Monument Maker, page 66
And as we move away from the page, zooming out from a clumsy closing paragraph that would have the warrior monk framed on the horizon like a shot from a John Ford movie, we start to imagine his movements on the other side of this profile, this puff piece for cynical longhairs to laugh over, we see him go into a chemist’s on the high street and pick up a prescription for God knows what secret terror, we see him clip his nails, in his pyjamas, his feet on the very edge of the toilet bowl, which from this angle looks like the notorious sinkhole behind Niagara Falls, and we observe the bruise on his calf and the hard skin on his feet, the white lines on the nails, and watch as the nails fall in perfect half-moons into the dark water, each one breaking the surface and sending out waves like stones into flooded quarries, or single bright tears, all accompanied by this impossible silence that the warrior monk has entered into, and watch as he boards a train to Devon on a summer’s morning to attend the showing of some newly recovered experimental films, one of which consists of a loop of two people making love, some art film that went on forever, only they are upside down, with their bodies entwined around each other, this eternal love, the warrior monk thought, this fuck forever, this upside-down embrace where only the woman’s features were visible, the man is on top of her, her left leg wrapped around his, his face buried in the pillow, over her shoulder, are they coming, are they caught up in coming, again and again, the warrior monk wondered, the two of them fused, in passion, forever, and he thought of all the little deaths inside the body, and how crucial they were, it was a factor he could never control in his experiments, this state of ceaseless sacrifice, this interior force, in time, although it may well be an exterior force, this sacrificial power, he allowed, or perhaps language itself wasn’t really up to the job, and as he looked from interior to exterior he felt the same bottomless terror of the fallen angels stood in front of their mirrors in care homes at night and all he is able to do is to run a little drool from the side of his mouth and put his hands to his forehead, where the skin has suddenly become too tight, and he starts to rub his temples in order to relieve the pressure and to loosen the skin, and as the lovers repeat, in the flickering light of the film, in its perfect black and white, he passes his fingers over his crown and comes to feel it for the first time as endless, skin, no shortage of it in the world to come, impossible to map, this creation, and as the lovers repeat he staggers out, into the night, and lights a cigarette—he hasn’t smoked in months—and stands on the balcony of the picture house, a little shaken up, it has to be said, and in the distance he watches as a small boat, transformed by perspective into a simple cube, disappears beneath the horizon, a stone, afloat on the water, is the moon, and this is the Valley of the Kings, he thinks to himself, lover, kind lover, as the lovers, repeat, forever.
Another summer.
APPENDIX NEBULA: CATHEDRAL OF ALL SUMMERS
Abandoned Robotic Men in a Lock-Up in Athens—choristers.
Actual Frenchman in an Actual Beret with an Actual Goatee Who Plays Atonal Acoustic Guitar Between Serving Overpriced French Artisanal Beers and Shaking His Head Over His Lack of a Single Fucking Word of English—proprietor of a bar in Bourron-Marlotte.
Douglas Adams—Doctor Who producer whom Paimon submitted the (rejected) script for Pirates of the Universe Divide to.
Adolphus—aka Banjo, prisoner with one hand (and who could stand on it), intimate of the moon, cellmate of the late Robert Scott.
Adults Who Have Kicked the Bucket in the Bathroom—choristers.
Advertisers—choristers.
African American Tank Commander—liberator of Mauthausen.
African Woman—chorister.
Ageing Astronomers—choristers.
Alarmed Fellow Boarder—chorister.
Albigensians—self-suicide in perfection, for transmigration is wanderings in the desert of eternity and the body of Christ is a lie.
Pope Alexander II—threatened William the Conqueror and his wife with excommunication for marrying without his permission.
Pope Alexander VII—Bernini’s wretched pope.
Muhammad Ali Pasha—led the raid against the fort of Gereif on the Blue Nile. Betrayed and set upon by black demons on that very same Nile, his body was never recovered.
Aliens—choristers.
Dante Alighieri—walking, once again, in the fulcrum of his life, in the summer of his years.
All of the Disappeared—choristers.
Amanda—lover of the outlandish man.
Amanda’s Father—chorister.
Amanda’s Mother—chorister.
Amateur Psychologists—choristers.
Amour—old black Labrador.
Iannis Anastas of Tsagkarada—a loved one, lost.
Angel of Mons—supernatural entity that was seen above the battlefield during the Battle of Mons in Belgium on 23 August 1914, possibly inspired by the Arthur Machen story “The Bowmen.”
Angelic Children with Wide Reflective Eyes—choristers.
Kenneth Anger—film-maker and occultist, author of the classic Hollywood Babylon.
Angry Mob in the Marketplace in Wuppertal—choristers.
Anne—boring Swedish Robert Creeley-lookalike’s cute girlfriend, resident in Grez-sur-Loing for a summer long ago, went on to become a semi-famous Swedish pop star.
Anonymous Donor—forgotten, now, except in the mind of the architect Pierre Melville, who entombed him.
Anonymous Espagnol—composer of “Guárdame las vacas” circa 1550. Chorister.
Another Nameless Black Man in a Novel—chorister.
Saint Anselm—God is a thing that nothing could be greater than. Therefore he must exist, because a thing that is greater than everything else but that does not exist would be a lesser thing than a thing that is greater than everything else and that does exist.
Saint Anthony of the Flowers—the headless body of Goya resides in his hermitage in Madrid, where Goya lies buried in his own art. The Madonna Flower is the Lilium candidum.
Anti-Democrats—choristers.
The AntiMatterists—manifesto written by young William Scotia but in the end they went for The SIRK all the same.
Approximately Toxic—aka XX. Subterranean.
Thomas Aquinas—faith and reason are not opposed, faith takes up where reason ends, and reason can help to elucidate faith by metaphor and example, for can you, truly (ask yourself), reason to the end?
Arabian Woman—chorister.
Mr. Archibald—headmaster at the school where young William Scotia works.
Adam Aros—first river. Part of the team that worked on the Galactic Map. Chief cultural liaison officer on The Advance, the British link in the Victory Gardens.
Sarah Aros—wife of Adam.
Art Tutors—choristers.
Antonin Artaud—it is the state of his body.
Artists—choristers.
Artists Living in the Past—choristers.
Artists Who Fell Asleep on the Couch and Never Woke Up—like Jack Rose. Choristers.
Astronauts—choristers.
Atlas—another summer. Raise it.
Audience in Space—choristers.
Audience Members Joking About the Effects of LSD—choristers.
Saint Augustine—a shining example of man’s corruption, redemption and continued imperfection.
The Authorities—choristers.
The Axis Powers—the Nazis, the Russians and the Japanese.
The Axis Powers—adjustment.
Babette—French woman with long curly hair, owner of Ook, the dog, lover of Flower, my Flower. Striking red birthmark on her face in the shape of a small island. Briefly signed to the same modelling agency as Carla Bruni. Later married a roadie for French rock bands who fell from a lighting rig, and retired from life to look after him in his paralysed state. I hear they still live together in a cottage in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in south-east France.
J.S. Bach—resident composer in the castle of heaven.
Bald Guy with Big Ears—chorister.
Bald Unremarkable Tenor—chorister.
J.G. Ballard—author of the classic The Unlimited Dream Company. Looked like Frederick Delius in a painting.
Baphomet—(bisexual) talking head worshipped by the Knights Templar in the subterranean tunnels of Cugny.
Catherine Barjansky—sculptor, author and artist, born in Odessa, in the Ukraine, in the dying years of the nineteenth century. Sculpted Delius as a ghost in beeswax.
Baroque Music Trio—bass recorder, lute and bass viol, with the unforgettable singer who is my sister in another life.
Bart—chorister.
Bascomb—village idiot.
Bascomb’s Father—chorister.
Battalion of Locals in Burntisland—choristers.
Rudolf Bauer—avant-garde German artist who was a big influence on film-maker, artist and occultist Harry Smith. Painted portals, tunnels, transmitters.
The Beach Boys—endless summer.
Beautiful Blind Girl Sat in the Sun—chorister.
Beautiful Girl Whose Tiny Pink Bikini Is the Colour of Pale Flesh Made Rosy by the Sun—chorister.
Hans Bellmer—artist of the disarraying of the body, the erotic disarticulation of the limbs.
The Beloved—in his garden.
Michahim Bengt—said to have recorded camels speaking a particular brand of Hebrew that was described as “the masticating of the words,” in other words the regurgitation of words, and so Bengt had come up with a form of Hebrew poetry that regurgitated itself, in other words a poetry that saw a form of evolution in rephrasing, in reformulating, or rather infinitely recycling, really, but it was these letters, repeated in endless configuration for eternity, that was poetry, was the point: ZTM. TMZ. ZMT. MTZ.
Benzillah of Diagoras—aka Benzillah the Low to the Earth, author of The Qutub aka The Tomb of the Song.
Jean Pierre Bernard—built a house, once, in Larchant, in the summer of 1792, with his wife, Adelaïd Hamelin.
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux—was it in vain that the Wisdom of God hid what we are unable to see?
Gian Lorenzo Bernini—seventeenth-century Italian sculptor and architect credited with the creation of the baroque style.
Joseph Beuys—artist, Nazi, Marxist, hypnotised parrot, circumcised squirrel.
Biographers—choristers.
The Birds of the Air—choristers.
Black GIs at Normandy—choristers.
Black Slaves from the Valley of the Blue Nile—choristers.
Black Soldiers Holding Up the Bullets They Dodged and Grinning—choristers.
Black Soldiers Lying in a Field Hospital—choristers.
Black Soldiers Pictured with Their New Extended Families with the Lovers They Took in France and the Babies They Made Together—choristers.
Black Soldiers Tending to the Survivors of a Nazi Time Bomb on a Street in Coutances, France—choristers.
Black Stork in a Bombed-Out Zoo—
Saint Blaise-des-Simples—simple is a Flower.
William Blake—as alive today as he ever was.
Blake’s Flea—crippled horror that makes you think of Jack Frost?
Madame Helena Blavatsky—author of the classic The Voice of the Silence.
Blind Girl Dancing with a Hula Hoop—chorister.
Blind Man Being Led on a Rope Through the Night of Khartoum
chorister.
Blind Man in Burntisland—chorister.
Blondi—Hitler’s dog, and perhaps the true love of his life.
Bodies of Decapitated Men with Signs Carved into Their Flesh Like This: “#”—choristers.
Bodies of Mutilated Women—choristers.
The Body in the Book Tower—outlandish knight.
Antoine Boësset—composer. Superintendent of music at the Ancien Régime French court. Chorister.
Bolsheviks—choristers.
Jorge Luis Borges—claimed the last sound was a bird, left nothing to no one, turned history to dust.
Boring Swedish Artist Who Looks Like Robert Creeley—resident in Grez-sur-Loing all those years ago in the past now. He also wore an eyepatch, which might have been what made him look like Creeley, who, like James Joyce before him, also wore an eyepatch. Famous in Sweden for his boring still lifes, he shot himself in the head and he didn’t even die, how boring.
The Bornless One—the deathless one.
Harriet Bosse—long-suffering object of obsession for August Strindberg (see: Letters to Harriet Bosse by August Strindberg).
David Bowie—station to station.
Boys on a School Trip to Belgium—choristers.
Boys on Trampolines—choristers.
Boys Playing Frisbee by the River Loing—choristers.
Boys with Asperger’s—choristers.
Boys with Half-Eaten Faces—choristers.
Boys with Holes in Their Bodies Where the Light Shines Through—choristers.
Boys with Missing Ears and Black Holes for Eyes—choristers.
Lee Brackstone—editor.
Eva Braun—Hitler’s lover aka Eva Hitler, whom he married in the Führerbunker the day before she swallowed a cyanide pill and he put a bullet in his head.
Brave Young German Pilots—crossing the water on their way to an assignation with fate, our fate, their fate, God love us both.
André Breton—author of the classic Arcanum 17, The (Lovely) Star.
Brothers—choristers.
Norman O. Brown—author of the classic Life Against Death.
The Brown-Skinned Virgin—came down to earth and fucked a man silly so that the image of her was left on his heart, and on his skin, beneath the veil where she fucked him.
Anton Bruckner—composer of the classic Symphony No. 7, the music that accompanied the announcement of Hitler’s suicide on German radio.
Burly Young French Youth Pulling His Girlfriend’s Hair—chorister.
Mrs. Bustard—chorister.
Cadaver with Its Own Semi-Liquidised Organs Gathered Up in Its Arms—chorister.
Albert Camus—author of the classic The Stranger aka The Outsider aka The Outlandish Knight.
Candy—beautiful blonde groupie.
Captain of a Ship Operating Out of Malta Reported Sunk in May of 1941—chorister.
Casanova—chorister.
Cats in a Hypnotised Dream—choristers.
Marc Chagall—the great Russian painter, architect of the First Church of the Moon.
Child Crying in the Distance—chorister.
Children Dead in Their Bunk Beds—choristers.
Children Holding Animals in Shaded Groves in Calderbank Who Are Not Afraid—choristers.
Children Lost in the Woods—choristers.
Children on the Beach—choristers.
Children Trying to Steal Bird Eggs at a Cafe and Getting Chased Off by a Patron During the Siege of Khartoum—choristers.
Children with Phenol Injected into Their Hearts—choristers.
The Chimera—escaped creation of the Januists?
Jesus Christ—Christ Jayzus.
Chubby Girl in a Purple One-Piece Bathing Costume with the Word Disco Written on It in Lurid Green Paddling Past—chorister.
Chubby Nightstick—subterranean.
Winston Churchill—prime minister of the United Kingdom.
CIA—never The CIA.
Cico and His Wife—Italian proprietors of a cafe in Villiers-sous-Grez who moved back to Lecce shortly after, the rumour was that they had been called back by the Mafia, geez.
Circus Master in the Fields Outside Calderbank—chorister.
Cistercians—silent stone, speaking.
City Councillors—choristers.
The Clapton Clique—the famous Siamese twins from Clapton, London.
Clara—white Spaniel lost in the rain outside Montigny.
Sophia Clark—professional violinist and author of the classic UFO “romances” The Hovering Heart, I Won’t Let You Down and Three Times a Lady.
Claude—one-time secretary of Pierre Melville.
Henry Clews—American artist who left for France who can blame him. Sculpted Delius as a grub, come out a cocoon, in blind bliss and silent agony.
Cloud of Tiny Whirring Insects in Calderbank in the Summer—choristers.
King Clovis—“Worship what you burn, and burn what you worship.”
Jean Cocteau—is buried beneath your feet.
The Cold Fish—subterranean, unfortunate name, but he did present a brilliant account of the Führerbunker near the end.
Firth Column—lead singer and guitarist with legendary French psychedelic rock group Helpless Clairvoyants, last seen heading for the dark side of the moon on a moon buggy with nothing but a basic survival dome, the band’s music equipment and what was reputed to be a head, singing, inside a white cube.
Perry Como—never swore, never drank and was always faithful to his wife. Singer of the classic “Make Love to Life.”
Concerned Attendant—chorister.
Concerned Middle-Aged Woman—chorister.
Conductor at Saint-Étienne de Villiers-sous-Grez—piloting a dread ship through the dark.
John Constable—English landscape painter.
Contemptuous Young Man Who Shakes His Head—chorister.
Contented Spaced-Out Fat Village Rocker’s Wife and Children—choristers.
Convoys of Uniformed Soldiers Moving East—choristers.
Corpses of Poor Children—choristers.
Julio Cortázar—author of the classic Hopscotch.
The Counterculture—choristers.
