Stone, sights and sphincter (IFS – 6)

'Ars Poetica'
The goose that laid the golden egg
Died looking up its crotch
To find out how its sphincter worked.
Would you lay well? Don’t watch.
X.J. Kennedy

With this theme in mind for the month, I offer up a fix of some random photographs, and a few extracts from Into Stone.

I suspect that the Vikram and Betal text is in dire danger of being stillborn. I think my sphincter probing might have hit a critical internal organ. I'm still tinkering with it, but might switch mediums to fully realize the scope of the idea. Decision pending...

And now onto the tour...

A view of Edinburgh castle from inside a graveyard. There's stone everywhere and this stone is in possession of some really amazing 'memories'. One of the things I'll have to do is recreate this characteristic 'atmosphere'. There were dozens of memorials and each of them had a story to tell. I liked the spooky idea of the stone doing two very different things in the same picture – one structure is built to keep everyone out, the other is created to keep something inside.

A doorway of a castle in Nottingham. A mad mixture of stone is used here. You can even see the colour changes and how the door is constantly being reinforced with different kinds of stone at different points in time.
Metaphor: the stone structure as an artifact of 'cultural memory' is composed of different and conflicting accounts of the actions it has witnessed – the space is a site of continual historical dialogue.

A closer look at the patterns shows the differing 'contours' of the stone. When writing the scenes set in different time periods, I was tinkering with the idea of the 'contours of speech patterns'. Modern speech being jagged and cutting, the older scenes use sinuous or extended patterns. You might get a sense of this in the extracts.

Extracts from Into Stone

The present
Uttara: So what about you. Married?
Young man: Nah! Still free. Single. (pause) Mildly eligible.
Uttara: Mildly?
Young man: I have my dark secrets.
Uttara: Tempting.
Young man: All coming together. This place, meeting you.

Mythological Past
Old man: I saw him in the stone.
Satya: You saw him?
Old man: I make no claims. I just… I saw a sense of him… a thing… I don't know how to explain. Sight… For a moment.
Satya: You felt his form.
Old man: Yes. Yes that's it.
Satya: And you saw it dormant within the stone, waiting to be coaxed out.
Old man: Yes.
Satya: (pause) You never saw him then.
Old man: I didn’t?
Satya: How can you see the un-manifest? (pause) You saw what you did because you stopped seeing yourself as separate from the universe. You stop seeing the self, you see the infinite.
Old man: You have been chewing too much betel nut!

Historical Past
Maraj: A holy man up in the mountains Missus – he teach me this game.
They used to play it with the bones o' the dead.
This the hand o' fate. And this the souls o' the people.
Is all up and down – one life thrown in the air, or dropped. It's religious.
Young lady: Oh. Should I be playing it then?
Maraj: Sure Missus – I just made up the whole thing.

This is a stone prison(literally!). A very strange kind of limestone is used here and it's as if the rock has melted, giving it a droopy and gloomy kind of feeling. It as if the rock is old and tired and melting away – very different from resilient red laterite.

This is a completely bizarre object! It's a piece torn from a Luftwaffe jacket, purportedly from a downed WW2 Pilot. I'm not kidding or making this up! Mentioned the Iron Cross in an earlier post – definitely something to write about at some point. Spooky feeling, holding this thing...

This is a painting by Piotr Mleczko on display at the Polish Cultural Centre, Hammersmith. I totally tripped out on it – because it does visually what I'm trying to do dramatically. It mixes time frames and iconography, cohesively. I love the idea of a self split across time – the Christ-like head carrying a spear (of destiny?) - the anachronistic construct of the soldier figure. You need to be a bit 'stoned' to do this.

And talk about ostranie!
Strangely, the rick has Maharashtra license plates. Hehe...

The 'familiar' when set in a new context becomes 'foregrounded' - and as a consequence strange and unnatural, allowing us to re-experience the ordinary.

I spent about ten minutes laughing at this! Surreal!

That's it for now.

I stop my rhetoric and get down to actually writing!