Barefoot in the Head (31 page)

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Authors: Brian W. Aldiss

BOOK: Barefoot in the Head
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‘A new continuum has to alp itself from the screenery and potentiality is low from old corpses so mulch the old trodisues out of the worldbody.’

Her young face shrunk back to its ultimate socket. ‘You hate everything!’

‘Schweitz doesn’t line my inscape baby we’ll push east... Anyhow Anj I love everything that really has a shape.’

The rocking days closed over them, nights and afternoons with random weather, her womb rounding against the cracked april dayflight, the whole gestation-infestation opera yelling out on the revolutionary stage with mumps of pelting birds peeling larvae popping buds paregoric eggs in the drain downwards to emptying order-tors bared to the basalt. Until all his cogitations produced only To live with people Anj be with people love them hate their userpenting sleep, in a monosigh.

So you still breathe jesuspirations!

Get disenstrangled of this loot-in with Christ eh for gods ache its not for me that or you or anyone else ever agame that deathorglory boy with his nailed-up mystery and mixing pain with promise has all foiled up virtue against crudelty and permanan revel oution of our clockwatch west so now we break the square old charmed cycle. Be not do Anj be not do.

Amid the sprockets of his coinage he trod again the uncertain footage of his film seeing how it all fell in eternal recurrents and eddies of horning and horning with the everetrancing of steps slideways intombtime to the opening price of verture where the goahead geton-or-getout of caputulist christ was turd to ambivied materialschism and every grass and brute caught for an exploit.

 

So as the Pleonastocene Age curded to a closure the banshee crumbled under the thundering glearbox to grow up into deeply scarlet peony by the sacred roadslide where they finely went on foot with Anjie meandering through the twilicker her golden grey goose beside her it in its beak holding gently to her smallest twigged finger with Charteris choked in his throat’s silence.

Beneath them turned a greenfused planet where foliage unscrewed itself from the earthworld and they afflected by its field down to the last gaussroot of being. The wayfarers on their way youngbuds straplings or grey elders were of that earthworld impacted and she by this soothed Angey lifted from her lost garden and said to saint in a recurrent phrase

All the known noon world loses its old staples and everything drops apart. You should show us how to keep a grip until the bomfact wears thin and fight the growing forest.

When there was no forest were mock-ups of forest. When no PCAs organised religions as mock-ups of the personal paradise. Learn it angel not too hardly that the ferrocities of white officegoers had to crackup and tuck your city inside the only building is. Even in old concretions there pattered those our starcasters who went barefoot to the real experience hold their faith.

Expurience of drugged disorient.

Disorient we want and the nonwestered sun of soma.

In the dark under piping bushes the talk was all bodies they became interchanged statement to threnody stamen to peony ransacked of all loved lute.

He had grown out of too many lifetimes but this span bridged all there was valued. For her too no longer the grey-lagging little girl but that also. Some easement in the general break.

 

To the evereast they talked and walked among the littling humlets with stopped steeples while to meet them avrilanched from there even from Serbia itself curled hunters forest away but a day now retidings in its roots small black ringletting pigs and its boles whisperfaced littlemen and its trunks the glowing eyes and razorbones of subsisterly glowing eyes and razorbones and its branches the quick lead thing still scunnered with eyes and bones enterbal and in the leaves scabrerattle of birdsong and in the earth beneath a whole sparce tempscape ciscumstantialing the grotted world.

She broke with elmed summer into twain and he glazed through the furry wires of his conch to see his baby girl with Anjys lip of beads touch still between them the poor wages of pain words how everstretched never pinioned truth flying feathers of lovenests sprawling at heroic dusks sumptuary in feeling midfeeling deepernal but the white always winning as light flapped and varicosed in rustickled veins it cried at night barehead in all garrots where he spoke or harped silence as the concrete towers regressed.

The girl needled her small tranjecstory by his side or sprang after the rumpattering piglets in golden time so Anjy offered again seamly thewd thighs in splicing gesture. In him inartriculate patterns fuzzed and fazed stridulant through leafmoulded enterospection daytripping beyond his old throught records fobsilled deep only sometimes distirred by menacimages someone always drowning in beanstained waters beyond shingles behind a line of noctous epijean figures where shilluettes the sherd.

Living barefate in sheughs or hams where travellers now could share salaami and bread in humbled rooms they lodged craking ramshack many citizens lined to speak many he felt he could reckonise their plane shapes crossing and recrossing between him and the recessed light all asked him What you make of christs tearching or even Are you anti-Christ

So he Friends think fuzzed in diseither-organisated for mid-paths neither for nor anti what he said its Those whore not for me are agrainst me just a bit more punchy phallacy in westrun style there’s a newtrality to cultivate to be more receptive look for shades patterns where this goodevil stuff cant rise he startled too many hares for Man the Drover

The shins of the flesh mere alimbic fantasy

Don’t be for or against anyone only the waking thing that lies in sleep

Hold firm to dreamament

Its the pattern of percertivity

Awakes the greater sleep

Don’t think we’re too well made or permanent

You are more merged each than you believe

Better sensuous than sensible

All you must have within is outside among verdance Christ and the westering thing supposited the inside out

Never imagined where all the roads would lead

Here

The eternal position

You have to have been there first

Many theres

For the here no multernatives

His thought chewed deeper and deeper into the ruralities as the herding greentides lipped them

Other thought impacted two thousand years

Driver man became pedestrian. Be not do

 

At times he trod in every belief beneath a broken art sign or died again the thousand psychic deaths of croesus christs last autobile age

Barked the shins of the flesh under dogroses till senescence Saw and herded many nakedassed children to become holy men and whoremongers and homebodies

Talked less wondered more thought of crafty old G only a span along the net leaning on an old rope bed picking his toes as christs millerimage hitler came and went

Never knew anger allowed himself to be laughed at by strangers

She knew they who knew did not laugh who laughed did not know

Yawned as the phimpricked autumn grilled her hearsole

Tried not to teach but learn from his disciples Peeled off the long long sepiage of photographs

Watched aeroplanes in another sky

News from the statedepartmented north not reaching

Scratched himself

Taught the disciples to sit and weigh dust All alternatives and possibilities exist through old mottled gums under a spreading square tree where some tiles still lodged but ultimately of course

Ultimately they asked listening

Poignantly shall I tell them

No way of telling anyone only through silence

Ultimately of course

They let the vast blackdrop curtain their waiting

 

In the hours of morning he said I will answer your ultimate question thinking that glowing eyes and razorbones burned unattended

So under the sparky starcover he let her old arms lull him but the brain still burned towards its wisdom he crept away from her guzzling sleep amid the multibrood climbed out through the stiffly hole in their thatched roof lay flat there under pulverised galaxies

Put his arm over the curved spine of roof rough and warm breathing

Gigantic beast patient My ultimate wisdom my nonsense

Suddenly wildly flightening the hateful faces of his discarded selves when a man dreams instead of acting falling by the wayside the slow bonfire of unaccustomed words had he had a bad dream the archetypal figures or was he still lying arrowed on a hyperborean shore.

Feeling himself half-slipping from the roof he roused ultimately of course

Keeping an fuzzed open mind

That wasnt enough the forests are back

Brains just an early model half unwaked shaped for the forests

You want it both ways

Did I have it both ways

Made and destroyed lived and tomorrow maybe Both means two more than two many ways many many ways my chief word to the world I’ve been thought as well as body spirit and prick soul and stomach both

Slipping back into old astotelian ways of thought slipping off this damned roof cold

Was aristoddle also christ the proudwalker too old too damned old to think clearly back to nearderthal times

Climbed slowly down off the roof woke one of his grandaughters who went with care to blow on the embers and brew him a mug of redcurrant tea the warmth back to basics Pinhole camera my sight of shapes all fluffed Either too old or too young to think but who knows old angeline where was it I met her I loved her loved her in my way loved her being in many women

Thought about waking her till dawn came then she stirred bent nearly double came patted his gnarled hand and said something he had forgotten his bit I had a little speech for you

Heard too many of your speeches in my time you have to make your ultimate speech today do you know what you are going to say do you ever know

Perceived that this old place is really a great beast cantering us over the nightplane

Give me your animist patter again waking us all up in the small hours

Once they were everlasting hours

Do you know what youre going to say theyll all be under the meetree expectoring you

Meant to tell you something personal angel something about a flower or a cactus or something

Tyrannical really he still had not come to the end of words What year was it where were they she forgot finally he went out shuffling must be ninety who knows if its still this century even

I wonder if he was jealous of Christ

A doityourself christkit no nails needed

 

They were under the tree had his old bed there where they flies flicked about in the peeving shade he smiled his crafty old G smile and sat on the bed scratched his toes maybe he really would tell them

They waited in droves

No knowing the calendar

On this special day saint you were to speak about the ultimate

Yes

Well you patterny people with hands Byzantine born to genureflect below the low hair weigh dust well let it drip an hour or two we may not have beaten time but it no longer drives us desperate before it nothing like a catastrophe to lengthen lifespan pledge my last liquors to humbug the humbuggers and the ones who never made it

If they knew the flip old thoughts I blaspheme against my own holiness

Green and tawny under the tree the patterns they mean

We learnt to sit under trees again stop looking for better trees concentrate yourself under an inferior tree

One of his grandsons sneaking away he had news of an organised state north somewhere what was his name that man dead now a white sort of gown or uniform Boreas no matter Concentrated on his big toes the long within We learnt to sit under trees again the longer without In the old days Now the empty bowl

But I can remember sitting in a car and driving all through the night

Remember the old autostrada del sole the red lights paired tinily capable ceaseless countless swarming pintabling under the hills and over the bridges viaducts mighty mountains headlines slicing nature in two not a thing ever like it never no greater thrill we were all little christs then own death or salvation right there in your steering hands.

Autocrashes full of orgone-content like copulation bayonetpracticide war nothing personal in it only all things inferfused and the exhaust-throat snarling The sparks died into the earth finally My capital crime nostalgia Fault of early brain model flickering

During the long silence a small boy trotted round with fruit to eat and a disciple deferentially handed the saint an apple cut by his pocket knife the saint mumbled a segment

When they were all silent he sat up toes in the dirt

They waited

He waited

Their dull conformist minds he would have to give them holy law okay but spiced with heresy let them grit it right up their nostrils

Ultimately he said

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