THE MEANING OF DES
First published 'The Weirdmonger's Tales' (WYRD PRESS 1994)
The writing came too easy. Not at all like a letter of apology which, more often than not, was a question of breaking each word upon the page as one would eggs into a sizzling pan - some resulting in ruptured yolks, others perfect domes islanded by a thick-whitening sea, such sea itself another island. Nor like a love-letter. Nor a novel. Nor even a story to be frittered away in a reader's moment of nothing better to do.
No, what Des was writing so easily were thoughts. Thoughts that should never have been written. Thoughts forcing themselves into the pen and, then, upon the page, as if their life depended on being thus expressed. During each hiatus between their fitful inscriptions in ink, Des retrieved his own thoughts from the scrambled brain, one of which being his erstwhile surprise at the ease the writing came. That's where we came in - if 'we' was a pronoun with which you could be saddled.
For all Des knew, you might have been the perpetrator of the thoughts and, hence, of the writing itself. If that is so, he certainly hoped you were a nice 'you': not a vampire, nor a werewolf, nor a wraith, nor a zombie. Particularly not a zombie. If you were a zombie, all Des's theories as to the nature of these words and their autonomous source would have been thrown out of kilter. Zombies were not intended to have thoughts of their own, were they?
No answer.
Maybe that was the answer.
Thankfully, the act of writing became less easy, which indicated that Des was regaining control of the thoughts generating such writing. Bit by bit, as he moved against the grain of the thoughts, he brought his own mind to bear, so that it controlled the hand which controlled the fingers which controlled the pen which controlled the ink. Still, the words were never his. Not wholly his. Yet, they were now no longer steeped in a 'he' but in a 'we': a step in the right direction, perhaps - but he could not be satisfied until an 'I' had full automatic jurisdiction. He needed to turn the 'we' into an 'I', near as dammit: the double yolk to a single capsule of yellow slime.
Fearsome creatures of the night, those monsters that most of us dream about existing without really believing in their intrinsic existability, well, such creatures fed off the words we worked. Without words, such terrors would've been even more tenuous, if not mere phantoms of the mind. Vampires were stitched with icons, albeit those visual imprints ..uloid or, even more real, those imaginable vessels of verbal meaning, words, so-called, describing words with different words. Werewolves, too. Ghosts were even more real by dint of bearing less substance per se, but that was because they were indeed more insubstantial as creatures went. So, words were the ideal medium for such whiskery wraiths: spectral semantics of the spirit: utterly graspable by virtue of being endemically ungraspable. Finally, zombies. Those lurching lynch-pins of lobotomy, those lumbering lickspittles with a lavatory-chain - some mummified, others merely banadaged like the invisible man, yet others as bare as the day as they were not born. Like werewolves, zombies had the moon as their cursor - and, more often than not, zombies sported wolfwhiskers to make them more like men. Yet, zombies yearned for the tenuousness of ghosts, so that they could haunt themselves with at least a smidgeon of ratiocinative consciousness. Zombies envied vampires for knowing their own minds. Vampires were never at cross purposes with each other.
Our thoughts were gathering page-pace, weren't they? Almost time to ladle the hot oil-skinned yolks from deadpanned existence. One last chance to separate the whites from the bone-shells, the 'I' from the 'we', the present from the past. I'm writing with an invisible ink. What else can an invisible man do? Hope you (or someone like you) can type it up for me: on a word-processor. Whisked words: if only for the cake mixture. Beaten words. The proof of the egg-pudding is in the eating and in the gnawing and the gobbling, gulping, guzzling and the girning and the gypping up. The eye is in the seeing. In the seeping and the weeping. Behold, I love you and I'm sorry.
A certain indication of a possibility.
The flatness of the paper feels clean and crisp under the heel of the hand. I often feel awkward at a keyboard, facing a screen, eyes primed for finding gaps in the processed prose. It's all too easy to slip in and out of modes. With these new-fangled things, there's no excuse for not rewriting whole passages or inserting brand new paragraphs like cancerous growths. Even the words seem to dodge about the screen like viral tics, the tireder I get. No, I feel much better with a pen in my hand. Man and word, face to face. Texture and meaning. It's a pity that the publisher will turn it all back into neat rows of impersonal print. I prefer the jumble, the scribble, the squashed insect crossings out.
The publisher stares coldly at me as I shuffle into the front office, a sheaf of papers tucked tightly under his armpit. The man I've to see is Mr Ogg.
"I'm due to see Mr..."
Damn, I've forgotten the name. I hastily fish in my pocket with the free hand for the appointment card I may have abandoned somewhere at home. Thank goodness, it's still there - but all the details have been crossed out - as if the words are dead beetles and the meeting was cancelled at the last moment.
"There is nobody here of that name. Are you sure you have the right address?"
But all I'm sure about is the impossibility of having yet said anybody's name.
Des sat back, head resting on his finger-locks.
The screen blinked; somewhere else in the city there must have been a short. The piece was not heading in the right direction. He decided to pilfer a section from another piece and plant it between two sections in this one. He often made things grow from the middle. Beginnings and endings got in the way, usually. He leant towards the keys again, running lightly over them with the barest touches.
I've been ushered into an even more Kafkaesque office behind the first one. At least I've managed to find my way past the jobsworths. Mr Ogg'll no doubt see me shortly, even with a blotted appointment card. But how long is shortly? In Mr Ogg's world, probably forever, or as good as. Definitely dubious. The only string worth measuring is the fray-ended one I always used to keep in my trouser pocket at school, amongst the bubblegum. Finally, an unimposing individual closes the door after him.
"Yes, can I help you?"
"Well, I've an appointment to deliver this to your safekeeping. It's my novel. I've been working on it man and schoolboy."
I release the papers from the crook of my arm and they fall with a thud upon the desk. Smiling, I remember with what care I tied up the papers earlier in the day. The knot has red sealing-wax helmetting it. When I melted it with the lighter it made me feel heady. Now I'm proud of a job worth doing.
"I'm afraid we do not read unsolicited manuscripts."
But it might have been a masterpiece. What did they know, if they hadn't read it? Des's fingers raced over the keys in a fury. The screen flashed red. He felt tired. But he must plug on. Get the words out of his own system into another's. Make the meanings buzzzzzzzzzzzz.
But there is something decidedly unsatisfactory about it. The title has turned out entirely irrelevant. Nothing's been thought out properly; least of all the ending. I never know how long a piece will be until it finishes. It might turn into a blockbuster novel. In any event, the pen has run out of ink: a sure sign of a likely metamorphosis into something shorter.
Thus, time for simple chitchat face to face. Des's a chatterbox. So am I. So are you, no doubt - although neither Des nor I have any narrative control over you, which goes without saying, supposedly. But you're not a chatterbox in the usual sense of that word - because you often chat in writing. Your pen (with more ink than liquid death) races across the page at breaknib speed, spilling words to all sides, like there are no tomorrows. But you do not write for publication. You do not even write letters to your friends (if friends you have). You merely produce, for their own sake, sheaves of paper which grow into white mountains, with a million weaving paths of strange, indecipherable foot-, paw- and claw-marks turning the ruled lines into haphazard slopes like false clues in an Alpine paper chase.
That is not to say you are dumb - you possess a tongue and you indeed use it to form words in your mouth rather than on paper. You suck on them like boiled sweets, before releasing them into the light of day. But why do you need to speak? You are on your own most of the time after all. Well, YOU SPEAK TO YOUR WORDS AND THEY SPEAK BACK. More frightening than all those aforementioned monsters put together. Some of the words accuse you of plagiarism, of you using them willy nilly without due regard for their true meaning and, often, of not using them at all so that they will become mere redundancies or archaisms. In short, you are a great believer in the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
THE MEANING OF A WORD IS ITS USE, apparently, was that fellow Wittgenstein's great maxim. And perhaps there is more than just a grain of truth in that. For example, if the word DUSTBIN is used several times instead of TELEVISION, and it catches on with others, after a while, DUSTBIN will mean TELEVISION. Wittgenstein spent several complex volumes expounding and explaining that theory.
There was a whole clutch of words that banded themselves into a trade union - they came from the left-hand pages of the dictionary - and complained to Des that he never even bothered to use them. There they were, God-fearing words, as good as any, pregnant with multifarious shades of meaning, honest to goodness phoneme-clusters, almost erotic if he simply took enough trouble to get his mouth round them or filled his pen up with them.
They hustled and bustled, they badgered, and he finally decided to surrender to their whims. He gingerly took each one, like a gem, lifted it to the light, assessed the contrast of facet upon facet, bit into it to test its currency and bowled it along the table to see how far it would go. He carved some into monsters and, in the end, set them up against each other to see if they either fought tooth and nail or entered into a form of sexual communion with the view to hatching neologisms.
But, soon, words lost all their shine. He was now forced to take whole mouthfuls and roll them off his tongue so as to make them shape up. But, being so rarified, few even reached his ears. Even fewer managed to attain the paper, via the channels of the fountain pen; however, those that did manage to do so spun round like dying bluebottles and, with cries of semantic pain, merely became little more than smudges.
Even today, I can still hold reasonable conversations with brand new words Des once concocted. But, sooner or later, they will flee the cuckoo's nest of my brain and take up home in other people's meanings, your meanings. Or fall prey to the Dyslexia monster. Or be regurgitated by the worst chatter-box of all: the twenty-four hour electric dustbin in the sitting-room corner. And then Des will have an abandon-edit 'me', like everybody else, mindlessly swatting each 'you' with a folded dictionary as it buzzzzzzes near to oggle him overegging the cake of literature.