Life Through A Rolled-up Newspaper

Life through a Rolled-up Newspaper “Saturday, 21st December two thousand and two; it’s 14:32:00.00 GMT+0; I don’t know exactly where on Grafton Street, Dublin 2, County Dublin, Ireland, Latitude 53 minutes 20 seconds, Longitude 6 minutes 15 seconds, European Union, Eurasian continent, World, Earth, Solar System number One, Universe, Infinity, Reality. 1 metre 64 and 8 millimetres and growing; 58 kilograms, stable. Approximately. Well, I stand on Grafton Street, near Burger King, facing the far end of the street through the crowd, and nobody’s looking at me. It certainly means I’m perfectly normal. That’s a good start. Every now and then I still get a quick, sideways glance of astonishment, but this glance shifts away even more quickly in the opposite direction, as if something had attracted their eye. But nothing can tell the eye to look if it’s outside the one hundred and sixty-three degree range of the eyesight. And I don’t believe in intuition.” “14:37:22.389 GMT+0. I’m still on Grafton Street but I’ve shifted my position by twentyeight degrees so as to face south and present my semi-profile to the fluctuating crowd. I want them to see the protuberance on my face to see their reaction.” “Two minutes, thirty-seven seconds and eleven milliseconds later, nothing concrete has happened. Nobody said anything, nobody laughed, nobody ran away. Everybody is busy buying Christmas presents, and I’m looking at life through a rolled-up newspaper and everybody thinks that’s normal. I couldn’t expect more from the mass. Total acceptance, total abnegation. It’s been seven days now since I decided to roll a newspaper up and to have a look at life through it. I think it’s the Irish Times but I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter in fact, and I want to be precise on this particular point, I’ll even underline it: I’m not seeing life through a particular newspaper, nor through a particular event in history. I’m not using the newspaper as a magnifying glass but as a medium to improve vision. I rolled it up so as to use it like the longue-vue of Magellan and Marco Polo. I could have used toilet paper, but it doesn’t hold up together. A more apt assertion would run thus: I could have taken any other thing (except toilet paper as shown above) but I chose a newspaper because it was lying on the floor near the threshold of the family house as I was going out. It dawned on me that one could roll it up and that if one shuts the other eye, one can see life differently. I think, but let’s not jump to conclusions, that this is life as it really is. I rolled it up straight, not in a conical shape; I took it by the smaller side and rolled it up until I obtained a magnificent specimen of cylindrical telescope. ‘Telescope’ means something like ‘to see in the distance’ and by extension refers to ‘the device that enables you to see things that are very distant from you’. But the funny thing is that by looking at things with my paper telescope I got closer to these things. The cylindrical shape of the aforementioned device enhances the capacity of the © Copyright Rodolphe Blet 2009

crystalline lens of the eye to concentrate light rays. The light is funneled into the black cave of the eye through the cornea and the pupil. Thus you see things as they are. I decided to do this because science has always helped humankind to survive and to improve, thus both have always been very close, not to say interdependent now. Science is the tool used by men to improve themselves by subjecting themselves to it as tools. Hence I decided to improve – still as an autodidact – my own life with my own sense of science, my own handling of knowledge, both human and scientific; because scientists are only human after all. The rolled-up newspaper is an original, instinctive idea of my own. Nobody ever tried this, so who would know? People may find it stupid and myself extravagant, daft to say the least, but I long to show them the results – when I’ll be completely finished, when I’ll have brought the experiment to its precise conclusion with as many scientific proofs as available. That’s the scientific way to live the thing. But now, and it’s a very un-scientific observation to put down: I see rays of light jousting with shades and colours, and this isn’t a jocund scene to behold. Anyway.” “My alarm clock shows 22, then 12, then 58. That’s the time now. As the little experiment on Grafton Street proved concluding enough, I decided to come back home to pursue my series of experiment and conduct it on books. So I took a book from dad’s collection. But ten minutes and thirty-five seconds were enough to convince me: you can’t read through a rolled-up newspaper. It’s very demanding and your concentration soon gets distracted; moreover, only life can be seen through a rolled-up newspaper. It seems that one needs a human-scale scope of vision. My room is plunged into darkness and nothing is heard, apart from my heart pumping blood and re-injecting it into the vessels and arteries. My left eye, the one that’s shut, is twitching more and more. Few hours ago I put some eyewash into it, but I couldn’t see a thing because there was a thin white pellicle covering the entire lens. I wonder if I’ll get blind. I should focus my mind on scientific questions; it’s high time to go to sleep.” “3:20:45.

3:20:46.

3:20:47.

4:26:11. I can’t sleep very well on the side. I’m

used to sleep on the back but since I still hold the rolled-up newspaper over my eye, it’s more convenient to lay on the right-hand side to rest the telescope – and my aching arm – on the pillow. I need to find the telescope a new name.” “6:00:00. Ok, let’s get up. I want to see the sun rising. I’ve been unlucky all this week – today’s Sunday, so the week I’m talking about is last week – all the past week because it was all misty and grey, I couldn’t see anything. But today will be different, I want to see the sun rising and setting because it’ll be the same sun. My body’s all stiff, my limbs ache, especially my right arm, I’ve got pins and needles in it. I really wish the rolled-up newspaper could hold by itself, it’d make my life easier. My eyesight got used to it quite rapidly, not to say naturally, instinctively. The first © Copyright Rodolphe Blet 2009

day has been really tough, I fell down the stairs but held firmly the telescope over my eye. At first the vision is greatly reduced and the eye, not yet accustomed, focuses on parts of objects; but soon, after a day and a half of constant use, you start seeing the concept beyond the physical shape, and as soon as you’re able to see the concept of things, your vision broadens. By seeing the core, the omphalos of things in a sort of subjective way, you’re then capable of seeing all of it, its true nature, thus you see the whole world. My rolled-up newspaper is no longer a rolled-up newspaper, it’s become a scientific device through which I can now see truly, thus I’ll call it a Centroscope. Panoscope could be apt as well, but the name of a thing ought to tell about its primary and original nature. Let it be Centroscope.” “I won’t go to the university library today; I hope mum and dad are not up yet. What’re they up to these days? I don’t know but that’s not the problem; I would care if they’d cared about me beforehand. I wouldn’t be an autodidact now, that’s their fault, not mine. I had to follow the natural course of my primary evolution, as it’s the role of parents to give their children a new course, as evolution is basic, primal and doesn’t care about business or commerce but only about selfpreservation and survival. I had to learn by myself, learn it all by myself, so how could I find time enough to attach myself to a parent or to a friend, male or female alike? That’s their entire fault and it is I who bears the cross over my shoulders. They don’t care if I go to college or not as long as they can live their petty lives together undisturbed. Their routine is like a perpetual movement towards stagnation (as long as no outside cog comes and spoils the whole machinery, and it seems that I constitute a cog as long as I want to fit in the family mechanism.) If I stay still, that’s fine. I met mum downstairs three days, twelve hours and seven minutes ago, but I’d better have kicked a wall and ripped her wallpaper to get an ostentatious reaction from her. She looked at me as if I were some stranger, or a weirdo or both, and made her silent way to the kitchen, her favourite hideout. But since then, nothing; no movement within the troops of the enemy. Ok, I’m dressed; but I really wish the Centroscope could hold onto my right eye by itself – have you ever tried tying Bootlace with only one hand, Left Hand at that when you’re right-handed? There’s nothing harder than this. Let’s get out of House now. Funny, now I speak using Concepts. That’s an amusing consequence of Centroscope, the aftermath of taming vision, and by extension of taming Whole Mind. As I can only see one thing at a time, for example Glass, Sock, Head, Hand, Chair or Tree (if I’m exponentially distant from the object in question), I speak with Concepts. I refer to things as They are. It might be difficult for you to understand what I actually see, and it’s not easy to imagine, is it? So you’d better try this at home, but behold! the process is irreversible. Ah, ah, ah…scared you, have I not? Ah, Ah…well, in fact for all I know it could be.” “The 6:46 DART to Howth is two minutes and fifty-five seconds late, but that is not outside © Copyright Rodolphe Blet 2009

the boundaries or Normality – is it really a Sunday morning though? I like when nothing’s unusual, one can think properly without being disturbed by a cog in the machine. It’s the very fact of being uprooted from their habits that upsets people so much, they get the bends if they have to modulate an already tight timetable. Ah! Life imprisoned in the claws of Time, with no chance of escape. Of course, I am myself set in Time and Space, but the Centroscope seems to offer me opportunities of breaking certain boundaries. It dawned on me six minutes, forty-five seconds and a hundred and forty-eight milliseconds after I got into the train, as I wondered how the engine at work looked like. I looked intensely at where I thought the engine might be. First the empty seats in front of me disappeared – I blinked and the whole thing had gone – then the floor, then the corrugated carapace vanished, or became transparent I don’t know and then, in another twinkling of the eye, I could see the engine sweating, pulling, roaring, the engine at work: the pump pumping the fuel from the tank, injecting it into the carburettor through the tiny greasy pipes – a joint was leaking a bit – oil oiling the inlet valves etc…and water cooling the whole system down and then whistling out by the exhaust valve. I woke up from this daydream of nightmarish eloquence at Howth Junction and few minutes later – I was too thrilled and anxious – anxious it’d fail – to remember the exact time. “I get off Train. I head straight to Cliffs, without a look at the closed shops or at the harbour. I run, and it’s no small thing with an unfixed Centroscope; but I manage my way up the road, towards the cliff, like a fugitive towards his freedom. I take Green Path on Left bordered by shrubs, I think of Common Mulberry kind. Heath is short but stinging, Lichen is firmly attached to its maternal stone, Sun is rising in East and no Cloud can be seen from where I stand. Where I stand is called by the autochthons ‘the summit’, halfway between the Nose of Howth and Bally Light, though it is nearer the latter. Slowly, emphatically and ritually rising from its dark socket – the sea reflecting the morning sky still grey from lethargy – the sun, immense blazing eye, stirs from its metaphorical sleep. I can’t blink as the light, feeding on oxygen particles, pierces through the different layers of air, reverberates slightly over the smooth mirrory surface of the Irish Sea and with eponymous celerity smites my wide-open eye, fully. For an unknown reason, probably a deficient synaptic transmission in my tired brain, I can’t close my eyelid, though pain commands it. Now the iridescent orb is anointing the Bay of Dublin as if it were the first thing on Earth it had to shine upon. The white horses are riding east, towards the sun, regularly, their mane glittering – but I don’t see them. I’ve never seen such a spectacle, the sun is bigger and more majestic than I ever thought. I can’t see a shade of blue sky round the sun as it fits perfectly in the eye of the Centroscope, as if modelled for this only purpose. My eyelid is still wide ope, and begs for mercy. I must be lenient. If Head would not respond to Stimuli, I must move Legs. I’ll give a rotation of seventy (70) degrees of my Whole Body (z) around itself (axis z equals x); without delay the thing © Copyright Rodolphe Blet 2009

is done. But for an indistinct period of time the sun still hangs, omnipotent and omniscient, in front of my centroscoped eye. There’s something wrong with the persistence though, as if I could see shapes etched on it, like…like the moon. I have turned towards the moon, a full moon basking in the dawn. An unusual phenomenon: the full moon occurred, for the twelfth time this year, three days ago, on a Thursday if Memory is correct. But malignantly, or commanded by Fate’s hand, Full Moon stayed on for three days and, by a series of unusual phenomena pulling each other by the hand, I receive both lights through the same channel – the Centroscope. Both lights, at first superimposed, melt the one into the other, funnel into my eye, and this simple light pulls a trigger inside my brain and inside the Centroscope: I can now blink. I can wash away the water that has instinctively accumulated in my eye to protect it, but that I didn’t notice. And suddenly my body comes back to life and to the activity that characterises it: I’m panting for breath, my heart is pounding fast. It seems that I have held my breath all this time and that my heart slowed down to the strict minimum. Everything is going back to normality after such unusual events; everything but the Centroscope. Something indescribable has changed. It’s 8:36:03.864 – this particular time sounds ominous to me, leading to nothingness. Most numbers can be dealt with a standard conjunction of multiplication and subtraction; I believe sum and division to be altogether primitive and reductive, limited in their system of binary referents though necessary – and these ones don’t differ from their brethren. Is it a ciphered message sent by some wise deity? I can’t tell, but I’m not frustrated about that, not yet. I’ll have to wait, I’ll have to lie on my deathbed to know. My inward and outward visions are centroscopic, so I’ll soon be able to confront every boundary. I must depart if I want to be in town before the crowd. I feel weird.” “9:11:06.594. I can see blood in that bile. God, I had to get off the train because I got sick, really, badly sick. Two middle-aged female human beings were coming towards me, visibly moved by good will and worry, but as soon as they saw the Centroscope they hurried away. I feel so weird. I cannot see the wall against which I lean, my vomit is ridiculously hanging in mid-air. From time to time the walls are flickering, appearing and disappearing, coming back to their former form, the which I knew, or thought I knew. But now I know that the wall I can’t see is the real wall. From the bottom of my tired stomach, up my ruined oesophagus, blocking my larynx, thrusting through the pharynx, invading my mouth, devastating my taste buds, the sour vomit streaked with rivers of blood eventually flows out on the stony ground of the DART quay. The sensation of newness is painful and reaches every limb; no part of my body, even the remotest, is beyond its ruthless, homeostatic maul.” “9:57:38.194. It looks like the fit is over, but I still spit Blood and Bile in Handkerchief now © Copyright Rodolphe Blet 2009

and then. I have a bloody headache but I’m back on the DART anyhow. Stomach is revolted, emitting long grunts, twisting spasmodically. I can’t see most of the seats, nor the roof, nor the floor, just the rails like two unending threads of iron defying Fate and geography. I can also see the engine vomiting the steamy oil, pumping the oil eagerly as if there were no tomorrow, ecstatically, vomiting again, filling the pipes, burning the joints, making the pumping process more active, making the carburettor and the valves greasier and more frenetic. It seems that the engine of the train won’t last long, it is its last voyage, a bit like me. I cross my arms and grasp my ribs. I’m going to die. I swear I’m going to die. I feel the urge to breathe fresh air at each station – the train is packed. And just thinking of the sardines lurching in oil makes me sick. “The next- station- isPearse Station.” Says the- monocord- blank- voice- of the- automat-speaker. After what seems hundreds of seconds, each falling into darkness, the door opens and I crawl out of this hellish train that reeks of ghouls and I vomit again. I’m crawling on all four on Pearse Station’s quay, I can’t believe it. People are running away from me, the weirdo covered with blood and bile. I have to make my way to Grafton Street, this is becoming urgent. But I Must wait and think. If I’m crawling on all four – where’s the – Centroscope is still there, holding by itself. By the means of – roots. Beyond the pain in my stomach I can feel something alien creeping inside me, at once becoming an intrinsic, inalienable part of me. The Centroscope has grafted itself on my head, by its own volition; my left eyelid is sewn from the inside, when I move my blind eye I can feel the small regular ridge of the suture. The unusual light has made something to the Centroscope, to me, like a photosynthesis – but it’d imply that the rolled-up newspaper is some sort of living entity with an instinct of self-preservation. The symbiosis has been very painful, and I believe it now to be irrevocable.” “11:02:59.648. I Must Go To Junction Of Grafton Street And Nassau Street.” “I see people looking at me as if I were some strange exotic plant, and I see nothingness. The sounds of the street reach me muffled and even more muffled as I progress to the centre, the busiest and noisiest part of the gathering of people, the core of rottenness. The yells, shouts, hoots and baffling horns are so muffled, as if my ears wouldn’t want to hear any more. The Centroscope is still germinating, growing inside me – at least I have my hands free now, so I can lean on invisible but true walls. I know where the walls are because of the thin creepy ivy that runs along them – Ivy no Human Eye can see. Every building, every car, every street, have disappeared: the Centroscope offers me a natural vision of my immediate and intermediate surroundings: there’s nothing but the ground and the ivy and the sky, the groaning ground packed under the ever-heavier weight and dominion and taming of civilisation, the ivy trying to reclaim it slowly, patiently. I follow the path © Copyright Rodolphe Blet 2009

of human beings to reach my landing point. Oh God, the Centroscope is settling deeper and deeper into my head, even more intricately, and I can feel my skin cracking, becoming ridged, rugged, with a feel of grain, my limbs getting stiff. The human beings I meet are naked and withdraw from me. They’re living in the same place, packed, choking, surviving, leaving the less fit aside, but they’re not as fit as they’d like to. I look at my hands and see nothing but plain matter with atoms closely arranged together. I can’t see through me; I am not a concept; I am changing. Gradually, I see people’s skin disappearing, the pollution killing the cells and congesting the arteries, depriving the blood and the whole organism of the precious oxygen. Human beings conducting their own slaughter, dying of their own pride and foolishness. Masses of flesh and streaming blood, masses of muscles and throbbing veins and venules, of digesting organs and of bones and tendons pass near me in confusion, in real disorder. Curious eyeballs roll in their white sockets – the Centroscope is deeper in me, making me more vegetal but more conscious of my environment at the same time. It flays human beings alive and now it unmakes their muscles, tendons, arteries, veins, venules, their corrupted intestines, their bloody guts, kidneys, lungs, stomach, heart, strips them of their substance, leaves articulated skeletons moving awkwardly. I dare not look at my legs as their weight pulls on my spine. I feel so stiff it’s a nightmare to move my feet – they’re no longer feet but elongated stalks and knotty tuberosities; my fingers and my knuckles also have swollen and enlarged and sprawl in the dust; my genitals have shrivelled and expanded inside my trunk; my organs have become fibres, my skin, bark. The skeletons vagabond away but still in their white sockets the eyeballs glow like dark rubies. At the corner of my vegetal eye – the Centroscope? – I can see in the distance some trees and grass sucking the precious marrow from Mother Earth – a park perhaps.” “Sunday, twenty-second of December two thousand and two, I do not know exactly where on what has once counted for me as ‘Grafton Street’, Eurasian continent, Latitude fifty-three minutes twenty seconds, Longitude six minutes fifteen seconds, Earth, Solar system number one, the galaxy I belong to, Universe, the Empyrean, Infinity, Panoscope, Reality. Eighteen metres, thirty-seven centimetres, sixteen millimetres and growing; three metres in girth and growing; five tons, stable. It is nearly Noon. Yesterday, at the Exact Same Time, I was standing Here, not quite sure to which Kind of people I was Belonging. Today is Different, for I know exactly to which Kind I belong and what I will do for the Rest of my Life. I now have the Vision – I see things as They Are and it is lucky I cannot tell the horrors I everyday witness, for nobody would believe me. Who would believe a Thinking Yew? I have set my roots and mind deep into the Soil, and I am not sick anymore. My blood has turned thicker and golden; all my arms have spread, like my hair, very high,

© Copyright Rodolphe Blet 2009

a little above some disturbing masses of un-living matter, in order to get the maximum of light on my green crown. I still think conceptually, I still see them, but these concepts have become comprehensible, intelligible, like a hieroglyph that makes sense only because it is set in a cartouche, otherwise remaining ciphered to the dull, unaccustomed, neophyte eye. Now many concepts marvel at me, and I have become a matter of interest, a subject of attention, of which I am rather pleased. My brain is still there, though different in form, as my vagi that are much longer, but still have to struggle with the environing polluted air. My karyotype is less complicated to deal with and I know, recognise, sense many more things than I did when I was an abandoned man. But I think one day I will lose my memory; I cannot feel any more the cruelty of the world I used to live in. “Not yet, not yet” would probably prophesise a wiser living being. And this same stertorous voice would foretell: “Thou shalt be hewn down, one day, for thou wilt disturb men’s lives. Thy place is in a graveyard with the remnants of the dead, with the shreds of religion. Thou shalt be hewn down by the wrath of the people from whom thou fleest, and thou shalt return to the earth thy mother.” This voice could be echoing at the back of my head, though I am not sure. If men are compassionate enough I will probably remain here for a whole civilisation, counting up generations after generations – an unusual yew on top of Grafton Street. After a long, long time, after ages uncounted, Time and Space might revolve on themselves and return to those grim and dark ages when men were content with what earth gave them, when men were miserable but happy. My bark, my tired roots and my sap long for these days. One day we will all reach the end of the spiral of Time and Space and retrace back our steps to go where and when Time and Space began, and start all over again, and then I might even be venerated. But this is another story, for now I can just see the disquiet in men’s eyes.

© Copyright Rodolphe Blet 2009