Is there a dubious assumption here that the culture of the inner life is the one supremely valuable thing? – R.W. Hepburn
They lived in a tall gaunt house near a river.
The mother was a painter, a bad one. Her head was full of dreams of magpies. She was bitter, intelligent, theatrical when drunk.
She was not a sentimental person—which is to say: she was not weakened by love.
The only way she knew how to like her children was by publicly exalting them beyond all recognition—which is to say: privately ignoring them lest they disappointed her.
Everything she did for them—and she deplored this in herself—everything she did for them was styled as a merciful errand.
O
The father was a pirate—gruff, bearded, monocular—with a strong nautical instinct for knowing what bottom he was sailing over.
He kept a single gold doubloon and two pieces of eight sequestered away in the hollow socket behind his eyepatch.
On his right shoulder was a parrot, Pavlova, whose mechanical but darkly pertinent slogans, three in number, are swiftly particularized:
- Hot tamales!
- Make way for Styrbjörn!
- The tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others.
Through fasting and regular exercise, the father was able to bring his body—in an economic context of grotesque consumer capitalism—to a place where food was not only desired, but medically necessary. Consequently, his abs were geological. His caloric deficit was meticulously maintained. He felt a profound affinity with his remoter pre-industrial forebears, whose dietary habits must at times have been dictated by conditions of privation and scarcity, and who must therefore have experienced the same gnawing, self-annihilating, quasi-mystical hunger, albeit without the insurance of a fridge full of chicken breasts.
Every morning, he looked in the mirror and asked himself, earnestly, “Are you the sort of lad who’s going to founder spectacularly whenever your surroundings are altered in such a way as requires some non-habitual mode of thought or action?”
O
So yeah: it was a grey autumn evening, frankly devitalizing.
The mother stared out the window, guzzling the view. The sunset was quaint, garrulous, opaquely articulate. The wren was so noisy, there on the fencepost, for the wee size of him.
Between bicep curls, the father was speaking to the mother about the boy, Harold.
She turned her face away. She blithered her fingers irritably.
“Don’t talk to me,” she pleaded. “You’re only a bollix of a thing.”
“Kathleen,” said the father—for he called all women Kathleen and all men Harold.
“Kathleen,” he said—though his wife’s legal name was Presley Rose Kilfeather.
“Kathleen,” he said. “Listen to me now. It’s the young lad’s birthday and I’m worried about him…”
O
So yeah: in an upstairs bedroom, Harold sat lotus on the floor in a co-ord Adidas tracksuit. It was his tenth birthday. He had stark, gorgeous cheekbones. He radiated sadness.
A prodigiously clever boy, there was yet one major defect in his education: he had never learned to sew.
While his parents argued downstairs, Harold was engaged in a well-established nightly ritual.
Rocking gently back and forth where he sat, he compressed his eyelids with the heels of his hands and examined the stardust produced thereby. After thirteen minutes of this, he removed his hands and opened his eyes. Squinting now through touching lashes, he could just about glimpse, in the shallow angles between his fingers, the turrets and spires of a medieval castle.
He believed it was Camelot.
“Tirra Lirra,” he whispered. “Tirra Lirra.”
A knock at the door decanted him from his reverie. His sister, Kathleen, entered.
“Happy birthday, old dear.”
“Thanks, mate.”
“How’s it going?”
“Morale is low. The enemy sappers have undermined the outer palisade. Disease-ridden carcasses are catapulted day and night onto our ramparts. The Queene—.”
“Right-o, right-o. Just popped in to say: Mum and Dad want to talk to you in the garden.”
“Right-o. Any idea what about?”
“Presumably your tendency to squander your natural libidinous impulses in vast operations of paracosm.”
“Right-o, I’ll be down in a sec.”
“Right-o, I’ll see you down there.”
O
So yeah: the night was cold. The wind was wet. The moon was as white as the meat of an apple.
In an unseen quadrant of the escallonia, a cobweb was elaborated.
Harold’s parents sat at a picnic table in the centre of the garden. The father loomed out of the darkness like some meteor-bearded Helladic deity. The mother’s face was scrunched up like a little boy’s epitaph.
At a slight remove from them, sitting in an apple tree, Kathleen was reading P.V. Glob’s The Bog People.
As she read, she ecstasized, “Fascinating! Wonderful! Cool!”
On the picnic table were five objects: a thurible; a wolf’s paw; an ornamental dagger; a birthday cake; a digitally redeemable PlayStation gift card corresponding to a value of one-hundred Canadian dollars.
The moonlight performed miracles of elision, implied dubious organic and inorganic parities, promoted artefact to deifact, so that the plastic goalposts at the bottom of the garden glowed in the half-light like the relics of saints.
Harold felt the fragile apparition of his identity begin to mingle, like lamplight in sunlight, with the innumerable metaphoric lives of the moon.
“Ever the way with the old moonlight,” said the mother, regarding Harold mistrustfully. “The boundary between the real and the fictive is continually agitated. Our metonymic relation to the world is displaced by a metaphoric one, in which the realities of everyday life—all of our structured expectations regarding consequence, causality, and stable patterns of significance—are suspended. Even the most banal objects take on a parallel life. The branches of that beech tree, for example—”
“Sorry, Mum,” Harold interrupted, “but I’m afraid your distinction between the real and the fictive is gratuitous. The realities of everyday life, as you call them, are conventionalized; they represent an accomplishment of narrative. Without the correspondences instituted by metaphor, it would be impossible to achieve even the flimsiest conviction of reality.”
“Well done, old dear!” Kathleen chortled, waving merrily from her tree.
“Thanks, mate!” Harold chortled back.
The mother and the father exchanged a brief look, full of silent reciprocities. Even more than they hated each other, they detested the children.
“Have a seat, Harold,” the mother instructed with strained amiability. “On the occasion of your birthday, your father and I felt it would be fitting to offer you a few words of advice.”
Harold rolled his eyes. He felt a filial obligation to listen to his parents’ advice but the ability to pay heed is blunted by repetitive stimulus. Just like you stop noticing the fridge humming and the AC wuthering and the social media apps scraping the very data from your veins, so Harold had ceased being able to absorb his parents’ counsel—chiefly because they never for a moment stopped offering it.
The mother cleared her throat.
“First things first,” she said. “Heroism does not mean failing courageously. It means suffering unnecessarily.”
“That’s right,” said the father, gazing admiringly at his wife.
“Secondly. Don’t make gods out of words. Arrangements of words are not in and of themselves true or beautiful. Words are only signposts. I worry when I see you up there in the room reading Marianne Moore, John Ashbery—these word-squeezers. You’re wasting the best years of your life on a sort of highly refined syntagmatic neurosis.”
“That’s right,” said the father excitedly. “Beware the false air of legitimacy that inhabits literary and academic speech.”
“Thirdly—”
“Make way for Styrbjörn!” Pavlova screamed.
“Thirdly,” the mother continued, ignoring the parrot. “There’s a rickety little rope bridge that traverses the valley at the centre of every human heart. On one side is wilderness, chaos, the tyranny of the pre-rational—and on the other is an excess of subjective will, a too-stringent insistence on interiority, on the richness of the inner life, whence consolation fantasies like your “Camelot” arise. It is essential that you keep to this bridge, Harold, and never look down.”
“Consolation fantasies?” Harold repeated in bewilderment.
“And finally,” the mother concluded, “the earth demands nothing of you except that you be happy. You’re a passionate little maneen. But passion is ill at ease in the body, so it isolates itself in the soul. And passion destroys the soul, destroys contentedness. To be passionate about something is to be made miserable by it. Don’t be miserable.”
“But you’re miserable,” Harold pointed out. “Both of you are miserable.”
The father’s face became expressionless with fury.
“And is it any wonder?” he asked through gritted teeth, making an aimless, inclusive gesture with his hands.
“But there are extraordinary resources of renewal in the world,” Harold protested; “a surprising range of meanings. There are places on this planet where Great Truths are permitted to originate: Woolf’s diaries, Hiroshige’s rain, the rounded syllables of water on stone—”
“Make way for Styrbjörn!” Pavlova screamed.
“Your presents, Harold,” said the mother irritably, gesturing to the picnic table. “Choose one.”
Harold bowed his head in gratitude. He appreciated this evidence of the depth of his parents’ masochism, if not their love.
“Thanks, Mum. This year, I shall make use of the wolf paw.”
He leaned forward to retrieve the wolf paw, but his plump little hand was intercepted by his mother’s.
“The wolf paw is yours,” she decreed, “on one condition: renounce your allegiance to Queene Guinevere and promise you’ll never return to Camelot.”
Harold retreated silently along a trail of wounded eye-blinks.
For several seconds, he could not speak.
Then, the waterworks began.
“You’re just jealous,” he wailed, “because you’ve failed to cultivate an inner life authentically your own.”
“Make way for Styrbjörn!” Pavlova screamed.
While Harold sobbed his heart out, Kathleen floated down from her apple tree and glided across the garden.
Her balayage shone in the moonlight like a Maybelline halo
or an aerosol love potion
or a bioluminescent moss
or a substance from the centre of the sun.
She hugged her brother, ardently!, and in the close, confiding spirit of a library whisper, spoke the following words into his ear.
“There, there, old dear. Don’t cry. Destiny is something which will always precede us and towards which we will always be drawn by unknowable tropisms. There’ll be other wolf paws, I promise. I’m so proud of you, you know, for being so brave on your birthday, for resisting the temptation of apostasy. Henceforth, I’ll call you Harold the Brave, the very flower of chivalry!”
She paused to muss his hair before continuing.
“You know, while sitting in my tree, I was looking at the moon, and thinking about the moon, and about the mild self-alienation contagious of the moon, and about the moonlight’s extraordinary capacity to imply the possibility that death is reversible, and about its contradictory tendency to cast the living in effigy, to turn our skin to wax and marble, and about its capacity to liquify solid boundaries, and to inaugurate new subspaces, until all the watercolours meet and bleed and cross each other’s thresholds in every-shifting, -twining, -thatching, -bleeding mutabilities of either/or—and I was thinking, finally, about how the moonlight articulates so precisely what the daylight is at pains to conceal, namely: that all things are permeable, endlessly permeable, to each other’s emanations. It’s curious that the moon seems to represent for our family both a vast immaterial threat and a promise of insight into universal dilemmas—maybe it’s the same for all families—but I feel reconciled to it tonight, perhaps for the first time, and because I feel reconciled to it, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see a Knight Errant, in scarlet and miniver, come trotting down the garden with a letter—one of those beautiful wax-sealed letters—”
She chucked her brother under the chin.
“Can you see him, too, old dear?”
Harold’s shining face popped up, no longer sobbing.
“Oh, I see him, mate,” he said, without opening his eyes. “I see his pennon fluttering on the breeze.”
Garglestone is a fatuous pauper. He lives in Greece with his wife and daughter.
