Insane Leonards:
snapshots of delirium from a new magnetic pole #1

First of an irregular episodic piece of writing by St Leonards-based author Richard Makin

The light on the whitewash wall discharges from yellow to pink. Only the sequencing counts, in an existence constantly transfigured by failure. Then I had to drill holes in them all, the gathered-back. Rule one is tell us something we don’t already know.

                Plan A Head.
                De-position, burial in vaults carved into the face of sheer limestone cliffs. Parts of the earth were missing. These are clearly recognizable cycles; only toward the end comes the potential for action. It’s like the sound was locked into me. Think radar. This should not take very long (a different prism for every moment). No one used me. I was expected.
There were these giant reptiles and cheetahs, each group of beasts closing from either side on a deserted road. It was the middle of my life: the hiss of Catherine wheels, strobing light stored in the sanctuary opposite, quite heraldic. Heads were bartered to jelly.

                His life consists in being content to accept many things: earthquake in April, burial in May—an encyclopaedia of clouds. We have just heard (I was afraid to switch the radio on). Then he felt for the place where the peephole was. This belongs to my first years here, when I used to keep everything.

                ‘He looked a most broken man et cetera’.
                He did better than think. He did better than act. Bells rang out. (Where they did burrow with the help of their proboscis?) The power dynamic and belief systems of the early modern have little changed. You are contemplating minutiae, devoured by teeming detail.
                Take your eye off the ball: beached oil barrels, winter shipping forecast, twister at horizon, sole pivot above a groyne. All events are pre-written, he has duplicated every character: the algorithm of vibrating wings, solar flares, the dullthudding of barrels and depth charges. The old rationalism of falsify and hope thrives on the distrust of an existing universe. And they would scratch at the woodchip. He’s got the glimpses. I always sustain a gibbet perspective.

                Bureau Ha.
                The dust was carefully collected up and distributed. One comes to cleanse the shingle, dragging behind him all his possessions on a dayglo orange rope.
Q: Who descends and becomes a slave of the fate sphere?
                A: Something now as weakly luminous.
                I just knew you’d be here. For the extraction, limbs had first to be removed. You have to hold her up, her head resides above your own, cupped in your hands.
                After this, one could not even retrieve the simplest object.

                Subterfuge.
                That familiar unveiling. They are locked in positions (quantum metaphysics, the hissing of ghosts). Can you place that? Blood (a saint) was smeared across the locks, across the front door—slabs of unreadable black, for reasons of time and space.

                Catatonic (bring quicklime).
                An acid-gold bulge tests the surface tension of the sea, lenticular beside the headland. Yet too often the series is interrupted and only isolated numbers survive.
                Now to address a more vexing problem: the vascular membrane surrounding the brain and spinal cord has corroded in salt water. All speech is trial and error, the brittle sound of collapse—from decaying light, and the root of ‘to produce’. Consider which event is most deferrable, and act accordingly. Otherwise you’re going to give a false report, aren’t you?
                He got smaller, you say, shrank before your eyes. And then what?
                Are you a gentleman F. asked him as he entered the cell.
                The reason I’ve done nothing is because you’ve been so long in coming, the other replies.

                These are silicon-based, while these over here are carbon-based. Location and velocity can never be simultaneously determined; things cannot see where they are not. The inquisition is well underway, laps at your spleen—protest and cure—for you, for ever-rusting time.

                Humming on the podium, he has twice arrived—one instance wrapped in flesh, the other not. A small operation to drain the pus is required (he has killed in two weeks). We think we could win a skull-cap from his pelt, prised from the gullet. Did you have to re-register when he burst?
                Wait for symptoms of inertia. They were breaking into a sweat, pumping his chest. They wouldn’t even give her the names. They wouldn’t even bring the forms. It is two hours before time—silent reading, cultic or ritualistic. The most famous mediaeval example of the allegorical method is the eight-six. Nothing happened.

                Locomotor ataxia.
                Upper mandible of earth, shell lying below, palate soft, yielding to persistent stress. Let’s turn you around: on your knees. There were pressure ulcers, degeneration of the nerve fibres—stun-grenades, phosgene bombs.
Third: the demoralized, the ragged, those without names and unwilling to work (the loudest scream, that’s all I can remember). Most often, the procedure is one of blundering mediations. And that, in short, is how the epoch names what they are.

                An unwanted jerky effect in an emanation.
                The anaesthetist needed more information, is loathe to grant a few hours more. The first instants of another day are breaking on the window. And then my legs. I was obvious. Some have succumbed to their incapacity for adaptation—they force your head down until they can crack into your spine.
                I was waiting for the past. I needed to know. What’s the shortest time in here, the immeasurable? Check erosion, sand-rift.
                The one they splintered was blocked at ninety percent capacity, the point at which meaning shades off. A device was used as a temporary valve inside the bodily vessel, to pry it open.

                A person with a voice. A trumpet-shaped protozoan. Marrow was drawn off, harvested. Let me know when he’s broken through the white line. I think of his heart. Then he tells me his limbs are phantom. He was seeing shapes. Simple exchange was no robbery, nor was it treason. They did the old-fashioned one, you know, where they turn the dial. I was really quite shocked when he went up, disappearing skywards, lawless on the volley.

Insane Leonards #2 can be read here.

Richard Makin’s novel Dwelling is published by Reality Street
www.realitystreet.co.uk

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