I found this among the papers of the serious writer that were passed to me after his death. I offer it without an agenda, like a pair of well-worn gloves for your dashboard compartment. Do with it as you wish. I think he might have liked for you to read it closely. As always, his writing throws up more questions than answers. Some might call this a condition of modern man. Others call it inferior insight. I call it common.

The serious writer always knew there would be a last story but when the time was near, he felt ill-prepared.

One day, after settling in his favourite chair by the window but turned away from it, he told a visiting friend: “It’s well arranged that you don’t know which of the many will be your last: your last piss, your last time being touched by someone, the last warm cup of coffee in the morning. The last chat with a friend. The last supper. You enjoy all of these in the most present of tenses, carried by the hope that there may be another one, and then another and so on. And since we are an ingeniously lazy and trusting species, we take the routine to be a principle and we shrink it on the occasion of its repeated occurrence without further thought.”

The friend lit a pipe and said: “I think I see where you’re coming from. I understand death is on your mind.”

The serious writer shifted his weight in his chair and looked at the pipe with longing. Having stopped smoking years ago, he now afforded himself only the second hand experience. He made a mental note regarding the loss of certain pleasures over time.

“The older I get”, he said, “the less I appreciate the fact that one of my stories will come round and not leave, (like a hot beverage going entropically from scorching to lukewarm to cold), and then what? Become an epitaph?” He chuckled.

“You know that Koschinsky has begun to write your obituary already, I hear. That’s outstanding”, his friend said and found himself obliged to clarify: “Given Koschinsky’s reputation as a critic these days, of course.”

“I have not only heard it, I suggested it to Koschinsky”, said the serious writer. “I thought: why not take the initiative in final affairs while I can?” He crossed his legs, laid one hand on top of the other, rubbing them so as to feel the knobbly bits.

“I have recently disregarded my bodily needs terribly. Come to think of it, I also have not listened to my inner voice lately. I don’t know why. Perhaps because otherwise I won’t write that last story ― I’m afraid to leave an unfinished opus behind, you know?”, he said and his friend nodded, churning out blueish clouds.

The serious writer said lightly, “I have always been a great fan of the auto-da-fé as a way of maintaining a certain degree of control beyond the grave while at the same time keeping your fans giddy and guessing until Judgement Day: ‘Did he or did he not…?’, ‘What if he had…?’, ‘Could this have been…?’, ‘We wonder if he…’, and so on – it keeps me young I think. But the difficulty with burning your stuff in reference to the possibility of your death is two-fold: you don’t know if you’re wasting your time because you might be alive for another X years; and it makes you think of your own death”.

“It would be a terrible crime to do that. I don’t think your readers or your critics could ever forgive you after your death,” said his friend. He didn’t seem to notice his own tactlessness.

“Well”, said the serious writer, serious again, “as you know, I abhor both waste and thoughts of death. Hence I only carry the idea of an auto-da-fé around with me, together with a small canister of gasoline and a matchbox. Rather like the plan for a certain prayer and a rosary, which I never touch. I don’t know if I fantasise that I might burn not only my work but myself, but I am certainly stocked up just in case.”

The friend shook his head gently, trying to disperse the thought, and waved his hands, or so it seemed to the writer, because the fumes had become so thick now that he was separated from his visitor by a grey wall of smoke. He went on voicing his thoughts aloud, as was his habit even when he was alone.

“The stories I will write before that last one will be as prayerful as anything I have ever penned: the characters will be mild and philosophical, apt to hold life’s whole in appropriate balance, with an even demeanour gracing my own age, like a study of butterflies at the end of their long, ardous journey. These not quite last stories shall, I think, test my very existence by throwing up many questions that had plagued me for a lifetime of serious writing, like the question of whether we determine our fate or are determined by it.”

He heard his friend mumble something across from him and took it as approval to continue.

“One of these stories will be about a man who sat across me once on an underground train: his right arm hung limply as if he’d had a stroke and he looked at me open-eyed and yet guarding his self behind his condition. He had to lurch forward three times (as if performing a secret ritual) in order to shift his centre of mass and get up at all, ignoring me throughout this maneuver and finally smiling – unless it was not a smile but a strained grimace. I wonder: did this man feel that he chose his partial paralysis by making a silent wish between clenched teeth, or by dreaming it in advance? Perhaps he felt that he’d been dealt a bad card, not quite the last one, by some god not merciful, overlooking him, with respect only for the fabric of everything but not this particular man’s happiness?”

The serious writer realised in that moment how the word ‘happiness’ betrayed its own meaning, because in reality it boiled down to mundane things like chicken soup, which he then dressed up as something less plain than farts and farewells. But he was not ready to interrupt himself quite yet and continued:

“Or is this man, let us call him Max (a good, solid, reliable name for this type of man) like me, refusing to take sides on this question of questions, perhaps, again like me, writing for his passage between the Scylla of providence and the Charybdis of randomness? A passage not to anywhere, a time filler, an artful avoidance?”

“You tell me, my friend,“ he invited the other. There was no answer, only the sound of the floor boards creaking.

“Here’s another question that bothers me – no less than the first: how much of us is unique and how much part of a grand collective of souls? When we breathe in and out, do we choose our own rhythm or do we enact an unconscious concert? Do we only imagine that we create our own thoughts but actually just sculpt an identity out of one and the same shared material? Is our whole concept of individuality just nonsense?”

He broke off because he felt exhausted all of a sudden. His ideas, his questions all seemed unclear and somehow impure to him. As if there was a truth behind the words, but the more words he piled upon one another, the less visible was this truth. He put his hands over his face and felt their soft insides now on his temples and the bones around his eye socket. On his cheeks, the palms pressed down on his the beard. He felt himself.

“What a powerful illusion the self is, especially for me, with my oeuvre, my life’s work, which I, in the hubris of the great individualist who also happens to be a snob (a most convenient combination against the power of the collective) trace back to myself: me, me again, me also, me-me, meee – these are only some of the variations on the person at the centre of my consciousness, who is really only a persona and does not contain my soul, though the fingerprints of my soul are certainly all over it.”

He felt himself to be alone. Sometimes, for some people, the Me broke down almost completely, very close to disappearing without dying altogether, he thought and closed his eyes.

He wanted to write another story in this one-of-the-last-stories category about a man, always only called ‘the patient’, who emerged from a car accident as a vegetable, his brain shut down until, after five long years, he suddenly began to respond to questions again and finally awoke, but as a different person. Perhaps his coma had been a form of cocoon, a phase he had to undergo in deep sleep in order to become who he needed to be. Perhaps he wasn’t really asleep but communicated with non-human beings differently throughout those years. Perhaps he forgot all about it and, having rejoined humanity in its customary upright shape, could no longer understand the language of trees and interpret the trembling of the sides of his intensive care bed as he had when comatose – as the thought pattern of Earth itself.

The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was possible! – an even more infinite universe of all things to write about. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon from outer space – a huge gorge that looked like a thin trickle, impossible to miss, hard to hit.

“But my last story will not be about art or finding myself”, the serious writer said and opened his eyes. The air was clear again but his friend had left and robbed the writer of his audience.

“My last story will be about love”, he said bravely.

(Possibly inspired by the death of J.D. Salinger and David Lodge’s novel “therapy“. Comments on Fictionaut.)

(I’m participating in NaNoWriMo. See also my weekly blog entries at Virtual Writers, Inc. This is an excerpt of an in vitro novel “Bloody Management” only. Unfettered, unedited, but not dispirited. From chapter 6, “Hearth”.)

As she walked through the entrance hall of her Chelsea appartement house, she glanced at herself in the mirror. This was an old movie trick, she realised, and one she cherished: the female lead, whose deeper motives would not become clear until much later in the story, needed to check in with herself, and the viewer needed to check in with her – not through one of those full-face-all-wrinkles-and-pores shots of the head, but instead by following her discreetly, as she, with the same degree of discreetness, glanced at herself in the mirror. She liked what she saw and she didn’t like it at once: a pale face looked at her framed by a black thing frazzled at the temples – this was her hair; the nose seemed to peek out of the dough-white mass like a periscope (perhaps there were little grey-uniformed men hidden behind it, who followed her around); the eyes, green marble-like eyes, were shadowed by too much mascara as if they were looking for an excuse not to shine. She held her head like a bird, slightly forward from the shoulders, at an odd angle, as if she were a bird threatened by extinction. Maybe she was. She felt intensely Napoleonic at this moment, and the mirror with its brown chiseled mahagony frame (what else!) and its glass, which had a foreboding of its coming blindness, underlined that sentiment from which it was only a tiny step towards Hestia’s secretly held, but strongly and boldly defended view that she might be the reincarnated counterdraft to Jane Austen. Jane Austen without the talent for writing, but with the soul of that most sinister sister of all women writers. That Austen had been sinister was the only rational conclusion that could be drawn from her novels: hadn’t she encouraged the females of her time to rebel against social injustice and relinquish a position that women had occupied for hundreds of years? Hestia saw herself as the keeper of the flame, the calm center of the household, the place to which the man, the hunter, could return when the elements in general, and his drive in particular, were beginning to overpower him. She viewed man as the crown of creation and herself as a willing helper and bearer of children, a heroine more like Goethe’s Lotte than Austen’s Lizzy or Emma. She moved on, past the historic magical mirror and, walking upstairs instead of taking the elevator, felt her barrenness constrict her like a tight, unadorned belt. She dreaded the emptiness of her appartement, and she wished she could stay home instead and await the arrival of her prince, no, her king, ready to bring him his slippers, take him by the hand, lead him to a set table and receive, in return, the praise and the adoration befitting a goddess of the hearth.

“once upon a time, there were two people in deep and serious love with one another and with everything that they hoped they would be.”

i lit a cigarette and sat down to type. but suddenly i couldn’t remember what the keyboard meant. i looked at those small black squares with white symbols on them and they seemed to tell a tale which i could not decipher. i began to teach myself story again.

there was a “w” for “wild“, followed by “e” for “eros“. then, in quick succession “r,t,z,u“, or “rutz“, which clearly indicated sexual stuff gone from awesome to awry. this i found discouraging, and i looked for different messages further down the field of letters (why so many?): “i, o, p, a” for “opia“, which had to mark the entrance of drugs – quite possibly, the lovers turned to drugs to fix whatever had gone wrong between them. i got quickly bored with this game and i worried: what if i could never unlock the secret of letters? was i condemned to have to hire a long-legged secretary (short and stumpy would not do) to take my dictation?

days passed, bed and breakfast blurred into one big burden. i smoked, inhaling longer and longer until i could hold my breath for an entire day. no gods no muses came to my rescue. letters remained locked in a chest which might contain a treasure – or treachery. perhaps the story of love that i had started with was my destiny. so i tried to finish it:

“once upon a time, there were two people in deep and serious love with one another and with everything that they hoped they would be. they spent their days in a haze, waiting for the moment to get to bed, extinguish their cigarettes and look into each other’s eyes searching for that spark that had brought them together in the first place. the man was a writer, the woman was a painter. their foreplay was a mixture of both their talents: he wrote secret stories on her naked body. she sketched her desire on his. when they looked at themselves to admire each other’s work, they met every time as if for the first time, forgot about words and colours, merged their talents in a single movement. miraculously, the movement turned into a bird.

the bird flew up to the ceiling and out of the open window into the world. it settled on a birch next to their house and admired god’s creation. all the beasts noticed its arrival and paid attention. even the lion, their king, looked up from a gazelle who had given itself up to be devoured.

what do you think you’re doing, said the gazelle. i sacrifice myself like an idiot and you don’t even pay attention? – so sorry for that, said the lion – i’ll be eating you in no time, if you just let me satisfy my curiosity. – as you say, my liege, said the gazelle, and ate a grape while waiting for her hour of death. meanwhile, the lion walked over to the bird who had just discovered the power of chant and was singing a song just for fun. the song began: if i was an angel of dust …

that doesn’t make any sense, said the lion, you’re annoying and i don’t even think you’re a real bird. i know my subjects.

the bird didn’t mind. it was made of pure love.  it didn’t care about the animal kingdom, about its unwritten rules (nobody had bothered writing them down)…

in the meantime, the lovers had finished their lovemaking. the bed had gone still and they were breathing noisily and happily. in and out. as they both entered the realm of dreams, the bird dissolved, smiling at the king of the animals. the lion was confused and disturbed. he did not feel like returning to the gazelle in waiting. he did not feel like torturing his wives. he did not feel like playing with his offspring, or running after game, or bathing in the sun and glory of his natural title. the bird seemed to signify the arrival of a new way of thinking that broke the roundelay of eat and be eaten.

in the end, however, after a long period of deliberation, which he carried out as good as any predator, his stomach began to hurt and he went back to his meal.”

© 2009 finnegan flawnt – written under a milk wood tree

i have at the soul level only ever known five women if you dont count my mother: a german, a persian, an argentinian, an italian and an american. now i will talk about them & say what i need to say.

today i will talk about the german woman.

this woman is in a way the most difficult one to talk about because she was my first, and because it was a long time ago, and because there is still guilt. then again guilt comes with every one of these women & perhaps that’s what makes them worth remembering, perhaps that’s why i hold them dear in my heart.

her name was penelope.

she was two years older than me, freckled and pale, her hair toying with red without real commitment. she played the guitar and she sang like a lady of courtly love. she did not take me seriously at first – i sat at her feet: an invisible worshipper before a goddess, one of a number of young males, all of us unattractive in our own manner and unsure of ourselves, in particular of our maleness, which hung on us like a new uncomfortable coat, always the same coat in any weather, hot or cold, but we were stuck with it & we believed, with the faces of our fathers fused to our thick clumsy frames, that it would, one day, hopefully soon, fit us and feel right, no matter what temperature.

The remenant of the tale is long ynough.

throughout one of those overheated summers, penelope sang and sang herself into my heart. day by day, there were less men shuffling nervously around her, eventually they receded & became part of her audience so that she could see me as a man who wanted her & whom she wanted.

graffitti luv.

around that time a malheur happened to her and she broke her ankle so that she had to walk around in a cast. when we made love for the first time, this severely limited our acrobatic aspirations but made the moment more memorable. the cast was covered with graffiti, an artistically most promising thing it was.

moment of truth.

as i said, i had never been with a woman like this before & i went for it like a starved dog for the bone & i didnt think about taking proper precautions which in those days long gone involved carrying and using a condome: it simply had not occurred to me. neither did it occur to her until after the moment was gone (dear reader! it is difficult to write about what actually happened – i will leave it to others, braver ones, to serve you the juicy detail).

Have mercy on oure wo and oure distresse!

i recall that we sat together afterwards at candlelight (big in those days and perhaps still where hyppies live) & it suddenly dawned on both of us that we might have made a person by melting into each other. i remember the shocked expression in her eyes and my surprise at that. it made me see then and there the difference between the depth of our love for one another though i didnt realise it then and dont want to believe it now, still.

Of the bodies, and the grete honour.

her mound by the way then seemed to be as wide as the bosporus, filled with earthly delights, and for the first time i felt powers that i could not & did not want to harness. like a ship leaving the wharf after that long build, after endless dreaming of endless horizon and the swelling seas. like knowing that falling & letting yourself fall is a little death & only one of many many little deaths to come, and yet the fall is so sweet & the ground seems so near so near.

Shortly for to telle is myn entente.

penelope and i parted ways soon after when she moved to the south. got together again, briefly, years later, upon which i managed to expertly break her heart with chivalrous brutality that i had acquired in the meantime, the mean time that it took me to come into my might which penelope had shared with me as her gift.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt with a little help from Chaucer.

Eros, mr sex himself, once a formidable winged god & not too hairy, now lives in the suburbs under the name Eros Smith & works for the city’s authorities regulating and policing prostitutes. This sounds exciting but it isn’t. the job’s pure drudgery: the laws are boring & irrelevant & suppressive. the practice of the world’s oldest profession pierces the body of democracy and decency (that’s the whole point) and society strikes back. Hookers have unions now & health insurance like their clients & brothels have receptionists who can say “cunnilingus” in seven languages.

nobody knows better than Eros what sexloveandlust is all about. when he appeared, ladies used to get wetter than Seattle & gents wilder than broncos, their eyes sparkling with lust and love. The Body Electric – these were not just words in the small shapely hands of the old Eros, but dough to sculpt desires & to make or break careers & lives all tied together by immeasurable longings, by lifelong bonds or shortlived encounters. he soothed the woe of the life-weary by injecting pure endlessness in their pulsing veins & helped lovers build comfortable nests in fertile dirt.

now he is mr Smith with a face like a sour apple, with a sandwich for lunch and bags under his eyes from too much TV. his loins are dry & his mouth is drier.

So what had happened?

let us wind back to a rainy night a few years ago & quicken the pace of our story:

lovely lara leiblich had a lover: ludvig lorry, a hunky fisherman. in the hut by the village, by the village he had told her but no way she’d go there with him just to you know what. but then she did anyway. ludvig as large as gentle. guiding her carefully. his wet thick blonde hair. sweat on his brow and on his upper arms glistening in the moonlight. romance novel stuff. sentimental hadn’t there been ludvigs large limb she longed for, and likewise, ludvig’s stirring was caused by the sweet caressing of lara’s labia.

Eros the god of earthly and heavenly love, son of aphrodite, conceived by Plentitude and Poverty, had stood bye from the first moment that lara laid lusty eyes on ludvig and ludvig gladly cocked his cap for lara. ‘t was like a pinch they both felt at the same time, the divine belly laugh, that libido lizardry making dr freud proud.

fast forward & you could see sheer screwing – they fucked until the angels wept willingly & eros flapped his wings with joy. ’twas a simple enough fondness that made them find & fondle each other. ’twasn’t correct or civil but in that barbecue space between their legs & thighs everything was in order without proper spelling. they spoke litle & breathed hard. is this how the universe began?

at home, their parents sat wondering. rain drops drizzled. fires flared. lara & ludvig were at large. eros was there for the parents as well-he watched over couples old and young, wet and dry, hot and cold, everywhere & anytime. the parents were calmed: deep down they knew an old story was repeating itself and a good thing that was.

meanwhile in detroit, in a former derelict can factory, a group of activists wrote a manifesto that would end it all. in it they listed all things that Eros cared about. made connections between lust & science, sex & labanotation built not on mathematical formulae or sound statistics, but on the powerful lyrics of soul. they proved, once and for all, from a feminist & a chauvinist, a marxist & a neoliberal point of view that Eros did what he did better than anyone else without any knowledge of history, biology, french, geography, trigonometry, algebra. the essay showed that mankind, in fact, would be served a lot better if Eros’ services were taken over by professionals with pedigree and a higher authority than the god could ever muster up. they took his job & left him with a bowl of lukewarm soup. they warmed up Apollo’s ancient argument that Eros’ archery skills were inferior and laughable & they injected their manifesto upon its completion in the internet where it circulated uncontrolled, virally infecting appassionati anywhere.

Eros, second in self-love only to narcissus, took all this really badly, especially the renewed ridicule, dropped the bow and reached for the billy club, the paddy wacker, the nightstick.

for ludvig and lara & millions of passionate lovers since then, a world ended. once again, divine intervention had been interrupted, intercourse itself gone off the rails, and the god vacated his olympic throne in exchange for a desk, left Psyche’s divan & moved into a bunk in the suburbs.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt

they fight at night when the chest feels tight. oh right, he’s wrong, again, and she’s right, of course she’s right. and he shouts, he always shouts. and then she screams, always screams. now he sulks, always sulking that bastard, i did ask him when we met whether he sulked easily and told him i couldnt stand it and he said smiling yes i sulk and they laughed it off. doves were circling above the lake then and the mood was good and the pants were tight oh so tight too tight. their work was done and they were far away from everyone.

there were sounds around them then and they were whispering to each other and holding on to their sanity because the love seemed to make them crazy. or perhaps it was the fear of coming close again, who knows now after all these years.

now it is night, and they fight, and then they grit their teeth and they smoke and they make plans anyway and run their life, run their lifelines from the ship, the family ship around their house and their car and their jobs around a pillar knot them so they don’t come loose because then everything might come loose.

they fight, at night they fight. oh right, she’s wrong, again, and he’s right, of course he’s right. the bitch. and she shouts and he sulks and later they hug, dug in their trenches, firing from close range, all their ammunition comes from a deep sea of love, muddy waters but theirs. around them stand others, billions of lovers and shouters, all right, all wrong all the time every day and every night. and they fight.

later that night, after the fight, the dove comes again, in their sleep. He reaches out to touch her and she doesn’t flinch. their hands clasp, from way up they look like one, and down there, it feels like they’re together, something to fight for, at night. they’re allright.

The elephant made love in the living room. All is experimentation, all Capitalisation. Legislation galore because everything, everything ought to be regulated, what else would the public servants do?

These are different times. Tell me about that. Oh yes I am, ma’am. I have to leave proper sentence structure to do it that’s how different these times are. I might write you a letter instead. Useful as a hole in my head.

Now this isn’t fair. Life isn’t fair, Oswald, it’s thick like Russian hair with opportunity. Metaphors gone awry. Thick as oil. Thick as the bald porter’s goiter. Through thick and thin with a generous double chin.

What exactly is the cosine(x)? Who cares as long as triangles stand firmly. Horses for courses and other things one might not want to say out loud for fear of social consequences. Penis envy. What in Jove drove Freud? His wife did: out of the bed and on to the couch.

The elephant made love in the living room.
All is experimentation, all Capitalisation. We cannot but approve. Good move.

they sit in the kitchen dinner is long over but they feel hungry still. so they eat swedish crackers with butter and fennel salami from milano. they are tempted to smoke again, but don’t do it. the woman puts her legs on the table and crosses them below the knee. she wears pink and white striped socks, jeans, a t-shirt and a thin blue sweater. after the crackers she gets out a trail mix she created herself. no almonds, she says, we havent got any almonds. the man sits down to write because he hasnt written all day. i dont really want to, he says and grumbles. you better do it, she says. you’re right, i gotta stay on the ball, he says. he fires up the small computer and longs for a cigarette which he knows to be a major distraction. as he writes word after word, he watches her over his glasses munching nuts and dried apples and rice cakes. he is out of words. she asks him a question, he shows her the finger. twitter makes you aggressive, she says. do you really think so, he asks. she is right, he thinks. this is not a way to behave nor is it a way to treat your woman. she smiles at him, thankful that he shows some remorse, and turns to her book. what are you reading? he asks. color of magic by terry pratchett, she says, and: anything else you’d like to know? it’s not an invitation, really. she puts the book down. looks at him, a long look, and lets an even longer silence follow. twitter’s all banter, she says. she is right, he thinks, and writes on. he is not logged on now, as they call it. logged, that’s not real, not trees or loggers, real men. when you’re logged, you’re connected, and when you’re connected, you’re on the net, it must be a kind of work, he thinks, or else it wouldn’t be called net-working. he thinks of a disgusting cronenberg movie where the people put video tapes in their bodies. he can’t remember the actual plot or the ending. it doesn’t matter. it’s the same thing – except that our bodies aren’t altered, they are simply ignored. it’s a lot more powerful, he says. what did you say? she says, what is a lot more powerful? he explains. she wrinkles her forehead. she is beautiful, right here, right now, when she thinks about what he says and shows it. her fine toes in the striped socks wriggle. he knows that she can put the second toe over the big toe which he can’t do. it’s a birth defect or a granted privilege, depends on how you look at it, he thinks. he forgets about logging and all that virtual stuff right here, right now, at the kitchen table covered with crumbs and the butter dish and dirty knives, and a book that looks like a fat fallen butterfly on its back. you are beautiful, he says. she smiles and says, you looked at me for 10 minutes straight just now, how can i not be beautiful. now he smiles and closes the laptop.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt