Short and Tall Stories...
The Sand Travels Too
By Alan Morrison
I have accrued a modest but eclectic collection of the souvenirs of other peoples’ travels: a Dutch Van Gogh print; an Argentinean pencil box; a portly pottery Czech village mayor with his nose in the air; a cadaverous wood-carved Don Quixote figurine. And then there are the stocks of crinkled postcards from all and sundry person and place, coffee-stained and ink-blotted, wishing I was here.
Travel may broaden the mind, but the mind can also broaden travel; it can intensify it; it can crystallize the experience and distil the sensation of moving itself until the kinetic process becomes frozen in time like the photo of a struggling smile. And of course, landscapes themselves are constantly on the move: hills and rocks slowly, almost invisibly, through time, subside or accumulate – especially desert dunes, plunging seemingly into themselves, snaking in the wind in North Africa, just across the water from here on which the Moors first came; it’s not only us who journey, the sand travels too.
When I do travel abroad, it is likely to be to Granada, to accompany Lucía in visiting her family. Granada: that contradictory, almost arcane city where uncannily preserved Moorish architecture clashes deafeningly with that of the sky-gazing Christian inheritors. You may feel yourself sojourning in two worlds at the same time in this labyrinthine place, nestled in a dusty valley between the olive-tree mottled hills and the snow-capped, Sierra Nevada mountains. They say that’s why Granada has such seasonal extremes, because of these mighty peaks: in summer the heat smothers the city like a hand over a face, and in winter the cold reddens the skin with an icy burn.
Our last visit was in winter. The penetrating chill of a city I had come to associate with thick, heavy heat, served to both surprise me and complete my sense of disorientation – my customary sense of being when travelling abroad. My Cancerian pincers always tense when I am away from home, but, unhelpfully, my shell recedes and the cold sunlight pours into me and stretches my eyes, melting off the blinkers. Then I am spiritually naked. My sense of self and purpose shrinking as I am exposed to the glare of an unfamiliar sun illuminating unfamiliar views and unfamiliar faces, until my own identity and perception are reduced to the size and dimensions of a postcard. This feels more than simply a transition of time and place; it seems sometimes like a painful but educative metamorphosis; a transmogrification from a native to a foreigner – and yet I’ve always felt a foreigner even at home. Some people go abroad carrying their countries with them and leaving their minds behind, safe at home. Unfortunately, or perhaps ultimately fortunately, I bring my mind with me.
While I am abroad, scooped like a tadpole from my microcosmic pond, I fill with the transience of things. It’s as if I’m suddenly all spirit, all ether, flitting insubstantially through a maze of lasting buildings, markers of my own earthly limitation. And throughout this dislocated passage of time, one thought sticks like a thorn in my mind: words printed on a page, my words, my poems, blinding me with their permanence – and all I want is to become as permanent as them; to have my entire consciousness immortally franked onto paper. And this immovable thought serves continuously and without any respite, to remind me with a piercing shiver, of my own ephemeral substance. This thought is the stone, it can blunt any scissor-points but those of panic; paper can wrap it – but paper also burns.
Why do I meditate on mortality as I pass by the beautiful, motley mustard-yellow and milkshake-pink town houses with their pretty balconies and large rectangular shuttered windows; the winding backstreets verged high by silent, shuttered terraces that look dark and unlived in, only a washing-line away from their opposites across the narrow Roman cobbles? Their shutters are sealed like visors – mine are stretched wide open as if someone had clothe-pegged my eye lashes apart. I want to look and to see and to appreciate, but my thoughts swirl in and out the nooks and crannies of every poetically dilapidated street. This is an intense type of tourism; an out-of-the-body visit. My guide is a dislocated native of this place, who was brought up to accommodate the great weight of history heaving through every vivid day; Lucía says Spain is ‘so heavy’, and I think I might sense what she means sometimes in the dark chocolate of the peoples’ eyes, the bars adorned with black bulls’ heads and dust-caked wine bottles, clamouring with glasses and laughter, plates clanking like castanets.
Near our cramped wood table where we feast on vivid-coloured delicacies, a gnarled-faced, leathery-skinned character strums flamenco – or some such idiomatic strain – on his chestnut-coloured guitar; his fingers spin their stringy web fast as a spider. Occasional thunderous strums strike picaresque images in my mind of Don Quixote jousting with the windmills as his armour clatters with his horse’s gallop; Sancho Panza riding rationally behind him on his bungling mule. The flamenco strums strike my ears with a violent gust of pride which doesn’t belong to me or my country – but it stirs something remote and significant in me nonetheless (like De Falla’s El amor brujo when I listen to it at home in the cold). It strikes only a sort of inherited sense of turbulence in Lucía – and it is at this point, as she sighs wearily through her cigarette, that she first coins her legend: ‘Spain is so heavy’. ‘So is England’ I utter, unconvinced of my own comparison, and she promptly ties up this thread of doubt: ‘No it isn’t – not like Spain’.
In the piercing mornings, while breakfasting, I am struck by how alive Latin culture is, as we scramble for a spare table in the fug of animated conversations and cigarette smoke. The natives of Granada are as lively and loud as the ubiquitous little birds that smother the trees in the winter squares like puffy, rotund, feathery leaves – so it seems all year round the city’s trees are in leaf; amidst the clatter of coffee glasses and tip-plates the café congregations chirp friskily over their chorros and hot chocolate. Lucía introduces me to the many shades of café con leche, subtly differentiated in a hierarchy of milk quantities served in little glasses hot to the touch: shadow (so milky only a shadow of the coffee remains), cloud (milky), cut (espresso with a trickle of milk). Another bright, stunning day is in the ascendant, and the mournful toll of the cathedral bell can do nothing to lastingly solemnize it; this city is unrepentantly alive; bustling with activity and thought and feeling; perfumed with the odours of incense and oranges. Granada is a slow taste to acquire, like the olive; when you taste it as it should be tasted it is both sweet and sour at the same time, gradually reviving the tongue. Many other analogies might do for this place: the smoky oak flavour of Rioja; the salty tang of jamon, sliced clean and red as if from a raw wound.
Strangely enough I had never actually been into the Al Hambra before this visit. Twice before we had sat sipping summer wine in the Satsuma-glow of the bird-chirping spring evening, staring up at the sunset-orange of the Moorish walls that had given the palace its name: the Red. Not so this time: we rose early one morning to discover another time, built in tribute to the Muslim sense of the transitory nature of things; built to pass like a thought, not to last, unlike the Christian cathedral at the city’s heart. But this convoluted palace had lasted, beyond all expectations or even considerations, no doubt, of its original architects. Though some of the cobalt blues of the interior tiles had unsurprisingly faded in places, the intricacy of the sculpted walls with their egg-shelled casting and high star-shaped ceilings remained painstakingly intact, like the imprint of mummified cerebrums. Courtyards once paced in by sleepy Sultans have retained their shape and detail, still fecund with fountains in the centre and pillared porticoes perfectly preserved and symmetrical, luring the eyes in to their whispering shades. One fountain stands on squat stone lions – ‘a gift from the Jews’ informs my guide, assuring me that even the tour-book omits this information. And from the portico balconies, through the Visigoth arches and architraves, the most breathtaking sight of all: the view of Granada itself, cliffs of innumerable white houses tumbling upwards to the inky mountains beyond. Here and there are protrusions of green, cypresses and poplars, and the whole city looks like the miniature Bethlehem lovingly crafted for display in a tent outside the Cathedral.
It is night in the miniature Bethlehem, only the bleats of shepherded sheep and the grumbles of King-burdened camels carrying in the evening silence. Faint glows of scrub-nestled households hover here and there like glow-worms on the hillsides; the three Wise Kings bring their gifts, guided by a special star lighting their way. Joseph and Mary are crouched beside a haloed baby in a straw manger in an illuminated stable. The Angel Gabriel is held on with blue tack to the stable beam. The customary visitors huddle near the place of nativity, three pipe-smoking shepherds, a cow and a mule. There seem to be more attendees than one would see in the average Anglo-Catholic crib – and most bizarrely of all, there is one figurine, possibly a shepherd, perpetually crouched in a crapping position, his trousers pulled down, an emerging stool protruding from his anus. ‘Who the hell is this meant to be?’ I ask Lucía and she smiles knowingly with that inimitable Spanish iconoclasm saying ‘No one knows – but he’s always there’. ‘Perhaps it’s meant to be the Devil?’ I suggest.
Strangely, my most enduring memory of this last visit of ours to Lucía’s city of birth will be of sitting round a glass-topped table, a heated tablecloth hugging all of our knees as we sit round watching Gabriel’s existential cartoons. Gabriel is only five years old, with wide brown eyes full of dread and wonder – the strange bedfellows of innocence. He sits couched in sierras of cushions, gripping his special pillow, Felipa, which he always brings with him wherever he goes. And I am the foreigner in his small imaginative world, struggling to let go of a thought which is lodged in my mind like a sharp and jagged rock. One day soon, he will have to let go of his pillow.
Published in Headstorms magazine, Seeker magazine and The Taj Mahal Review, 2005/6
Alan Morrison © 2005/6
The Mighty Absence
By Alan Morrison
I was seventeen when I first started to see; see properly I mean; see not just what’s here, but what isn’t here but should be. And once you start to see what is not here but is possible, everything else begins to fade as this mighty absence takes shape.
It’s a sort of awakening of conscience; a conversion of faith; a spiritual politics. It’s come a long way and had many forms: the blacked out face of a Scottish coal miner; the proselytising lips of tea-sipping thinkers; the turpentine nails of tubercular journeymen; the brief reigns of hair-suited Ministers; the thundering thoughts of compassionate minds. But it’s always had one thing in common at its core: life and its fruits are here to be shared.
My parents were going through one of their lean periods, so I accompanied them in our clapped-out burgundy Maxi to a car boot sale in the run-down school grounds of a local council estate. It was a depressing, drab community and the playground lay at the centre of a labyrinth of paint-peeling beige box houses, all exactly the same, with little patches of scrub for front gardens littered with rusting bicycles, old fridges and upturned shopping trolleys. This was where the pallid species known locally as ‘scum’ existed in their hidden numbers, cramped between the Social Security offices and the town centre. Graffiti sprawled on every road sign and lamppost – the claw marks of society’s neglected residents. Just outside the wire enclosure of this asphalt hinterland, a sign shouted the eleventh commandment: NO BALL GAMES.
There we displayed our commodities, old faded Star Wars figures and rusty toy soldiers, souvenirs of childhood, heaped in damp-stained luggage once used by us in mythic times when holidays were still possible.
In a small matter of minutes a grubby-faced little boy appeared wearing a pair of scruffy corduroys too big for him. His face had that transparent paleness typical of these neglected neighbourhoods, where skeletal kids look like they’ve barely seen sunlight for years – as if they’ve been left on their parents’ window-sills to fade in the urban glare like Chimney Sweep miniatures; the sort of luminous paleness the Council kids used to have at school, the ones who reeked of stale urine. That face was marked by a mighty absence of life’s better things. I had to remind myself this was almost the twenty-first century – and no doubt at times so did this shabbily-dressed, thumb-sucking cadaver.
There he stood like a half-starved ghost gazing in wonderment at the out-of-date merchandise displayed before him in the old damp-smelling suitcases. He stared at the small figures as if they were nuggets of gold. I watched as he crouched on the asphalt and picked one of the figures up, toying with it and animating it as his father’s shadow hovered over his luminous skin. ‘How much are they each?’ asked the timid parent, back hunched humbly. My father could barely answer for the pity that scraped his tone: ‘50p’, he croaked. ‘Ok,’ said the father, kneeling down next to his enraptured son, ‘You can pick one of them’. As the small boy rummaged around in the multitudes of figures for his one plastic, out-of-date, paint-faded choice, I saw my father turn away for a second as if on the brink of tears while I held back my own, feeling a mixture of extreme pity, shame and…a sort of enlightening sadness; an unconditional love for the little boy and the little second-hand world he lived in; for the way he scrimped about for just one little faded figure, a faded little figure himself.
In time, and after much careful handling of figure after figure, the boy made his choice and the father pressed a cold 50 pence piece into my hand. The man and his mesmerised son turned and walked slowly away. As I stared after them, I noticed how the little boy held the plastic figure, which I had once taken for granted, as if it were a precious and priceless relic; as if one blink of his eye and it would disappear. Our hearts sank with our hands into our pockets.
What choice had we? We needed money ourselves and so we sold what we didn’t need anymore – but we felt ashamed, and it was all we could do to stop ourselves giving the boy the whole suitcase full of figures for the price of those meagre two. But it had largely been through such selflessness that we had come by hard times ourselves; my father often proudly quoted the motto of our Fabian ancestors: sui oblitus commodi – forgetful of one’s own interests. Doubtless these matchstick folk had never had any interests to forget.
Only a short time later another man, about the same age as the boy’s father, all jeans, trainers and clinking car-keys, squeaked up to us in his leather jacket and surveyed our suitcases of toys on the ground. With a screwed-eyed, indirect gaze beneath the peak of a baseball cap, he said to my father, ‘How much for the whole lot?’ Slightly taken aback, my father’s brow furrowed as he bit his nails in consideration of the toys’ collective value. As if instinctively sickened at the prospect of making a profit in such a deprived place, he muttered ‘I’m not really sure…’ ‘Thirty quid for the lot’ proposed the slightly impatient spectator who seemed as much a stranger to this playground as we were. ‘Right, ok’ agreed my father, no doubt so relieved at the prospect of securing sufficient funds to keep us in electricity for the next fortnight that it didn’t occur to him to haggle for any more; anyway, bartering was contrary to his ancestral nature.
The deal done, the man slid out three crisp ten pound notes from his hefty wallet. My father grinned with embarrassment as he took the money. ‘They’re for the kids’, said the man as he closed the lids on the figures and clicked the latches shut. He then heaved the two cases from the ground and carried them stealthily away, his trainers crunching on the playground gravel. My father gazed at the three notes in his hand, tapped his fingers on his corrugated brow, and smiled wearily at my mother stood shyly by the car.
Then there came the clunk of a car door shutting some yards along the asphalt and we looked up and saw the man seat-belting himself in. His car was a large, chunky estate with a huge boot at the back filled to the brim with all manner of children’s toys and clothes. No one except the woman who lived in the shoe had as many children as that! Or were they for him? Surely an adult should have grown out of hoarding toys? Of course, as his car heaved away, another possibility occurred to us…
The scruffy little boy whose day had been illuminated by the gift of one single second-hand figure came into my mind again, and no doubt, from the sad look clouding my father’s face, into his…
…the image of that boy and his innocent gratitude for what was a pittance of amusement has lodged in my mind ever since and even as I speak about it now I have to swallow the memory as if it’s a stone in my throat. But if it is a stone it’s from a fruit, as it’s grown in me, fleshing out with sweetness. Now every word on my tongue tastes of that memory.
So the seed of new convictions was planted in me that miserable day, when the grey skies hung heavy over the small, second-hand boy crouched on that asphalt before a trove of small, second-hand toys. That’s when I first glimpsed the mighty absence, under his chin, glowing like the golden shadow of a buttercup.
published in Headstorms magazine, 2005 and online at Seeker magazine, 2006
Alan Morrison © 2005/6
Biography of a Ghost
By Alan Morrison
Stanley Tantalus (indeterminate time - unspecified departure) failed to make his presence truly felt during several decades haunting his now derelict digs at 41, St. Anthony’s Street, Tipton. The obscurity of the many undocumented achievements in his profession as Insubstantial Tenant at this only latterly recognised address classically illustrates the timeless theme of the polarised, struggling ghost; still a much-deprecated community role in our unreceptive technological society. Tantalus, an already doubt-afflicted fiction was driven to inverse solipsism at his complete invisibility and ultimately handed in his lack of notice. His absence wasn’t missed.
It is indeed shocking to meditate on the disturbing reality that throughout his entire posterity on earth, the full achievement of Stanley Tantalus’s prolific absence failed to capture the light of celebrity.
In recent times however revisionist mediums have begun to reassess Tantalus’s long and significant obscurity; the full metaphysical extent of which has only just begun to attract the critical notice it so giftedly eluded when transparently manifest at that now legendary bed-sit. All the more legendary for the fact that it was bulldozed down last year by a sub-contractors who refuse to be named, acting on the orders of a well-known high street retail company, who also refuse to be named, as part of an inner-city redevelopment, the details of which both the sub-contractors and the retail company refuse, emphatically, to divulge. Nevertheless, an un-intrusive shrine to Tantalus’s mythical home, now a pile of sub-contracted rubble, has since been erected by some of the more fanatical disciples of his in-growing cult phenomenon. This powerful gesture has ensured that both the address and Tantalus himself have tipped into the arena of popular folklore.
Stanley Leonard Tantalus, known indifferently to disinterested neighbours as ‘that work-shy loafer from number 41’, was frequently forgotten for his unmemorable, neutrally toned, threadbare cardigans. He was always missed by passers by, a morning paper crumpled in his armpit, spindly roll-up protruding from fish-lipped mouth, which puckered involuntarily in its gash of brillo-pad stubble whenever he smoked – a sort of smoker’s stammer. His unrecognised catchphrase, ‘If you’re out of Lambert & Butler I’ll have an ounce of Old Holborn and some blue RIZLAs, ta’ has passed into the popular unconsciousness and is now the stuff of void; it has almost become a ghost of the modern vernacular. This quintessentially idiosyncratic ‘Tantalism’ of alternating between straights and roll-ups never succeeded in attracting anyone’s notice. Tantalus was an emphatically self-effacing, inoffensive individual, who was often mistaken for himself in the street.
It is a testament to the vast vacuum of Stanley Tantalus’s contribution to modern Western society that an unmanned museum has recently been erected on the site of his demolished rented dwellings. The Tantalus Museum attracted much media disinterest on its unofficial opening last December to a throng of hard-hat sub-contractors, clipboard-waving surveyors and handpicked street beggars, all struck dumb by the complete absence of any building. Sponsored by the Tipton Spiritual Society, the new museum has been omitted by local architects for its striking innovation in design, lovingly built along the late Tantalus’s own forgotten spiral-pad specifications, constructed on the foundations of his lost thoughts.
‘The museum is built to last the ravages of time,’ stated site manager Derek Lepidus on the building’s incompletion. ‘Yes, we had a poor turn out at the unofficial veiling, but on hindsight we perhaps should have waited till the spring. Invisible buildings don’t tend to attract much interest, especially in late December’.
Similar sentiments were expressed by the museum’s undedicated curator, Lindsay Carus, or would have been, had she been aware of her appointment to such a post.
But the Museum has attracted a priceless accolade from an itinerant ex-architect through raising his methylated spirits in the wake of this ‘highly significant Post-Modern comment on our times – its transparent scaffolding, a masterful irony (anon.)’.
There is no doubting the seductive appeal of the breathtakingly un-researched detail of this unusual museum: no one could fail to be un-fascinated by exhibits such as Tantalus’s second-hand typewriter with its missing r, i and p; his precious pilfered Starbucks’ ashtray; and the coffee-stained sofa on which he composed some of his most obscure suicide notes which he un-famously scrolled into empty Unigate bottles every morning for the milkman to collect – all of which are tantalisingly un-manifest in the museum’s main gallery, The Rubbish Dump Room. Stanley Tantalus was indeed a prolific suicide note writer, having committed suicide on at least three occasions throughout his life.
But despite these recent non-commemorative developments in memory of the early Stanley Tantalus – ‘the unsung cultural stalwart of Tipton’ (The Morning Dodo); ‘the very sinew and bone of these disinterred Tipton streets’ (The Daily Spectrograph) – the incarcerated legacy of this most unremarkable of men is best absent-mindedly meditated on with a thrown, empty gaze at the burial mound of rubble cordoned-off with yellow tape under the auspices of a new urban rejuvenation initiative. The site, we have on good authority, is currently sub-contracted to a reputable high street exorcists who have requested to remain unnamed, as competition is currently at an all-time high due to a slump in business.
Predictably and poetically, too, the grossly overgrown pauper’s grave of one Stanley Leonard Tantalus, is also unnamed. It gathers mildew and molluscs in the shadow of its unmarked headstone – though the more feverish of Tantalus aficionados claim the incumbent’s initials are clearly visible in the eerie serendipity of snail spoors. There has even been the grisly rumour that some members of the local community were now able to recall numerous sightings of Stanley Tantalus whilst he was still alive.
Contemporary social theorist Julian Cruickshank, irritable at being asked to expend oxygen on the subject, interprets these ‘Tantalus witnesses’ (sic.) as suffering from ‘…a collective false memory syndrome triggered by the sudden wave of hysterical media neglect regarding the, until now, un-credited absence of one of life’s faceless understudies’. Cruickshank even goes so far as to describe this outburst of sudden communal mourning as ‘…uncannily similar to that of the disciples Christ’s body was interred in the sealed tomb: unable to accept their leader’s death, they experienced a collective hallucination immortalised as The Resurrection’. Cruickshank continues: ‘Of course, this Christianity itself could easily be explained as the culmination of centuries of Chinese Whispers. Or, indeed, Russian Dolls. The rational mind dismisses eschatology as myth. We don’t even know for certain whether the collective hallucination which inspired this myth ever actually happened either’.
[Note: our sympathies go to the family of Julian Cruickshank (late) on hearing news of his suicide last week, just as we went to print. Mr Cruickshank Phil, MA, BA, BC, AD, took an overdose of St. John’s Wort washed down with a litre of White Lightning, only two days after the launch of his latest publication, The Impossibility of History. His suicide note simply said, ‘I’ve lost my faith in doubt’, and was signed in barely decipherable, spiderish scribbles, only the ‘Phil’ and ‘MA’ recognizable in his list of academic distinctions.]
Whatever one’s tilt on the subject of Stanley Tantalus’s non-existence, even sceptics are unanimous on most points: that something failed to happen; someone failed to make any impact; some number of people definitely witnessed nothing, and that this nothing was undeniably something; that this something must have been hugely significant to have inspired so much speculation as to the nature of its unapparent substance; that this substance emitted a strange, eerie, gas-meter grey aura, and that this aura shimmered with some sort of non-energy, or lethargy, that clearly wasn’t visible but was there; that this energy, or invisible apparition, uncannily resembled the anonymous face of someone; that this anonymous someone was completely unrecognisable but yet they KNEW it was Stanley Tantalus because they couldn’t remember what he looked like, nor indeed who he was, and yet all three of the witnesses swear blind that the apparition said it was Stanley Tantalus and bid one of them give him a fag; that as Stanley Tantalus dragged at his cigarette, he coughed out a billow of phlegm-green smoke, wiped his stubbly face as if shaking off some cobwebs, and told them to forget that they had ever remembered to forget him, go forth and spread the word that purgatory has a public smoking ban, angels have to save up for halos with easily mislaid coupons, your dead relatives bombard you with nonsensical gossip under the subterfuge of ‘catching up’, everyone speaks in infuriating tongues reminiscent of Born Again Christian bashes, if you can’t get a haunting job you have to go on a Ghost Training Scheme which is insufferably patronising and ill-equipped, and, most unimaginably of all, those who once looked straight through you now acknowledge you by asking you to autograph your obituary for them, while they politely look the other way and congratulate you on a superior work of fiction…
And so the caucus story of the unfashionably early, fashionably late Stanley Tantalus finds its infinite closure in a paradox of ifs, buts and maybes, and not least of all butts: Stanley Tantalus is the only prophet to have been glimpsed after death having a transcendental fag-break.
So the mystery remains, to no one’s particular notice, and the words of those few who testified to his little known resurrection continue to tantalise sceptics: we didn’t know what he looked like but we KNEW it was him, because he introduced himself…
This, no doubt, will go down in the annals of hearsay as perhaps the cleverest double bluff of all time. And who knows, it might even spark a little piece of history which some day in some plaque-yellow backstreet pub, the friendless, stubbly, fag-wafting drunk sat in the corner, who never manages to be seen through the cloudy ponds of clinking pints, might be the only person to know that piece of pub quiz trivia, and finally be sculpted into being by the perception in the other punters’ eyes.
Published in Headstorms magazine, 2005
