Black Swan Of Trespass

BLACK SWAN OF TRESPASS metafictions

by

MICHAEL BLACKBURN Lindum Colonia Electronica Sunk Island Ebooks 2004

GREAT WEIGHTS CAN BE LIFTED On the bus home at night, the lights, white and yellow, sliding past the windows that were slowly steaming up. On the top deck she considered various parts of her past and present. Seven o'clock, lasagna, the smell of furniture polish in a room in which she had been locked alone for hours as a child. Her mother, whom she hadn't seen for nearly twenty years. She saw that the frost still lay along the roadside even though in town it had all thawed. Her mother's chronic, persistent lying. She remembered this happening when she was just a small child, her mother lying to her schoolteachers, to the doctor and nurses. No sense of right and wrong, no sense of shame though she could preach it like a vicar. As the bus moved along the main road out of town, toward the village, she saw the water in a ditch still frozen and white. Beside her in her bag was the book she had been reading for her course. Now, as she mentally checked off the attributes of this particular psychological type, she felt something crystallize in her mind. Complete inability to feel sympathy, fellow feeling, love for other human beings. Herself now, divorced and childless, but free and not unhappy. She wanted a child, she would have children. The bus moved without smoothness along the road, jerking as the gears changed automatically. Her mother had stolen from her and her brother. Had frequently just gone off and left them with relatives for weeks, sometimes months. She thought about Cousin Emily, some immensely distant relation her mother had discovered in Bournemouth and how she had gone to look after her. Then went on a holiday to the Bahamas after the old lady's death. The need to be the centre of attention at all times. Glibness, plausability, charm, even. Had she understood this for a long time without wanting to acknowledge it? Twenty years was not too long. As she got up to make her way to the exit she knew she could take her time to examine it all carefully. She was certain now, though, of the source of her mother's poisonous beauty. Her mother was a psychopath.

BLACKBURN AND I Something has happened to that other man, Blackburn. Of him now I hear nothing at all, though I used to glimpse his name in small literary magazines, in newspapers or on lists of committees. I have a taste for pictures of naked women, maps, old typefaces such as Caslon, Bembo and Sabon, walks in the country and the company of good friends. The other Blackburn liked these, too, but not in such a way as to make people connect them with his personality. It is true that some excellent poems were published under his name and that a stream of books and magazines appeared with him as editor. But now I believe he was merely a phantom, a sickly vampire whom I fed with my own blood, my own imaginings, my own talent, a vampire who failed to materialise fully. Despite my efforts he remained almost invisible, repeatedly crumbling away in the sunlight of other people's indifference. And so, luckily, I did not suffer the fate of being mistaken for him, of having his contradictions and foibles mistaken for my own. He did not exist, he does not exist. Only I exist, and, as Spinoza asserted, everything desires to persist in its own being. And so, in my self-persistence that other Blackburn has vanished. I am taking back all the words and images I gave him, all the poems I lent him which he published under his own name. He allowed me to bestow them on him, and therefore, in a sense, he stole them from me. I now reclaim them. I shall never expect to encounter his presence again as I walk by the Tower in Newcastle, or by the river in Richmond. I have a few copies of his books and pamphlets, the uncollected pieces and manuscripts of unpublished poems. These I may keep or give away, as the fancy takes me; perhaps I may burn them or turn them into compost. My power over him and everything he named his own is total, if inconsequential. He's not coming back for anything.

MR ISBN Travelling in the Midwest a few years ago I came across the case of a man who changed his name. This in itself is nothing noteworthy these days: film stars and musicians, after all, do it all the time, as do those tired of their given names, and many who are plain eccentric. In the latter category, for instance, I would include Haywood Ritter of Indiana, who in 1989 became Chicken Chicken Jones. I recall, also, a joke told me by a friend from New York about Joe Horsepiss who asked the judge to change his name from Joe to Dan, but that's another story and not funny to me now I'm no longer a 20-year old pot-smoker. What intrigued me about Paul E Stankovitch was that he became Mr ISBN 187477840X: surely the first case of a man who voluntarily became a number. For those of you unaware of this form of code - an ISBN (which stands for International Standard Book Number) is the unique number which identifies a particular edition of a book. After the change Stankovitch insisted on the 'Mr' part, by the way. Unfortunately I didn't keep the article from the paper where I read about this transformation, on account of being in a hurry and having other matters on my mind at the time. I did, however, and for some reason which I cannot remember, write down the actual number. The only other detail I can recall from the article was that Mr ISBN 187477840X worked for a local utility company who had not looked upon his self-appointed name-change with pleasure. Neither had the Inland Revenue Service at first. He also had a dog called Nixon, but he wasn't planning to change his name. It occurred to me that if the dog was one of a long line of hounds he could give him an ISSN - an International Standard Serial Number, like a magazine. I occasionally thought about Mr ISBN 18747740X. What did his friends and family call him, for instance? Was he called 'Is' or 'Isbn'? Or 'Ice'? Did some of his workmates call him '40X'? Did ISBN serve as a first name at all? It wouldn't be a problem to his kids, if he had any. He'd just be plain 'dad' or 'pop'. But I can't imagine his mother or father calling him anything but Paul. Can you? If he was an embarrassment to his friend and family, thay must be used to it by now. He's only a mystery to people who don't know him, like me. Why a book? Why not the title of a book instead of its number? Did he read too many books? Was he a local genius with no outlet for his creativity? Was he a homegrown Thoreau making a statement? Was he mad? Did he do it for a bet? Sometimes I muse on these things while I'm sat on a plane over Utah or the Atlantic. I checked out the number on various databases and no book exists that fits. So he is unique. Maybe he is the book he's writing, so he is literally writing his own life. I like to think that's the case. At least, that's what I think on Thursdays.

CHIPS WITH HITLER: AN EXTRACT FROM A DIARY Most diaries are boring, and most dreams are boring, because most lives are boring. I offer this small item because it amused me a little when I first read it. I extracted it from a private diary uncovered in a junkshop in London. All I know of its author is that he was called Lawrence Elman and that he lived in Fulham at the time of writing. This dream came to him on the night of January 21st 1980. A note for the non-UK reader: for 'chips' read 'fries'. Last night I dreamt I was summoned for a private audience with the Fuhrer himself. I knocked on a large dark door, heard him reply, and walked in. He was seated at a small table. There were a few other people in the room I didn't recognise. I sat down opposite Hitler and a plate of chips was placed between us. The chips were rather scrappy and pale. I noticed a couple were cut flat and square. They were nonetheless hot and tasty. As we ate, Hitler said how much he loved cricket because of its elegance and timing. I said there were mythic elements to it and he agreed. That was the extent of our conversation. I ate more chips, removing a large hair that was stuck to two of them. I think it was a human hair. Elman's handwriting was clear, legible and regular. In all of 64 pages, however, this was the most interesting entry.

THRESHOLD As soon as they had entered and closed the door he said to her let your hair down. She undid the band that held her hair back. Then he took her face in both hands and kissed her on the mouth softly for a long time.

WHAT PHIL SILVERS HEARD Phil Silvers heard the dollars calling in the middle of the night, Daddy, Daddy, take us home. But they were fickle children and fled his addiction to chance, leaving him to years of darkness in cheap rented rooms and the madness of psychiatry. He became just a turnstile. The traffic drove straight in and out. That's no good, I tell myself. When the money comes in you should make it stay at home, bring it up with a sense of family duty, so you'll end up with a whole tribe of your own to look after you. I know that doesn't work, of course, and that like millions of others, the only way I could amass a fortune would be through luck, through wheels, horses, winning numbers, that kind of thing. But Phil Silvers, he was a genius; he was on tv and in films, he made money. He could have coasted it to the end of his life if he'd wanted to. He had no need for horses and wheels. He lost it and kept on losing it. I dreamt about him once, he was in his shirtsleeves, standing in the darkness outside his motel room, crying into the silence: Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.

I HAVE CROSSED THE BRIDGE BUT NOT THE RIVER Some discussion has ensued over this now defunct proverb. Its generally accepted meaning has always been: I have accomplished something with ease and hence without the experience of its potential dangers. Henryson (in Tauromachia, Berlin 1936) argues that there is a moral self-criticism implicit here: because I have easily achieved something which was once perilous I am now complacent and therefore open to fault. There may be some corroboration in the view that a moral criticism obtains, in view of Mendleson's comments in Eros and the Helping Hand (London 1954): she had, indeed, crossed a bridge but not a river in that she [Tracey Gray, the novelist] slept with her husband's analyst on a frequent basis without being discovered. In this case, however, it seems that the act of crossing the bridge represents transgressing an ethical boundary and not crossing the river signifies evading punishment or condemnation. A further twist is added by Matthaeus (Regenswald, Malmo 1948) who interprets the meaning as I have proposed or intended a transgression but not carried it out.

FABULOUS FRAGMENTS My late friend, Moravia, told me he believed that life is absolute chaos from which, if we are lucky, we can pluck a few shining, mysterious fragments of order. It was not long after this that he died, and when I went back to his stories I realised that it was his style I loved as much as the characters he wrote about, ordinary people caught in the nets of their own passions, desires and foolishness. It was as if he had discovered that style, any style, however transient, could rescue these fabulous fragments of redemption from the daily mess of our lives. It made me think about those moments of order, such as when you wake to a morning of immense golden stillness, or when you hear the sound of rain at night, continuous, gentle, like the earth meditating upon itself. And those moments, scattered throughout a life, somehow make it meaningful and significant, holding it together tenuously and without explanation; moments that are rare and beguiling, perhaps even deceitful, but the closest that most of us can ever get to what may be called the divine (whether it exists or not), moments pungent as hyacinth that give us the sweetness we crave, like fresh honey torn from the hives of angry bees.

MAGNETS, MOONS AND MYSTERIES Here is how I wrote this book. I emptied my mind out like an old chest that has been stored in the loft for a long time and made a heap of what I found. There seemed no end to the things I kept piling up. As I looked around me I saw so many other things, books, papers, overheard conversations, paintings, photographs, secrets, dialogues with the dead, films and letters, magnets, moons and mysteries, that I could no longer tell what came from inside my mind and what already lay about me. It was then I understood that what the old alchemists used to say was true: that the matter of one's Great Work was to be found everywhere and in all places and at all times. In other words, it was as infinite as the universe itself and bounded only by my own mortality.

ACCIDENTAL A British tourist was passing through Queens, New York, to visit an old friend called Pete, whom he hadn't seen for nearly twenty years. On his way he stopped off at a liquor store to buy a bottle of bourbon. As he was being served the store was robbed at gunpoint by a young man who made off with the cash from the till. A soon as the thief had gone the storekeeper pulled out a large black handgun of his own from behind the counter and started to give chase. Jesus Christ, said the visitor, can't you go anywhere in this country without someone waving a gun in your face? Hearing this, the storekeeper turned, as if to say something. He was fumbling with the gun and his hands were shaking and before he could say anything the gun went off accidentally. The bullet struck the visitor in the heart. He died instantly.

YOUR GOLDEN DOUBLE All day he follows you like a tacky song that won't let your mind alone so you find yourself humming it in the car, the office, the street: your golden double whose presence you feel somewhere behind you as if about to call your name and hand you the winning lottery ticket or take you away to a life of workless pleasure by a warm pool in the sun. You don't speak of it to anyone, not your wife, your lover or your friends because it would be like admitting you believe you've come from a world of angels and unicorns and this planet whose tiny acres you shuffle across is only a place of mistaken banishment, your life the shadow life of one twin split from the other. Sometimes the awareness comes upon you like the blunt ache of hunger or the sensation that your walking body is thin as tissue paper a shower of small rain can dissolve. Other times it blossoms briefly like a drop of clear honey on your tongue or flashes on unexpectedly like a faulty lamp you're trying to fix, so intense and short it leaves you half blind with a dark hole in your eyes for minutes after. Whispers, cryptic messages; it makes you feel you're going mad, perhaps, understand how people get religion so bad they stand up in the high street waving their free pamphlets in embarrassed faces, chalking The Kingdom of Heaven again and again on their portable blackboards for the benefit of shoppers and drunks lost in their own daily exile. You see in all this the hand of your golden double who can live in both worlds at the same time without having to write cheques, mend fuses or sidestep beggars on the way to the shops. But each day is the same: nothing arrives, no one calls your name. And each night is the same: you lie down to sleep knowing your double has been there ahead of you, meddling with your dreams. You see? - blue angels in a tree. A unicorn set free by the river.

INSCRIPTION '...a place where I once lived as a child, the tall, thick walls of its garden, already two hundred years old, pierced, fractured, bound together and canopied by tree-like ivy among whose dusty branches I would climb...'

THEY MADE LANDFALL They made landfall that night and camped out on shore. At dawn they made their way inland, taking with them candles, black robes, ropes, oil, holy water, ritual knives, swords, cups and towels, as well as provisions and the wooden case containing the sacred book. For five hours they travelled over dirt roads and through trackless forest until they reached the clearing of their traditional ceremonial ground. For the next three hours they prepared it, clearing away vegetation, removing stones and building a fire in the centre. Then they stopped for refreshment and rest. As darkness came down and the moon glowed above the horizon they began the ritual. Four robed figures stood ten yards apart from each other, foursquare, their arms pointing towards the fire. The light from the flames revealed the eager faces of the silent watchers who stood back in a circle. The High Priest entered, bearing the Holy Golden Sword, which he raised toward the moon. Hail!, he shouted

CYCLING FOR TAOISTS The bike that can be ridden is not the true Bike. The bike that has no wheels is the way to the understanding of the Tao. The bike with no handlebars is the signpost to the understanding of the way of the Tao. The bike with no rider is the Tao. Therefore the sage learns how to pedal without pumping and to reach the end of the journey before setting out. In summer he breathes through his nose and keeps his mouth shut. Thus he swallows no flies.

ASTRID VISIONS Harry Zen’s famously cultish recipe for making art was - I pick it up. Throw it around a bit. If it bounces, it’s right. It certainly worked for Astrid Visions, the one and only classic LP that he issued with his band, The Jan Sax Quartet, in 1978. The band achieved a certain following that persists today, so there will be a market of sorts for the new digitally-remastered CD of its unique output. The band, of course, with due irony, was sometimes a trio, sometimes a quintet and occasionally even an octet, but never a quartet. And neither did anyone called Jan Sax ever appear in its line-up. Never go back, they say, without explaining what happens to those who never leave in the first place. Following Harry Zen’s simple philosophies, such as Reverse the mechanism, I did go back, and listened again to my old copy of Astrid Visions before trying out the CD. Sometimes the past is worth a visit, especially when you find that it’s not only part of the present but also prefigures the future. The Jan Sax Quartet pioneered the fusion of techno, jazz, rock and just about everything else, years before everyone else. I won’t try to describe the wonders of the title track, or of its accompanying numbers, such as Headingley Vespers and Take Six. Rumours about the identity of the beautiful Astrid have multiplied over the years - Zen has resolutely refused to comment, never confirming or denying her existence - and the new documentary to appear about Zen and the Quartet, The Band That Never Was, due to be aired on Channel 365 soon, only deepens the mystery. It contains previously unseen footage of the band live in various Leeds bars in the 1970s plus extracts from a recent interview with Zen by Didi Tsunami, who has made a name for herself by her probing but sympathetic treatments of other lesser-known contemporary artists. Zen, minus the hair and beard of the glory days (What I call The Cheesecloth Era, he says in the interview), talks publicly (if cryptically) for the first time about the band and some of the musicians who played in it in the period of Astrid Visions: Buckton - What he didn’t know couldn’t be known and Mohilton Message man from the cloud chamber, he was truly cosmic. Even if you don’t check out Astrid Visions (and you’d be a real no-brain not to) then you should catch the documentary - if only to see the delectable Tsunami interviewing the wacky Zen in a jacuzzi.

FROM THE FRAGMENTS OF ANAGLYPTOS THE GREEK 121 As the wood of the doorframe shrinks in the cool of the night, with a sound of creaking and groaning, so too does a man toward the end of his days. 122 Do not blame the rope for hanging the man. 123 Even the hunter must perish. 124 Every man believes he thinks for himself and that his actions arise from within his own soul. But his words reveal him to be no more than a sheep, bleating what all the others in the same flock are bleating. Hence the need for a clear-eyed shepherd to guard against wolves. 125 The watcher also is watched, but the eye that watches him is in all places, at all times and does not blink. 126 They stand in the marketplace proffering paradise and punishment in equal measure. Children laugh at them and dogs bark and still the taverns remain full. But for them, as for the rest of us, the sun sets in the west, which is when they fall into the arms of sleep, with his dreams of apples and shadows and the twisting forms of naked bodies. Their sophistries then are useless in the same way that a harp is to a deaf man.

MY NAME IS WYATT EARP This was in the late 1950s. The first school I went to I hated. I hated the place, the smell of it, the teachers who sat high above us. I had no friends there, or if I did I cannot recall their names or faces. I cannot remember anything that I was officially taught there. One day when the teacher read out the register I refused to answer to my name. Michael Blackburn, she said, looking directly at me. No answer. Three times she called out my name and three times I refused. Then she came down to me and said, If you're not Michael Blackburn then who are you? To which I replied My name is Wyatt Earp. For the rest of the day I answered to nothing but Wyatt Earp. Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp, hero of the gunfight at the OK Corral. Born in the Year of Revolutions, he would live through momentous times: the American Civil War, the Great War in Europe, the Bolshevik Revolution, the first stirrings of fascism, the invention of the machine gun, the aeroplane, the telephone, the radio and the automobile. When he died he had already outlived one of my own grandfathers by three years, by which time my father himself was already entering on his early youth. When I was born he had been dead no more than 25 years. By then, of course, he was a Wild West hero and a favourite of mine on TV. Earp understood how the hypocrisy of the law was in constant conflict with the need for order. He knew that the compassion of the left hand was counterpointed by the brutality of the right and that everything lives by the death of something else. So it is that each day in secret I repeat his name and invoke his spirit. Each day that wounded child learns how to protect himself and not take shit from anybody. That's television for you. Extracted from The Life by Michael Blackburn

THE WRITER, THE THIEF AND THE GRANDSON, PART TWO: THE THIEF In 1982 Henry Arthur Harrington (27) was brought before Banbury magistrates charged with stealing a book from a local secondhand bookshop. He asked for 1,321 other offences to be taken into account. When police had searched his flat they found exactly 1,321 copies of Axel Munthe's bestselling book, The Story of San Michele in different editions, impressions and formats, all in English. It was Harrington's own meticulous filing system which condemned him, as he had carefully noted the date, time and location of every theft. These notes revealed that over 12 years he had travelled extensively throughout the UK stealing every secondhand copy of the book he could find. Bookshops he had plundered (some on repeated occasions) included The Side Bookshop in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Reader's Rest in Lincoln and The Petersfield Bookshop. Harrington offered no real explanation of his obsessive quest, saying only that he had read The Story of San Michele when he was 15 and had developed an intense interest in obtaining every secondhand copy he could find. He was ordered to see a psychiatrist from the local hospital. Nothing else is known of Harrington's career since then. The Story of San Michele is still available in new and secondhand editions.

THE WRITER, THE THIEF AND THE GRANDSON, PART THREE: THE GRANDSON Tucked away in an old copy of a biography of Munthe at a friend’s house in Australia I discovered a newspaper clipping whose publication date I calibrate as 1981, the paper being the London Evening Standard. The short text appears in the gossip column and concerns Munthe’s grandson, Axel. It comes complete with a photograph of the young man (then in his early thirties), in casual ‘athome’ garb, ie tieless shirt with the collars outside the pullover (fashion victims please note); a head-and-shoulder shot with suitably erudite background of bookshelves. A young man strangely reminsicent of Bruce Chatwin in looks. The piece concerns Munthe’s association with Princess Margaret (they shared pasta and Soave last week at the Fulham Road trattoria Il Girasole [I knew it well]) and says: Munthe, a dilettante theatre director, [is that shorthand for self-indulgent rich-kid with no day job?] may surprise the Queen’s sister with his antics. He takes his parrot Augusta to dinner parties, sometimes sleeps in a coffin in his basement and busks Albinoni and Vivaldi on a musical saw on the King’s Road. Luckily, as I was living on Fulham Road, just around the corner, at the time, I didn’t bump into melodious Axel, otherwise I would have felt obliged to smack him one in the face and use his saw for more surgical purposes.

ELATION PAST For approximately one month during the summer of my twenty-first year I experienced a continuous state of gentle elation that was nearly religious in its nature but not induced by any form of spiritual exercise or experience. Neither was it chemically induced. I felt that no abuse, misfortune or accident could destroy this powerful sense of calm and security. The elation persisted through moments of sobriety as well as evenings of drunkenness and mornings of hangover. It endured more days of cloud than sun. It throve in hours of solitary dullness as well as in hours of madcap company. I cannot remember if it arrived suddenly or if it made itself known by a steady, barely-perceptible increase, one day after another. It occasionally incensed my friends, who found it contrary to my usual nature. At times I was amused by it. Mostly I was just happy to enjoy it, like a child, self-absorbed at play in a sunlit meadow or field. Its great virtue was that it persisted for so long during my waking hours and made everyday life more than bearable, unlike the various forms of ecstasy, which are always brief and inevitably lead to a sense of disappointment when they have worn off. Why this gentle elation arose when it did and what subtle alterations in my brain chemistry produced it I cannot know, but it vanished as mysteriously as it arrived and has never returned. Extracted from The Life by Michael Blackburn

BLACK SWAN OF TRESPASS There can surely be no doubt now in the mind of the perceptive reader that Ern Malley, Australia's greatest poet of the twentieth century, was a real person and not the product of the the embittered imagination of McAuley Stewart. It was Stewart who claims to have written the 16 Malley poems first published by the avant-garde magazine, Angry Penguins, and subsequently as a separate book (which is still in print). ...[text totally unreadable]... the streets where Mally [sic] lived and worked have long since disappeared, buried under Walmarts, Coles' supermarkets and drive-in bottleshops. But in my researches I have managaed to track down a genuine relative of Malley's, by the name of Larry Chester, who now lives in Windsor, west of Sydney. For many years Chester ran a secondhand bookshop in Paramatta before selling up and retiring. ...[text unintelligible]...Malley well and has written a memoir of his friend (unpublished and unread) he is extremely reticent on the personal details of his friendship. 'The literary business,' he says, 'is still twitchy even after all these years.' However, Chester, now a neat and sprightly 92-year-old, showed me manuscript copies of some of Malley's unpublished poems. mcAuley Stewart, he said, a b [text unreadable as a result of wine-staining]...but 'I've seen truth rot like an apple by the side of the road' passed me another tinny From the rescued papers of the late Alan Renfrew

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 'Mr ISBN' first appeared in print in Dreamcatcher 12 (Spring 2003). 'Fabulous Fragments', 'Cycling For Taoists', 'From The Fragments Of Anaglyptos The Greek', 'What Phil Silvers Heard', and 'Chips With Hitler' all appeared in a limited edition pamphlet, Chips With Hitler, published by Sunk Island in 2002. All texts first appeared on the Art Zero website: http://www.artzero.org.uk/ This is the first electronic book version of these texts. © Michael Blackburn 2004 Sunk Island Ebooks, Lincoln, UK, 2004 ISBN 1 874778 80 9

OTHER WORKS

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