two cats went to the vets to be spayed/neutered (for which I felt terribly guilty) I brought them home on the way back from school. They were both terribly uncoordinated after the anaesthetic and I watched in mirth as the walked into walls and jumped off the table forgetting to land on their feet.

Walter took to perching on my shoulder as I walked around the house.

At some stage Smokey disapeared. I spent a weekend hunting for him up the Moat, and was devastated by the loss for some weeks. We speculated that he had got trapped down a rabbit hole, caught in a snare, or that he and Walter had come to an agreement that one must leave and Smokey had lost and gone off to find a new home.

Walter loved the Moat. He would come with us on walks all around. One time Mark and I were walking up there late at night and drunk. We heard a rustling in the leaves, and a running noise. Mark had a tendancy to become afraid, but it turned out to be Walter. He led us around the Moat that night, galloping back and forth, showing us various things, and giving us a glimpse into his nocturnal excursions. He also used to go for walks with Edna and her dog, Bobby.

Once Walter disapeared for a couple of days. We thought he might have met a similar fate to Smokey, but somehow I discovered that he was locked in a garage, and the owners had gone on holiday. I found out who was looking after the house whilst they were away, and we located a key to free Walter.

He got into numerous scrapes. Once he arrived home with some large pus filled holes in his hide. We pictured him carried around in the maw of some strange Cumbrian beast before he made his escape. The pus burst onto me and his favourite sheepskin rug shortly after.

Another cat came into the area and began to challenge Walter’s dominance. This cat, a big fluff ball named Moe, even invaded our house, via the cat-flap, on a number of occaisons, until Dad chased him around the house, drenching him with the plant mister. Walter got his home territory back, if a fraction of his previous empire.

Then Dad moved to South Cumbria and Walter acquired a new world, much more rural.

…to be completed…

What if religion/belief is a preparation of the brain for the experience of death? A kind of training that will dictate what our final experience will be. If you believe in eternal life then that is what you will experience in your final moments. What if this was scientifically proven? Wouldn’t you want to believe in something, in order to take control of your last moments and have the best possible experience. Would belief be possible if this was known to be true?

Welcome to the scene. You are in Harar, Ethiopia. Near the border with Somalia. To the south, the river Awash. To the north the Afar desert and the Danakil depression. To the east the desert and Somalia. To the west the final north-south bound road in Ethiopia, and the magnificent highlands. Harar itself is an ancient walled Arab town. Part of the ancient trade route into Africa where spices, the stimulants coffee and qat, slaves and gem stones were whisked to Arabia and Islam whisked itself into Africa.

The town of Harar is still part of this trade route. Now televisions, car parts, sattelite dishes and refugees are the incoming goods from the war torn Red Sea port of Mogadishu. Only qat and money and guns and ammunition return to Somalia along the route.

The population of Harar can be broken into roughly four ethnic groups: Somalis, Oromo, Amhara and the descendants of remaining Arabian caravaners who were enchanted by the desert or decided to set up lucrative businesses – the Harari.

Harar is raised somewhat from the desert, and the region near the town walls and up to a mile away is fertile. A number of cash and subsistance crops are grown: Corn, coffee, qat, wheat and tef – the grain used to make the Ethiopian staple flat bread. All are grown in sufficient quantity to keep the town thriving.

There are a few incredibly elderly ancients who remember Rimbaud, the teen poet turned arms dealer, who lived in the town, erecting an elaborate mansion in which to die.

Knowledge in Harar is passed down through time by the Muslim scholar-priests. Within the walled city most residents, but not all, are muslim. Despite this there is a relatively large number of bars, inhabited by an ever changing series of characters, drifting like the desert sands.

The Orthodox Ethiopian church is the other dominating religion of the town. It is based on a number of beliefs:

1. The royal family of Ethiopia is descended from Menelik I, illegitimate son of Solomon, by the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba. Raised in Palestine/Israel, Menelik escaped returning to his motherland to rule.
2. It is believed that one of Menelik’s companions stole the Ark of the Covenant from Solomon’s temple, and brought it with him to Ethiopia, where it remains to this day. It is believed to reside in Axum, in a church near the seven massive stellae carved from solid granite with more accuracy than is possible with today’s tools. The stellae are the tallest erected monoliths of the ancient world.

In the afternoon the crazies come out, aroused by qat. Old men sit in dark bars around the town square, playing dominoes for money and talking of the days not so long ago when soldiers from Cuba were stationed in between Harar nad the nearby Diri Dawa. The children of the town shout at westerners, “Cooba! Cooba!”, when they are not offering guided tours, or merely helping locate Rambo’s house.

Finding anywhere is a puzzle in the winding narrow streets, designed with blind dead ends and snaking intersecting paths, with no street signs, as the designers of old Arab market towns always made them. A form of protection against invading soldiers or bandits.

There are still bandits in the area, Somalia and Oromo terrorists, trained by Iraqis, who have blown up hotels in Harar, Diri Dawa and the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa.

In the evening hyenas approach the city. They sometimes roam the narrow streets, hunting for food, occasionally attacking children and small women. Every night a shiny headed old man feeds hyenas meat from his teeth. The hyenas could crush his skull in a single bite with their powerful jaws, but they seem to be his friends. He has names for many of them.

I was born a parasite. Concieved, then gestating in my mothers womb, thriving on stolen blood, energy, concentration and love. Born to feed from her body, suck at her breast. A hungry mosquito, yet unswattable.

I have lived as a parasite right up to this point where my head has become so swolen, so distended that it flows over my shoulders, down my back into the arms of the two bearers who follow me everywhere. No one has ever had any choice in the fact of their exploitation by me. They have never given themselves any choice, and I have never needed to give any justification for what I do.

I have taken from the world and only given back the shit I drop, which was never something that wholy originated from me anyway. Maybe it will go back in the end, when my fat head rots in the earth, or smoke rises up amongst fetid pigeons. But there will never be anything more than I took. If I can help it there will be a whole lot less. No bullshit.

I am a parasite. If I pass on a disease, so much the better. I might even take posthumously.

No one ever, I mean ever at any point in my existence, questioned me or what I was doing. And it starts with guilt. Your guilt. Your guilt gives me almost total freedom. If I could make God feel guilty I could even escape the destiny and responsibilities enscribed upon me by the physical universe. But I don’t care. If I ever had to strive for things, it is forgotten now. I have been doing my own thing despite everyone no matter what.

My time is nearly up, and I will take it with grace. Had circumstances not freely whored themselves to me I am sure I would have been called “good”. Not that anyone views me as “bad”. They just take me for granted, even if I make their lives pure living hell.