enter the novella
the dust
“… but this dust, it has somehow evolved …”
the narrator watches dust move across the dayroom
then something begins to happen
the dust becomes a people
they build settlements – they develop language – they create gods – they begin to write – ten thousand years of civilisation starts unfolding inside the psychiatric ward
and eventually the dust leads somewhere much older
extract
"... But this morning, I am faster and faster and faster round pool table, dizzy, until they caught my eye.
It’s typical that dust is gathered in each corner, and up the walls. But I drop out of circling speed and stand.
It is dust, illuminated, somehow animate. Dust begins to move. Gathered and lit up, it is more than just the atomisation of morning light.
Dust becomes something alive and animate all of itself.
My first miracle of morning.
I trace the path round the corners of floor, all hair and skin cells and web the Domestics had simply missed.
But this dust, it has somehow evolved. It becomes a small tribe all of itself, a people who started up skirting boards like base camp of Everest, and on and on, up to base of wall, purposeful in their making time, enjoying it.
This small tribe of gatherers, men, women and children assail the sheer face in front of them, move up pitted paint and cracks, move all the way up.
I follow their progress intently, an observer to this beginning of life. Some time passes and the room is full up with my breath, and their progress.
They come up and up, slow but sure, small minds become vocal, and even though I can’t make out a word of their language, I know they have elected a leader.
I follow their journeying around the four pastel-blue walls for an age until they reach ceiling. I stand on the pool table and so quick, like electric along cracks, a lightbulb – a magic of technology lights my mind, filaments burn a patch of bright white in my eyes.
Down a long web from the glass of bulb, they drop onto green fields of safe at my feet, onto grubby green pool table fabric.
I climb down and lean in to absorb this new world.
Settlements with hurling fields like some Gaelic fantasy, settling as fishers and gatherers this vast awakening, spreads to occupy a greasy pool table green.
Over small fires and sacrificial bones, they barter for sacred spaces, the D, the black ball spot, down cavernous pockets. Stories brim from under the weight of their own significance.
I saw one leader inconsistent in his symbolism for the marks he made on calf skin, the tribe expelled him to the wilds of a pocket for pretending knowledge, for being a fraud.
They have magical items purposed with spells, a power is gained from agreeing upon which written word might further ideas, define symbolism of things. And as some begin to write; words float between my face and the middle distance of the room.
I seem to be observer of ten thousand years of oral tradition being written, and the power of these words takes them in and out of good and bad.
Gods are made, came up from their soil rest, rise into the air between us, ask elaborate mythologies of them.
I saw Deirdre dash her head on a rock at the end of love. Étaín transformed over time immortal and reveal to me the strength of love that outlasts death, spans deeply into otherworld.
My tongue becomes fat in my mouth, and it dries with memories of how we were, you and I. To witness the trials of attraction, even at this micro-scale, I am capable of loving you better because of it.
Saw too, the three hundred years Oisín spent enwrapped in Niamh’s life through a curtain of the window beyond.
I felt every second of the nine hundred winters those children spent swan.
I can’t imagine a more perfect promotion of knowledge, it’s admirable what it takes to memorise the oral into rhetoric.
Their ways of telling tales by fires those early seasons ended quick when round stone towers become square, making my glimpse of this small part of time a privilege.
But the tales which made me smile became diluted.
The scribes wrote Cessair in, a failed fertility tragedy who would appear later as a pseudo-God, animated by voices from the future. But I can tell you plainly, there was no animated ghost of her in our ether those centuries of theirs ago.
Nothing was written of Danu. She had your anarchy, your convictions. I could see them edit her out, Her ministries gone unwritten like an altercation never witnessed hospital night corridor.
I saw Her power with my own eyes, Her doing, Her name, the name of the people, but for these new scribes in my vision, I could see why they wrote Her out.
And as sudden as lightning, The Dagda, rose from the books and looked directly into me.
I saw myself in His eyes as He locked in. Raw and unfiltered masculinity, a mirror to all the sins of my time, with you and without you.
His gaze electrified each and every nerve in my body. I felt seen.
I raised my face to the lightbulb for mental reset, for I didn’t want to be the next greedy poet to die by two gold coins. I’d taken enough of this in and went to leave the room.
A faceless nurse caught me at the door, said simply, plainly, I couldn’t leave, so I turned on my heel back into it.
Of course! To leave would be to upset the balance of the universe!..."
belfast
a city becomes a psychological landscape
psychosis
everything becomes significant
colours – objects – dust – paintings – language – people
myth
the ancient world returns through a mind trying to reconstruct history from fragments
apocalypse
a fungus – a bell – the devil – the possible end of humanity
love
throughout everything, the narrator keeps writing to the person he loves
the questions inside alone
can a hallucination tell the truth?
can a city become a state of mind?
what happens when mythology becomes memory?
what happens when memory is sullied by politics?
is collective identity a source of belonging – or another way of creating an enemy?
alone doesn’t necessarily answer these questions, it keeps worrying at them
[home]
alonenovellaart 