The Visitor (35)
(xxii)
The Story of Hittler, the Spindly Monkey-Tooth
How can you possibly see me through the ingrowing skin of your eyeballs? How can I tell my tale when my mouth is chock-a-block with broken teeth and nerve-raw stumps? The land is swaying, swerving ... as the solitary zebra crosses the distant, disappearing horizon...
My tale? His teeth clicked as they went in each others’ way, nerve scraping nerve. My tale is in fact no tale at all but an
EPILOGUE
Orlando Blue has become a ravening beast, one who tortures… a victim of his being tortured. His scarlet whites of eyes pierce the gloom as he nears poor Rosemary. She screams, screeches as the flopped and festering creatures of the gathering play with the non-existent pigeons of the sky. And the old Charlie Chaplin film flickers and slowly-motion dies upon the wall of our author’s mind.
And in glorious stereo and full colour TV, the war is afoot…
THE END
(xv)
WAR IN SPAIN
OR
THE VISITORAL AND MESSIANIC ANNALS
by Charles Dipp
(a)
Apocrypha
‘War in Spain’, they say.
And as Hittler (the spindly monkey-tooth) stepped down from the platform, his story told, the Cuckoo remained fallen and was the most perfect rose (all bud and dewdrop) in Christendom.
And he wilted, his judgement of the competition staying silent and never to be told, except, perhaps, in some obscure and unremembered apocryphal tome.
If booes and hisses sounded at this silent judgement, then booes and hisses sounded.
But none sounded. For only flowers decked the only field in Spain around the only rose.
And then there was war, but first:-
(b)
Cinema Land
The world was nothing but cinemas. Nobody lived anywhere but toddled from film farm to film farm (using the cinema loos and washbasins for cleanliness and the cinema-foyer confectionery stalls for sustenance). The sad thing was that since everybody did this, no new films were made, so each film was watched countless times throughout a life time.
Economics is the sorting out of limited resources for unlimited resource-wanters. So how such a world?
The MGM/AGA organization ( made up of many so-called art Masters) fought fictional wars on Spanish plains against fictional enemies (the SBA/Hippy/Messiah/Visitor hordes or Scratch-Be-Art/HMV for short, who lived in strange caves far from the Cinema lands). They brought back hatched up booty for the ‘economics’ of the land. And so the faction continued. Until there was war and armageddon, retribution and crucifixion.
(2006 DFL comment: there now follows a crudely biro-drawn plank cross (+) with a man’s figure nailed to it, his face been moon-shaped, bearded, bespectacled, a mole on the left cheek, with a bubble saying ‘And in (c), it is told'. There are numbers at the end of each cross-‘spoke’, 12 at the top, 9 on left, 3 on right and 6 at bottom.)
(c)
What is it? Where are we? Whither has the dream snatched us? Twilight, rain, filth. Fiery glow of the overcast sky, ceaseless booming of heavy thunder; the moist air rent by a sharp singing whine, a raging, swelling howl as of some hound of hell, that ends its course in a splitting, a splintering and sprinkling, a crackling, a coruscation; by groans and shrieks, by trumpets blowing fit to burst, by the beat of a drum coming faster, faster – There is a wood, discharging drab hordes, that come on, fall, spring up again, come on. - Beyond, a line of hill, stands out against the fiery sky, whose glow turns now and again to blowing flames. About us is rolling plough-land, all upheaved and trodden into mud; athwart it a bemired high road, disguised with broken branches and from it again a deeply furrowed, boggy field-path leading off in curves toward the distant hills. Nude, branchless trunks of trees meet the eye; a cold rain falls. Ah, a signpost! Useless, though, to question it, even despite the half-dark, for it is shattered, illegible. East, west? It is a flatland, it is the war. And we are shrinking shadows by the way-side, shamed by the security of our shadowdom, and noways minded to indulge in any rodomontade; merely to see again, among those running, stumbling, drum-mustered grey comrades that swarm out of yonder wood, one we know; merely to look once more on the simple face of our one-time fellow of so many years, the genial sinner whose voice we know so well, before we lose him from our sight.
(from ‘The Magic Mountain’ by Thomas Mann)
A pre-First World War calm beset the French and Spanish fields. No strategic trenches, but row upon row of nodding blooms and petal sprinkling the breeze and aroma. No uniformed and lice-ridden men asentried around the wastelands The peace was essentially bird-twittering and pax-halcyon.
If some solitary shepherd were strolling through some undergrowth, if some bookwormy hermit were lain akimbo and concentrative within some overgrowth and if our narrator (the one whose narrative led us hither), pencil chewed between contemplating teeth, were cowering asquat within some ingrown birdhide, then, indubitably, they all would hear the gentle hum of some gentle hum. If they all remained hidden and still, they all would hear this gentle hum crescend, become more then hum, for it grew in militant volume, became much more than hum. If they were still there, unfrightened, sweated within the corner of their lair, they all would stop their ears from tremendous roars and unmitigated pandemonia. If they now, with incredible foolhardiness, lifted their bloodshot eyes to the now birdless welkin, they would see countless metal beasts soar more than ominously, more than loomingly, more than forbiddingly, over the hedgerowed horizon plane.
These aeroplanes, from a future age no doubt, screamed in countless hordes across our fictional ‘if’s’. They spat fire end shat ploding clots. And the trenches, men-filled, below, were splashed in uncontained blood. Grim-visaged war was afoot.
On one side of this incredible vastness of polluted country sat the allies in balaclavas and incredible muffles to protect them from the shearing frost and knife-whip ice. The snow cascaded around them, splattering the already shed blood.
On the other sat the enemies amid martial music and decked with nodding plumes. A nifty tucket was the ticket...
Overhead and overheard, as we have already more than hinted, roared the confused aeroplanes, none knowing to which side he belonged, none having thought to decorate the sides in recognition.
Both sides attacked each other, continuously opened fire but rarely received any in return! And so the war bore on.
*
A war which was intended to last three weeks, endured for seven years. The mortality was mammoth and its magnitude shocked even the most warlike of the proponents.
‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ reiterated many a pacifist.
‘Beneath the mountainous corpses, drawled a gloomy one.
Then there came One. A strange man (some have called him a gospeller, others a narrator, others a storyteller, others a bibliophile, others only a mere clerk of hand, others an insurance salesman, others a saint and yet others even a captain in some strange army). I, even I, would like to call him by a modest title - Messiah is too grand, too all-embracing, too Godlike; Comer is too small, too sexual, too anthropomorphic - I would like to call him a Visitor. This contains all the transience and modesty needed but also the deserved welcome and the space-age, man-of-the-future, alien side of his nature. It even contains the necessary dark side, i.e. The Visitoresque element (if I can be eponymous for a moment!)
*
He stood between them, held up his hand and shouted ‘Stop, please. Please, stop!’
‘Who is this nincompoop?’ questioned one bloodied soldier.
‘Git, yobbo! We will have no pseudointellectual , yobbo pacifists here!’ sneered another.
‘Out of the way,’ effeminated a BBC producer from a near-by tree who was doubtlessly filming yet another ‘World at War’ or ‘Great War’ documentary.
He retaliated :- ‘O.k., you mean buggers, but history will show me as hero!’
At that, a mighty crepitation, a hefty cannonade blasted this pseudo-Messiah, crushed Him against the near-by tree in which the aforementioned BBC man now shook his fist at the squashed corpse below him.
‘Who did He think He was, bloody Jesus Ohwrist?’
(d)
Back in Cinemaland, the starving masses awaited the longed for booty, But, little did they know, the so-called art Master had confused themselves in their own machinations, tangled their small brains with petty intellectualisms and warped their sensory perceptions with strange and inchoate aesthetics. They were lost, lost in forests of narrative mazes, in labyrinths of countless and unaccountable signposts and amid verbal icons and linguistic tortures. Their opponents, the hippy hordes, were no longer opponents (in fact did not know that they had actually been opponents) for they were drafted in as soldiers in a real war. They were taught to kill.
So, the cinemas crumbled. Their fantastic facades crashed into the deserted streets. The wailing masses stretched imploring hands to a forsaken god. They scat to the countryside, away from the errant edifices. There, they were shooed from pillar to post by angry farmers who chased them from their previously quiet and uncluttered farms.
Then, after much wandering, they reached a horrible Field. It was strewn with creepish corpses and decapitated aeroplanes. The very place stank. They sank up to their knees in mud and gore, but they continued to wade through the sucking, black (always black) quagmires.
Suddenly, one pointed. Wordlessly he pointed, but all turned their eyes.
Embedded in a mighty oak, part of its very fibre and texture, was a face. Its moonshape stared down at the astonished masses lifelessly. Then, they made out the rest of his body, literally growing with the wood. It was a plant-like corpse expanding with the tree as its bloodnourished roots made it soar welkinwards.
The uncounted masses bent their heads in reverence, then kneeled and chanted spontaneous hymns. Satisfaction and sheer spiritual joy were alive over their starving visages, as they enacted worship on this Field, on this Black Field, on the Field Where The Corpse Grows. Since then many a strange story has grown about this legendary Field.
(written 1974)
to be continued...[b]
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