From: joe@dentist.demon.co.uk ("joseph st.hyper")
Subject: st.hyper 1
Date: Sat Apr 01 13:10:51 MET DST 1995

short story written for you. all.


fountain 1915
remix by josef st.hyper 1993

The  anarchist was watching TV, with his dark brow furrowed by concern for its
own lack of anything worthier to express. He looked like an anarchist, for he had
been growing his beard which was a picaresque crimson and gleamed under his
anthracite shock of hair like a carefully groomed triangle of diathermic embers.
Although his beard was thick, the first bloom of manhood was still searing his
laconic cheeks with its tender ritual strokes of erythema. Despite these designer
idiosyncrasies, his underlying features were well-proportioned, especially his nose
which was not sharp, or aquiline, or snub, but modestly unremarkable. Nevertheless
with his trim beard he was imposingly diabolical.

He was Just 17 and yet already aware that he was a symbol, that his history was a
sorites, his relationships metaphor and his dialogue prosopopeia. (In point of fact
this sense of the narrative quality of his existence had often lead him to wish that he
had been born many centuries earlier, before existentialism and post-modernism,
when content still transcended form and irony was an adjective.) That's not to say
however that he was nihilistic in this literary determinism, for he had read
enough Sunday magazine articles about Chaos Theory and quantum physics (indeed
beside the beermats and cigarette packets pinned to his wall like a collection of
cardboard Croix de Guerre, was an autostereogram of the Mandelbrot set) to realise
that, although theoretically pre-determinable, his universe was incalculably complex,
providing free-will enough for any pragmatist. God, some people
even managed to maintain their faith in religion.

The anarchist had faith in nothing. But, he was a true skeptic and, recognising the
paradox of the apothatic doktrina 'nil verum est', not merely a lapsed Christian
heretic. As we have stressed however, he was a pragmatist and as such found it
felicitous to accept both phenomena and noumena as objective truths, for with his
under-over-educated upbringing he saw metaphysical speculation simply as a
rationalised confection of the apathy inherent in any culture, and hence, as decadent
and meaningless as any other fashion.

One example : Although he found decadence aesthetically attractive, his intuition
categorically impelled him to reject it. He rationalised this in his anarchy (decadence
as a fetish of the gigmanity) but in truth he was not political, in any real sense of the
word, and his idea of keeping abreast of current affairs was page 3 of the Sun. He
was an apolitical anarchist, an accidental anarchist, but an anarchist nevertheless.

The anarchist was once a son. (In fact he had been : a randy gardener, a murderer,
an author and an eccentric professor, amongst many other things; but it seemed to
him, in retrospect, that these had been veneers, masking his true nature rather like
the fancy dress of Mr. Ben or the congenital neurotic metamorphoses of Zelig.) He
had had a mother and father whose faces, etiolated now by the presence of son rather
than the absence of sun, were lost to him. Like Agni, the Aryan god of fire, born
mature he had consumed his parents. Yet, this was not a bloody immolation but a
gradual, almost imperceptible, shift of focus, a KY-lensed X-fade, the flick of a
cosmic finger on a cosmic remote control.

In the empyrean ratings game, the reportage of youth is always Number 1. Doting on
their treacherous scion, his parents rendered themselves impotent, mere faggots, to
feed the ingravescent flames of his growing self, his ego. And now he was surfeited
and they were dead.
Agni with his seven sharpened jaws, seven tongues and golden teeth, having ground
his denticles on his parents' bones, found sustenance in the oblations of clarified
butter made by the priestly caste of which he was both author and benefactor. The
anarchist, however, survived on the 24-hour visual libation of TV.

Down the road from the room in which he was receiving this tithe, was the Catholic
church of Saint Amis. It sat perched on a scrappy quadrangle of dying grass like a
huge futurist concrete, a Russian cenotaph to the dead of Vietnam, an eagle with its
wings pointed acutely toward the heavens. And yet despite the apparent intentions of
concrete-pourers and hod-carriers and brick-layers, crippled by gravity, it clung to
the anaemic turf, disproportionate as a child's Crayola drawing of its father.

100m away in the gently suffocating heat of his beige, low-ceilinged shrine, the
anarchist pressed the 'standby' button on his remote control. The relentless semiotic
palimpsest was enfurled; the flickering cyan-rays ceased to irradiate his lumpen
skin; the room was dark. Except for the reassuring flame of the red LED Eye Dot
(Affirming by its anamorphous winking the continuation of his product-
consumption. But also, a play on the mechanics of communication, a cybernetic pun.
Like the Ner Tamid, the eternal beacon of Judaism, a complex of Signal, Message
and Channel, called technically an Ideology.); except for the fading phosphorescence
of the walls' Dulux Magnolia; except for the glowing point of his cigarette.

Scraping himself from the adhesive velour of his armchair, the anarchist stood,
foetally hunched  for a moment, and then shuffled into the hall. This corridor,
distended by the gloom, stretched umbriferous to the Front Door. The heat buzzed in
his ears and prickled his flesh, which responded with the scalded red of a new-born
child. He was drawn moth-like to the thin exact moonlight, which lasered, with
astrological significance, in perfect syzygy, from its bony, pock-marked source,
through the corrugated glass of the door, to the shadow pile carpet in the anarchist's
vestibule.

Outside the night air was coolness reified. The anarchist felt the urge to whoop and
cry out, not from an appreciation of the Freudian significance of the scenario, but
instead from the innate joy in consummating what Russian Formalists would have
called an intertextual theme. For his life was a concours d'elegance of these atomic
narrative archetypes, the apodoses of which, with their consequent illusion of
progression, afforded him great psychic pleasure.

Had the anarchist been listening as intently as any other creature abroad in that
blinding moonlight, he would have noticed that the night sounds were curiously
artificial; that the distant atonal roar of traffic, the ubiquitous buzz of street lamps,
the faint ringing of remote bells, all conspired in a single modernist stridor, an echo-
location of the symbolic, to mimic the BBC special effects tape 'Nocturnal Ambience
#1'. Instead, however, he concentrated on walking, mentally articulating each
movement. Thus confusing pre-hensile and post-linguistic function, the sub- and
meta- conscious, his strides fell unequal, his body weight swung unbalanced and his
brittle frame rattled with every step.

His destination, the church, was soon reached. It had been raining, and the moisture
glistened on the concrete chapel's angular contours, coruscating in the bilious light
from the Sodium street lamps, moir, in the cerulean dark. Like Saint Elmo's Fire.

Now that he saw it, the anarchist realised that the building was a symbol for
television, a synaesthetic machine, spontaneously visualising the imperceptible
other. Whilst the Television eulogised a pantechnicon consumer Heaven of
automation, abundance, white teeth and tanned skin, the pinnate, utopian
architecture of the church inculcated the no less material glories of a more celestial
Paradise.

Indeed amidst the cement cheveaux de frise of its roof, scraping the stooping sky,
rose a single shard of masonry, the spire - an antenna.

He crept inside. The anarchist had arrived to burn the church.

And now, wordlessly, he began to wrench the chairs, which crowded the nave, from
the anthropomorphism of their sexualised couples, piling them before the altar.
Although the squeals and moans of this constructivist reconsacration tortured the
unperfumed air, in the anarchist's head, all was silence. And suddenly he was
finished and his work hung at the focal point of the interior's monadic perspective
like an Anti-grav ossuary, supported by the sheer density of its own anastomose
skeleton. It was a magnificent creation.

0o, facing it directly, it was a Cubist metropolis of prismatic skywalks and exuberant
towers, commemorating the technical achievement of their own construction; 30o,
the chiaroscuro of its interwoven shadows composed an Orphist fugue; 45o, the
harmony of lines yielded a Futurist trompe-l'oeil of dynamism; 60o, its staccato
geometry sketched a Vorticist abstraction; until at 90o, it resolved in a triumphant
De Stijl crescendo.

Kneeling down, as though recanting, with a graceful flick of his Zippo, the anarchist
kindled a single wooden promontory, for although it was an aesthetic omnibus, an
exhaustive syncretism of style, this was primarily a Kinetic work. Then he scaled its
gently curving slope and stood at its summit, lurching in sudden spasms, like a
Logan stone, as he upset the delicate rhythms of tension which supported him.

Slowly, the flames embraced the meisterwerk of which they were part. Slowly, the
fire stretched its talons, raking the subdominant wood, piercing and tattooing it into
a smouldering charcoal netsuke, and then coyly inching up towards the anarchist,
salivating a crackling shower of sparks in its Pavlovian anticipation.

The anarchist too was ready. He knew that like Jorge Louis Borge's Man turned
Magician he was a mere appearance, dreamt by another; he knew that as the shreds
of flame rose around him, they would caress and engulf him without heat or
combustion; that his body would dissolve and his spirit ascend to the aethers. And
yet as the fire scraped the skin from his body, as his eyeballs bubbled and burst, as
the blood boiled in his veins, as his fingernails blistered and baked, as his hair
exploded, as his tongue sizzled in its own juices, as his tendons split and spat, as the
flesh slid from his bones, he knew that fire just burns.

Apres nous le deluge.

(c)jh93

 mail ("joe@dentist.demon.co.uk")

--
joseph st.hyper