Sunday, December 21, 2008
fifty words for christmas
The festive lights of Anglia Square flatter our bah-humbug countenances wrought with isolation, her daubed coarse features now inviting, my weak jaw now handsome, commanding. The money I have won’t buy a turkey dinner, but will manage a noisy blowjob kneeling on the gravel of the poorly maintained car park.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
santa's own holocaust
Dead thought: Santa starts his own holocaust tonight. It was a cold day and his wife had upset him.
- You silly old man!
One thing after another, one drink after another. A dirty beard on top of it all. Into the special cupboard, the locked cupboard. Here is the shotgun. Here is the carving knife.
- Shouldn’t you be getting ready for work, dummy? Have you been drinking, thicko? Brush that beard, ugly chops! Every year you sorry bugger gets the credit for his Christmas delivery! Where would you be without me, brainless? I’ll tell ya: Fucked Street!
BANG! BANG! The shotgun echoed around the kitchen and a fist full of wife brains went onto the ceramic green tiles that started at the sink and ended at the breakfast bar. Angry face even in death. She never finished the sausage roll preparation. An advance list of the weeks projected ironing fell out of her apron pocket. Santa shot her again, in the stomach this time. A trickle of guts smelt like black pudding. He trod on her fingers. They were coarse against the lino. Her thatch of nasty hair mopped up some of the blood, blown off from the scalp. One of her eyes wasn’t there anymore. It would turn up.
Nasty woman. Santa picked up the carving knife and cut off her head. He put it into a gift box with a red ribbon and bow. It could be a present for the mother-in-law. He threw the rest of the body out of the back door. Two elves watched curiously. Santa shot them fast through the neck and climbed into his 1958 Chevy. He threw the head in the box onto the back seat and put the shotgun onto the front seat. He loaded a small revolver and tucked it into the waistband of his faded jeans. It purred like a butterfly as he ran over his flock of reindeer. They fell down expectantly.
He played a song on the stereo and sang along for a few lines.
People underestimated the stress of being Santa Claus at this time of year. The violence on Oxford Street on Christmas Eve wouldn’t even compare. Without psychiatric input he had been a ticking bomb just counting down until something like this happened. He had to stop the children from carrying on.
The car was stopped at house after house. He slipped down the chimney’s and unloaded round upon round into the innocent heads of children and their parents. He looked at the brandy left for him but didn’t drink it. It was going to be a long night. White sheets turned dark red with blood, almost brown. The smell was like an abattoir. Beautiful blonde three year olds who couldn’t sleep:
- Santa!
- BANG!
- Mummy, Santa’s made Kerry’s head come off!
- BANG!
- Stop sobbing Timmy!
- What terrible parents… BANG!
The bloodshed continued into the very small hours of the ongoing night. No sleigh bells here but screams and gunshots, the whooshings of houses catching fire. There was blood in his beard. His fingernails stuck with gore. His eyes glistened like a jolly old man in the middle of a job well done.
But look! A police car! Tearing towards the scene.
- Halt it, Santa! Even a formerly good man can’t kill this many children.
Santa pulled the trigger of his revolver into the nearing shoulder of the officer with the megaphone. He fell from the car window. Santa shot him again and again and again. Four bangs: you’re a dead bastard!
A mob of angry neighbours who weren’t yet murdered in this grotesque holocaust shot Santa in the back. He fell down, but still managed to unload a couple of shots on the way. Two imprecise men fell victim. More police stood now over the injured Santa, smoking aggressive cigarettes. They shot him in the guts.
- Used to be such a good man.
- Yeah.
- Helped the kiddies.
- I hear ya.
They squared him in the balls. They hit him about the chops. What a violent Christmas surprise. They stamped his neck until air whistled through the broken shards of windpipe. They mangled his face until it looked like a dishcloth. What a heinous Christmas Eve killing.
- Yeah, real nice guy once, that Santa. You know, I blame loneliness.
- I blame drugs.
- I blame TV.
- I blame film.
Those proud men of the law. Walking off into the bloody street, cracking their bruised knuckles. Santa gurgled out blood. He was like a mistaken Halloween decoration. Someone pressed the wrong button on the plastic mould. A little girl stood over him. She was confused.
- Santa?
He mustered enough strength to punch her, a desperate last violence, funny and indiscriminate. The gnarled cadaver still lies in the street. There is shouted sex with the corpse, photographs too. People don’t know why they do it, but something comes over them. He is Santa. Was. Maybe. A man.
The mayor:
- An example is required of a nonce.
The newspaper:
- Holocaust.
- You silly old man!
One thing after another, one drink after another. A dirty beard on top of it all. Into the special cupboard, the locked cupboard. Here is the shotgun. Here is the carving knife.
- Shouldn’t you be getting ready for work, dummy? Have you been drinking, thicko? Brush that beard, ugly chops! Every year you sorry bugger gets the credit for his Christmas delivery! Where would you be without me, brainless? I’ll tell ya: Fucked Street!
BANG! BANG! The shotgun echoed around the kitchen and a fist full of wife brains went onto the ceramic green tiles that started at the sink and ended at the breakfast bar. Angry face even in death. She never finished the sausage roll preparation. An advance list of the weeks projected ironing fell out of her apron pocket. Santa shot her again, in the stomach this time. A trickle of guts smelt like black pudding. He trod on her fingers. They were coarse against the lino. Her thatch of nasty hair mopped up some of the blood, blown off from the scalp. One of her eyes wasn’t there anymore. It would turn up.
Nasty woman. Santa picked up the carving knife and cut off her head. He put it into a gift box with a red ribbon and bow. It could be a present for the mother-in-law. He threw the rest of the body out of the back door. Two elves watched curiously. Santa shot them fast through the neck and climbed into his 1958 Chevy. He threw the head in the box onto the back seat and put the shotgun onto the front seat. He loaded a small revolver and tucked it into the waistband of his faded jeans. It purred like a butterfly as he ran over his flock of reindeer. They fell down expectantly.
He played a song on the stereo and sang along for a few lines.
People underestimated the stress of being Santa Claus at this time of year. The violence on Oxford Street on Christmas Eve wouldn’t even compare. Without psychiatric input he had been a ticking bomb just counting down until something like this happened. He had to stop the children from carrying on.
The car was stopped at house after house. He slipped down the chimney’s and unloaded round upon round into the innocent heads of children and their parents. He looked at the brandy left for him but didn’t drink it. It was going to be a long night. White sheets turned dark red with blood, almost brown. The smell was like an abattoir. Beautiful blonde three year olds who couldn’t sleep:
- Santa!
- BANG!
- Mummy, Santa’s made Kerry’s head come off!
- BANG!
- Stop sobbing Timmy!
- What terrible parents… BANG!
The bloodshed continued into the very small hours of the ongoing night. No sleigh bells here but screams and gunshots, the whooshings of houses catching fire. There was blood in his beard. His fingernails stuck with gore. His eyes glistened like a jolly old man in the middle of a job well done.
But look! A police car! Tearing towards the scene.
- Halt it, Santa! Even a formerly good man can’t kill this many children.
Santa pulled the trigger of his revolver into the nearing shoulder of the officer with the megaphone. He fell from the car window. Santa shot him again and again and again. Four bangs: you’re a dead bastard!
A mob of angry neighbours who weren’t yet murdered in this grotesque holocaust shot Santa in the back. He fell down, but still managed to unload a couple of shots on the way. Two imprecise men fell victim. More police stood now over the injured Santa, smoking aggressive cigarettes. They shot him in the guts.
- Used to be such a good man.
- Yeah.
- Helped the kiddies.
- I hear ya.
They squared him in the balls. They hit him about the chops. What a violent Christmas surprise. They stamped his neck until air whistled through the broken shards of windpipe. They mangled his face until it looked like a dishcloth. What a heinous Christmas Eve killing.
- Yeah, real nice guy once, that Santa. You know, I blame loneliness.
- I blame drugs.
- I blame TV.
- I blame film.
Those proud men of the law. Walking off into the bloody street, cracking their bruised knuckles. Santa gurgled out blood. He was like a mistaken Halloween decoration. Someone pressed the wrong button on the plastic mould. A little girl stood over him. She was confused.
- Santa?
He mustered enough strength to punch her, a desperate last violence, funny and indiscriminate. The gnarled cadaver still lies in the street. There is shouted sex with the corpse, photographs too. People don’t know why they do it, but something comes over them. He is Santa. Was. Maybe. A man.
The mayor:
- An example is required of a nonce.
The newspaper:
- Holocaust.
Monday, December 08, 2008
Cirrus Mercurio
Cosmic greetings sentient shifters! My name is Cirrus Mercurio and I specialise in synaptic realignment, which harnesses the positive powers and teachings of the cosmos for ideational and practical improvements and growth. Or, to put it casually, Internally Driven Cosmorphic Realignment of the Synaptic Interchange!
With over half a years experience in the fields of cosmic ordering and motivational interaction, I am meticulously qualified to bring the right attitude back into your life.
For me, life is a journey, an exciting excursion from past to future which incorporates a sense of the present. Like any other journey, sometimes things can go wrong, and whilst this can make our lives seem miserable, or even worthless, these self-same things are also the one’s that give us the sense of urgency and achievement when we make it to that final destination. Or, to use high-level metaphor, it would be fair to say that nobody ‘likes‘ to run out of gasoline mid car journey... but at the same time, one only has to imagine the incredible things that might happen on the unexpected walk to the nearest petrol station to feel a real sense of gratitude at being alive and at the level of potential the cosmos has endowed us with!
I am very much a spiritual man, and my whole life has been shaped by the faith I have. As a boy I used to weep for God, and every night when I went to sleep I would sob beneath my covers and pray so hard that one day He would enter me. No readers, don’t be saddened, for my prayers were answered. One night within my twelfth year I again said my prayers, and as I settled into the pillow for another night’s slumber I heard it – the bedroom door slowly opened, and from the blinding light came the figure of a man. He told me, Daniel (for I was christened in this world a Daniel, and cosmically reborn in later life into the Mercurio nomenclature, meaning literally “of mighty therapeutic brain fingers”) do not be afraid, and that He was of God, and had come down from the heavens to enter me (just as I had longed for). As he took my hand I submitted fully to my first religious experience, one that was frequently repeated throughout my adolescence, strengthening both my faith and my resolve to take a spiritual path in life. A fire burned within me that night, a fire that remains aflame to this day.
However, my Christian beliefs were only the beginning of my belief in what I like to call a greater Cosmic Sense. In many ways I feel as though my Christianity was eventually taken to its logical conclusion, as if I had come up against a brick wall and had nowhere left to go. I’ll try to explain. I love Christ, and not a day goes by when I don’t fall to my knees in worship of the heavenly Lord and the sacrifice he made for us all. Similarly, the key tenets of the Christian scriptures are those of unconditional love. And yet the majesty of the enormous universe is somehow a mere trifle for Christianity, and gazing at the stars and struck by the very real sense of wonder they instil within me and my life, I felt a real need to reconcile my Christian beliefs with what I consider to be the awesome power of the cosmos. In the universe I see an order and a rationality and even a tenderness all its own, untouched and incorruptible by humanity. I suppose I started to feel that the more judgemental tendencies of Judeo-Christian religions were blinding them to the power of universe, and of what the universe could do for us, with us (much as the preoccupation with life after death seemed to belittle our interactions with the cosmic guidance of the world during our lifetimes).
It was the freedom of the universe from the tainted hand of human development that I found so fascinating about the vastness of a universe still so desperately unknown. In fact, this propensity to value judgement so apparently integral to humanity, the propensity to consider ourselves to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ ‘things’ is the very first mental blockade that cosmic realignment aims to destroy. You see, nothing is inherently (that is, in and of itself) ‘likeable’ or ‘dislikeable’ – these words are merely convenient labels borne of the primitive need for verbal communication within the evolving Homo sapiens. Such words, however, are foundational elements of the mindset of negativity that is prominent within human consciousness. In other words, our understanding, as well as our society, is built out of ideas of hatred, in itself a meaningless notion that has over time taken on a profound sense of meaning pertaining to the psychic wellbeing of individual sentients (like you or me).
Linguists have proven in experiments that the very first languages consisted of only four words:
1. Yes.
2. No.
3. Like (or approve of/love [of base type]).
4. Dislike (or hate).
With this apparent simplicity of linguistic exchange, the significance of what we would now consider negative responses (for example, “I dislike this wallpaper”) become all more apparent. Dislikes were used as way of forging relationships and of constructing a sense of shared value and unity. Within early human tribes, those with shared dislikes were effectively excommunicated from early social cohesion and forced into the wilderness to form new sects of shared, conventionally disliked characteristics.
One sees, then, that not only the English language, but all language throughout history grew from a very basic need to hate, separate and segregate, which allowed smaller communities to develop within a greater whole. Language was – and still is – used to divide oneself from others, to find wrong in the alternative and equally arbitrary value judgements of others. Over time, as civilization grew and thrived, other animal instincts within the human psyche – such as the lust for sexual exchanges – were sublimated, for some reason this linguistic divider remained so enshrouded within our minds as to be, to all intents and purposes, permanent.
With language playing so central a role in our lives, I consider it not only beneficial but even essential to break it apart and to REBUILD THE ENTIRE EVOLUTIONARY PATTERNING OF HUMANKIND FROM SCRATCH! A tall order indeed, but that’s only the start.
As the name suggests, Cosmic Ordering centralizes the Cosmos within the ever-complex matrix of what I term the human intellicore synaptic mainframe (or HISM). This HISM is a central contextual core, comprising many millions of individual nodes (or human brains) which are telepathically linked to form this one perfect, wholly encompassing Mind, which is the HISM itself. In other words, every sentient human mind within the world is simply a small part of something far larger, the one true mind, if you like.
I consider the physical cosmos to be a manifestation of the immense energy generated by the HISM, whereby the sheer scale of united thought has formulated into something all together tangible. For simplicity, and in keeping with the common parlance of religious dialogue, I call this physical ‘by-product’ Father Cosmos, or Father. He represents the very essence of an excruciating hyperbeing of reasonable and reasoned structure (borne as He is of pure reason).
Thus when I refer to the Cosmos, I am not referring simply to an ‘airy fairy’ notion of positive ideation; nor, on the other hand, am I referring to a scientific blanket term for the wilds of knowable space. Instead I use the term to refer to the reasoned universal interplays within the immensity of the HISM, and the telepathic union that grows out of it.
As a practitioner of Internally Driven Cosmorphic Realignment of the Synaptic Interchange, I am interested in the formulating harmony between the often seemingly illogical human psyche and the vast ordered logic that envelopes it through the telepathic network. Central to my work is the need to accept our status as individuals making up a bigger system. However, once we have accepted the seemingly trivial futility of our lives, we can then move forwards into blissful togetherness with all of mankind, and a certain ‘oneness’ with the workings of the physical and mental universes, secure in the knowledge the illogic of mind is illusory, and in fact order, strength and cohesion and the primary facets of the human experience.
They are simple precepts, but I guarantee you that this knowledge will make a difference to your life or my name is not Cirrus Mercurio (and my name was changed by deed poll earlier this year)!
Hold on though – I can hear your questions, humming through the Cosmos, and I’ll try to address some of them here:
1. Mr Mercurio, it all sounds fascinating but what does it really mean? For me?
This is a great question, and one I’m glad to hear. Remember, sometimes it’s okay to be ignorant! Because we are dealing with a groundbreaking approach to our understanding of human existence, I really could explain these ideas all day – and I frequently do – but it might be easier if I simplify matters as best I can. The theory can come later.
So, firstly:
(a) THE WORLD IS NOT AGAINST YOU.
(b) YOU ARE ONE WITH THE WORLD.
(c) YOU HELP MAKE THE WORLD.
(d) YOU ARE THE WORLD.
However:
(e) DO NOT LABEL YOURSELF – YOU’RE BETTER THAN THAT. YOU ARE NOT THE WORLD (ALTHOUGH THIS TOO IS A LABEL).
(f) YOU MAY OR MAY NOT BE A HUMAN BEING, OPERATING – POSSIBLY – WITHIN WHAT WE KNOW AS EARTH.
(g) YOUR THOUGHTS REPRESENT AN INTERACTION WITH ALL OTHER THOUGHTS, AND DO SO WITHIN THE HISM.
(h) BECAUSE OF THE NATURE OF HUMAN ONENESS, IT IS UP TO US TO APPROPRIATE POSITIVE MINDSETS TO INCORPORATE UTOPIATE FANTASIES WITHIN THE POWER OF THE HISM.
In short:
(i) HUMANITY IS A VAST, INTERLINKED, MULTI-EXISTING SYSTEM OF ORDER FROM WHICH IS GENERATED AN IMMENSE PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION (WHICH I REFER TO AS FATHER COSMOS, BORNE OF THE HISM). THIS SYSTEM INCORPORATES ALL HUMAN LIFE, ALBEIT UNCONSCIOUSLY, AND AS A RESULT FORMS A BANK OF INCREDIBLE KNOWLEDGE. MY PRACTICE OF COSMORPHIC REALIGNMENT REUNITES OUR UNCONSCIOUS ASSOCIATIONS WITH THE REALITY OF THE HISM BY CULTIVATING THE BEST WAYS TO ASK THE COSMOS FOR THOSE THINGS YOU DESIRE FROM YOUR LIFE. AS A QUALIFIED PROFESSIONAL I EXTEND THIS GUARANTEE: IF YOU ASK, FATHER COSMOS WILL DELIVER (although not within a specified timeframe). I REALLY SEE MY COSMIC REALIGNMENT AS A WAY TO BRING SENSE BACK INTO THE MADNESS OF MODERN LIFE.
On an individual level, then, I believe that I can offer complete ordering of your life, in everything from financial concerns to relationship issues. Cosmic Realignment is a way to re-establish contact with a sense of something bigger, better than you currently are. In so doing it marries perfectly religion and secular perspective, providing a greater ‘spiritual’ being for worship whilst maintaining the very human essence of that self-same being (a being ‘made’ of humanity, as it were).
With my intensive three week course, your very own Cosmos will be entirely realigned, and by using groundbreaking mind massage techniques stimulated by my own patented equipment, I will return your individualistic tendencies to the reassurance of a collective.
In fact, you’ll never be alone again!
2. What are the 6 ways in which we can apply your ideas about Cosmic Realignment to our own lives?
Too tight fisted to pay for professional aid? Whilst I wouldn’t ever recommend that unqualified persons attempt any of my Cosmic Techniques without intensive instruction and research, I also accept that the more sceptical of my readers might feel reluctant to succumb to such unconventional techniques. Fortunately for the doubtful (although ultimately there is no room for the doubtful within the HISM – NO ROOM), there are a number of key ways in which we can all work on our own Cosmic Realignment every day, and in the comfort of our own homes. You should think of these more as training exercises than as Cosmic Realignment proper, ways of liberating the mind part of the way towards comparative positivity built around order and productive assertive action (PAA).
Please note: only those who complete the course will receive a personal certificate of completion, which also works as recognised confirmation of a Cosmically Aware Mindset and will give a small discount on some full priced purchases within a limited number of Mindfulness Stores nationwide.
Cirrus Mercurio’s Six Ways to Train:
1. Smile for the universe! Did you know, for every smile you perform, a typhoon doesn’t happen somewhere else? It’s true, devil!
2. Don’t be afraid to touch yourself. Exploration of private cavities is a quintessential comprehension of the beauty of cunt, and, indeed, cock. My advice is to fumble on in there: you’ve only got yourself to blame!
3. Remember, positively! It may feel like a kick in the pride, but in truth it’s probably only mild disdain.
4. True Cosmic Realignment doesn’t happen overnight. It happens in a Cosmonium Chamber™.
5. Find your cosmic fingers! Often subtly located within the intricacies of the brains own matter, the cosmic fingers are near mythical, technically false digits conjured up for the sake of word counts. They will caress you to ‘kingdom’ ‘come’! So give it a try! Just turn left after the cerebral expletive... you know it makes Edmonds!
6. Owl eye. The key to expressive demonstrative lies in the eye of the common hoe owl. Boiled down and sodomized, the universe channels through its retinas, explodes screaming from its flawed lenses. For retribution or Cosmic Realignment – Owl.
And, of course, the final question stands:
3. My Incredible Monsieur Mercurio, do you sell any products crucial to the Cosmic Realignment Process which we can purchase in the instantaneous, with the use of credit card, cash, or deceit, in aid of the one true goal of Cosmic Enlightenmental?
My fuck, I’m glad you asked, O mighty brainsacs! It so happens that I do offer the following Cosmic items, and at a discount price to limit the ill effects of their reportedly ferocious danger:
BENEVO-LANCE!
What the Cosmos? It’s... it’s...
It’s a Benevo-lance!
Ostensibly appearing as a kind of magic wand, this is very much not, and is in fact the one official and [almost] patented BENEVO-LANCE!
It’s benevolent! It’s lance-like!
It’s... Benevo-lance!
Insert three inches into your anus NOW for IMMEDIATE results!
Only benevolence could be as benevolent as the BENEVO-LANCE!
Whatever the gripe (rectal or Cosmic) – jam it up there, and bugger (literally) the prostate!
BENEVO-LANCE! The simple, use-at-home instrument of exceptional Cosmic Realignment, conjoining man and woman alike with the awesome might of the HISM!
COSMONIUM CHAMBER
Constructed out of SOLID cling film, the Cosmonium Chamber fucks credulity! A transparent dome in three dimensions, it literally encompasses the Cosmic Order of Human Unity within its confines. Sealed within the Cosmonium Chamber, the individual is literally engorged within the answers of the all-knowing, positive Cosmos. In much the way that a Christian will feel somewhere closer to God when conducting acts of prayer within the sanctuary of a church, within the Cosmonium Chamber the Cosmic Practitioner can feel truly submerged in the midst of the reassuring rationality and mental order of the concentrated HISM.
A masterpiece of inter-relational design and theory, the Cosmonium Chamber was designed specifically for the home user as the ideal complement to Benevo-lance therapy and the more structured, professional approach of my own course of Cosmic Techniques. In concurrence, the increase in PAA will be notable and help in creating a liberated world of Cosmically Aligned personages, living or dead.
*
There, then, it is. My name is Cirrus Mercurio, and my quest is to help you and the world in its battle against human corruptions of inappropriate wordage and firmly bound brain response! Cosmic goodbyes to you readers, and long may you feel the explorations of my brain fingers in the fire of your souls over the vast terrain of the HISM, as my informational pamphleteering mutates in the darkness of night!
With over half a years experience in the fields of cosmic ordering and motivational interaction, I am meticulously qualified to bring the right attitude back into your life.
For me, life is a journey, an exciting excursion from past to future which incorporates a sense of the present. Like any other journey, sometimes things can go wrong, and whilst this can make our lives seem miserable, or even worthless, these self-same things are also the one’s that give us the sense of urgency and achievement when we make it to that final destination. Or, to use high-level metaphor, it would be fair to say that nobody ‘likes‘ to run out of gasoline mid car journey... but at the same time, one only has to imagine the incredible things that might happen on the unexpected walk to the nearest petrol station to feel a real sense of gratitude at being alive and at the level of potential the cosmos has endowed us with!
I am very much a spiritual man, and my whole life has been shaped by the faith I have. As a boy I used to weep for God, and every night when I went to sleep I would sob beneath my covers and pray so hard that one day He would enter me. No readers, don’t be saddened, for my prayers were answered. One night within my twelfth year I again said my prayers, and as I settled into the pillow for another night’s slumber I heard it – the bedroom door slowly opened, and from the blinding light came the figure of a man. He told me, Daniel (for I was christened in this world a Daniel, and cosmically reborn in later life into the Mercurio nomenclature, meaning literally “of mighty therapeutic brain fingers”) do not be afraid, and that He was of God, and had come down from the heavens to enter me (just as I had longed for). As he took my hand I submitted fully to my first religious experience, one that was frequently repeated throughout my adolescence, strengthening both my faith and my resolve to take a spiritual path in life. A fire burned within me that night, a fire that remains aflame to this day.
However, my Christian beliefs were only the beginning of my belief in what I like to call a greater Cosmic Sense. In many ways I feel as though my Christianity was eventually taken to its logical conclusion, as if I had come up against a brick wall and had nowhere left to go. I’ll try to explain. I love Christ, and not a day goes by when I don’t fall to my knees in worship of the heavenly Lord and the sacrifice he made for us all. Similarly, the key tenets of the Christian scriptures are those of unconditional love. And yet the majesty of the enormous universe is somehow a mere trifle for Christianity, and gazing at the stars and struck by the very real sense of wonder they instil within me and my life, I felt a real need to reconcile my Christian beliefs with what I consider to be the awesome power of the cosmos. In the universe I see an order and a rationality and even a tenderness all its own, untouched and incorruptible by humanity. I suppose I started to feel that the more judgemental tendencies of Judeo-Christian religions were blinding them to the power of universe, and of what the universe could do for us, with us (much as the preoccupation with life after death seemed to belittle our interactions with the cosmic guidance of the world during our lifetimes).
It was the freedom of the universe from the tainted hand of human development that I found so fascinating about the vastness of a universe still so desperately unknown. In fact, this propensity to value judgement so apparently integral to humanity, the propensity to consider ourselves to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ ‘things’ is the very first mental blockade that cosmic realignment aims to destroy. You see, nothing is inherently (that is, in and of itself) ‘likeable’ or ‘dislikeable’ – these words are merely convenient labels borne of the primitive need for verbal communication within the evolving Homo sapiens. Such words, however, are foundational elements of the mindset of negativity that is prominent within human consciousness. In other words, our understanding, as well as our society, is built out of ideas of hatred, in itself a meaningless notion that has over time taken on a profound sense of meaning pertaining to the psychic wellbeing of individual sentients (like you or me).
Linguists have proven in experiments that the very first languages consisted of only four words:
1. Yes.
2. No.
3. Like (or approve of/love [of base type]).
4. Dislike (or hate).
With this apparent simplicity of linguistic exchange, the significance of what we would now consider negative responses (for example, “I dislike this wallpaper”) become all more apparent. Dislikes were used as way of forging relationships and of constructing a sense of shared value and unity. Within early human tribes, those with shared dislikes were effectively excommunicated from early social cohesion and forced into the wilderness to form new sects of shared, conventionally disliked characteristics.
One sees, then, that not only the English language, but all language throughout history grew from a very basic need to hate, separate and segregate, which allowed smaller communities to develop within a greater whole. Language was – and still is – used to divide oneself from others, to find wrong in the alternative and equally arbitrary value judgements of others. Over time, as civilization grew and thrived, other animal instincts within the human psyche – such as the lust for sexual exchanges – were sublimated, for some reason this linguistic divider remained so enshrouded within our minds as to be, to all intents and purposes, permanent.
With language playing so central a role in our lives, I consider it not only beneficial but even essential to break it apart and to REBUILD THE ENTIRE EVOLUTIONARY PATTERNING OF HUMANKIND FROM SCRATCH! A tall order indeed, but that’s only the start.
As the name suggests, Cosmic Ordering centralizes the Cosmos within the ever-complex matrix of what I term the human intellicore synaptic mainframe (or HISM). This HISM is a central contextual core, comprising many millions of individual nodes (or human brains) which are telepathically linked to form this one perfect, wholly encompassing Mind, which is the HISM itself. In other words, every sentient human mind within the world is simply a small part of something far larger, the one true mind, if you like.
I consider the physical cosmos to be a manifestation of the immense energy generated by the HISM, whereby the sheer scale of united thought has formulated into something all together tangible. For simplicity, and in keeping with the common parlance of religious dialogue, I call this physical ‘by-product’ Father Cosmos, or Father. He represents the very essence of an excruciating hyperbeing of reasonable and reasoned structure (borne as He is of pure reason).
Thus when I refer to the Cosmos, I am not referring simply to an ‘airy fairy’ notion of positive ideation; nor, on the other hand, am I referring to a scientific blanket term for the wilds of knowable space. Instead I use the term to refer to the reasoned universal interplays within the immensity of the HISM, and the telepathic union that grows out of it.
As a practitioner of Internally Driven Cosmorphic Realignment of the Synaptic Interchange, I am interested in the formulating harmony between the often seemingly illogical human psyche and the vast ordered logic that envelopes it through the telepathic network. Central to my work is the need to accept our status as individuals making up a bigger system. However, once we have accepted the seemingly trivial futility of our lives, we can then move forwards into blissful togetherness with all of mankind, and a certain ‘oneness’ with the workings of the physical and mental universes, secure in the knowledge the illogic of mind is illusory, and in fact order, strength and cohesion and the primary facets of the human experience.
They are simple precepts, but I guarantee you that this knowledge will make a difference to your life or my name is not Cirrus Mercurio (and my name was changed by deed poll earlier this year)!
Hold on though – I can hear your questions, humming through the Cosmos, and I’ll try to address some of them here:
1. Mr Mercurio, it all sounds fascinating but what does it really mean? For me?
This is a great question, and one I’m glad to hear. Remember, sometimes it’s okay to be ignorant! Because we are dealing with a groundbreaking approach to our understanding of human existence, I really could explain these ideas all day – and I frequently do – but it might be easier if I simplify matters as best I can. The theory can come later.
So, firstly:
(a) THE WORLD IS NOT AGAINST YOU.
(b) YOU ARE ONE WITH THE WORLD.
(c) YOU HELP MAKE THE WORLD.
(d) YOU ARE THE WORLD.
However:
(e) DO NOT LABEL YOURSELF – YOU’RE BETTER THAN THAT. YOU ARE NOT THE WORLD (ALTHOUGH THIS TOO IS A LABEL).
(f) YOU MAY OR MAY NOT BE A HUMAN BEING, OPERATING – POSSIBLY – WITHIN WHAT WE KNOW AS EARTH.
(g) YOUR THOUGHTS REPRESENT AN INTERACTION WITH ALL OTHER THOUGHTS, AND DO SO WITHIN THE HISM.
(h) BECAUSE OF THE NATURE OF HUMAN ONENESS, IT IS UP TO US TO APPROPRIATE POSITIVE MINDSETS TO INCORPORATE UTOPIATE FANTASIES WITHIN THE POWER OF THE HISM.
In short:
(i) HUMANITY IS A VAST, INTERLINKED, MULTI-EXISTING SYSTEM OF ORDER FROM WHICH IS GENERATED AN IMMENSE PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION (WHICH I REFER TO AS FATHER COSMOS, BORNE OF THE HISM). THIS SYSTEM INCORPORATES ALL HUMAN LIFE, ALBEIT UNCONSCIOUSLY, AND AS A RESULT FORMS A BANK OF INCREDIBLE KNOWLEDGE. MY PRACTICE OF COSMORPHIC REALIGNMENT REUNITES OUR UNCONSCIOUS ASSOCIATIONS WITH THE REALITY OF THE HISM BY CULTIVATING THE BEST WAYS TO ASK THE COSMOS FOR THOSE THINGS YOU DESIRE FROM YOUR LIFE. AS A QUALIFIED PROFESSIONAL I EXTEND THIS GUARANTEE: IF YOU ASK, FATHER COSMOS WILL DELIVER (although not within a specified timeframe). I REALLY SEE MY COSMIC REALIGNMENT AS A WAY TO BRING SENSE BACK INTO THE MADNESS OF MODERN LIFE.
On an individual level, then, I believe that I can offer complete ordering of your life, in everything from financial concerns to relationship issues. Cosmic Realignment is a way to re-establish contact with a sense of something bigger, better than you currently are. In so doing it marries perfectly religion and secular perspective, providing a greater ‘spiritual’ being for worship whilst maintaining the very human essence of that self-same being (a being ‘made’ of humanity, as it were).
With my intensive three week course, your very own Cosmos will be entirely realigned, and by using groundbreaking mind massage techniques stimulated by my own patented equipment, I will return your individualistic tendencies to the reassurance of a collective.
In fact, you’ll never be alone again!
2. What are the 6 ways in which we can apply your ideas about Cosmic Realignment to our own lives?
Too tight fisted to pay for professional aid? Whilst I wouldn’t ever recommend that unqualified persons attempt any of my Cosmic Techniques without intensive instruction and research, I also accept that the more sceptical of my readers might feel reluctant to succumb to such unconventional techniques. Fortunately for the doubtful (although ultimately there is no room for the doubtful within the HISM – NO ROOM), there are a number of key ways in which we can all work on our own Cosmic Realignment every day, and in the comfort of our own homes. You should think of these more as training exercises than as Cosmic Realignment proper, ways of liberating the mind part of the way towards comparative positivity built around order and productive assertive action (PAA).
Please note: only those who complete the course will receive a personal certificate of completion, which also works as recognised confirmation of a Cosmically Aware Mindset and will give a small discount on some full priced purchases within a limited number of Mindfulness Stores nationwide.
Cirrus Mercurio’s Six Ways to Train:
1. Smile for the universe! Did you know, for every smile you perform, a typhoon doesn’t happen somewhere else? It’s true, devil!
2. Don’t be afraid to touch yourself. Exploration of private cavities is a quintessential comprehension of the beauty of cunt, and, indeed, cock. My advice is to fumble on in there: you’ve only got yourself to blame!
3. Remember, positively! It may feel like a kick in the pride, but in truth it’s probably only mild disdain.
4. True Cosmic Realignment doesn’t happen overnight. It happens in a Cosmonium Chamber™.
5. Find your cosmic fingers! Often subtly located within the intricacies of the brains own matter, the cosmic fingers are near mythical, technically false digits conjured up for the sake of word counts. They will caress you to ‘kingdom’ ‘come’! So give it a try! Just turn left after the cerebral expletive... you know it makes Edmonds!
6. Owl eye. The key to expressive demonstrative lies in the eye of the common hoe owl. Boiled down and sodomized, the universe channels through its retinas, explodes screaming from its flawed lenses. For retribution or Cosmic Realignment – Owl.
And, of course, the final question stands:
3. My Incredible Monsieur Mercurio, do you sell any products crucial to the Cosmic Realignment Process which we can purchase in the instantaneous, with the use of credit card, cash, or deceit, in aid of the one true goal of Cosmic Enlightenmental?
My fuck, I’m glad you asked, O mighty brainsacs! It so happens that I do offer the following Cosmic items, and at a discount price to limit the ill effects of their reportedly ferocious danger:
BENEVO-LANCE!
What the Cosmos? It’s... it’s...
It’s a Benevo-lance!
Ostensibly appearing as a kind of magic wand, this is very much not, and is in fact the one official and [almost] patented BENEVO-LANCE!
It’s benevolent! It’s lance-like!
It’s... Benevo-lance!
Insert three inches into your anus NOW for IMMEDIATE results!
Only benevolence could be as benevolent as the BENEVO-LANCE!
Whatever the gripe (rectal or Cosmic) – jam it up there, and bugger (literally) the prostate!
BENEVO-LANCE! The simple, use-at-home instrument of exceptional Cosmic Realignment, conjoining man and woman alike with the awesome might of the HISM!
COSMONIUM CHAMBER
Constructed out of SOLID cling film, the Cosmonium Chamber fucks credulity! A transparent dome in three dimensions, it literally encompasses the Cosmic Order of Human Unity within its confines. Sealed within the Cosmonium Chamber, the individual is literally engorged within the answers of the all-knowing, positive Cosmos. In much the way that a Christian will feel somewhere closer to God when conducting acts of prayer within the sanctuary of a church, within the Cosmonium Chamber the Cosmic Practitioner can feel truly submerged in the midst of the reassuring rationality and mental order of the concentrated HISM.
A masterpiece of inter-relational design and theory, the Cosmonium Chamber was designed specifically for the home user as the ideal complement to Benevo-lance therapy and the more structured, professional approach of my own course of Cosmic Techniques. In concurrence, the increase in PAA will be notable and help in creating a liberated world of Cosmically Aligned personages, living or dead.
*
There, then, it is. My name is Cirrus Mercurio, and my quest is to help you and the world in its battle against human corruptions of inappropriate wordage and firmly bound brain response! Cosmic goodbyes to you readers, and long may you feel the explorations of my brain fingers in the fire of your souls over the vast terrain of the HISM, as my informational pamphleteering mutates in the darkness of night!
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
I feel like zang
A soft drink: made with twenty per cent fruit concentrate and oil based colours from the art shop in the precinct, poured down necks in hot summer gardens straight out of the plastic jug (“we don’t want any breakages now boys…”; “break off out of here, ma, you’re embarrassing me!”): passed between muddy-fingered boys: red-cheeked and blood-knuckled, the kids by the towering sweetcorn in which you can run and you can hide and which the late summer drifts straight into, staying out past six o’clock for a telling off later in a thunderstorm, and your fat boy’s back got sunburned today – bare-chested in the back garden with big raindrops crashing into your skull – mother cut your hair last week – “nice haircut today” – and the kids to the south of Troll Bridge won’t be fucking with us any more… it stains the bedsheets on its way out and with a glassful of ZANG inside me (about 250ml recommended serving allowance) it is like the days on the yellow bicycle whose ridiculous oversized frame was too much for a kid like me – “hey kid, you never even heard of a comb?” – when a girl called H.S. from the street around the corner had a reputation for being a nice girl to talk to and after two years or so I thought I’d give it a try and I talked to her and it was nice, the rumour grinder was mincing up the truth for the food plate of the world and one day she tried to kiss me, it felt like a funny age, like eleven years; I thought it was a mistake but then it happened again and in that exuberant youthful naïve misunderstanding – guffaws all round, the fat blushing red-top! – I ran away; to look back now it seems hard to budge the vision in my eyes of the teary little unopened and hairless cavern between her legs – like a new pot of pickled gherkin – the dimly lit highway into the sweetness of her soul that I was too young to want to see, and too silly to drive on in to, and I wonder if she still holds it now beneath her cotton girls pants like she hasn’t grown at all, or left her bike or the disused railway line linking the villages of the south, and wants not to talk all night but just to have a dirty party with no sweets and no genetically activated fruit beverage just a long and furious love?
*
A street slang neologism: achtung! The masturbation! Oh goodness the terribility of the awful scenario! The knuckles are cracked or cracking like a professional yo-yo expert ready to demonstrate to a small crowd in an even smaller toy shop the wild stunts of his youth and his father’s youth before him – “and here ladies and gentlemen you may yelp as I ‘walk the dog’, yes, ‘walk the dog’… no no my love I’m not walking a real dog here in a toy shop am I, that’d be a crazy stunt for even me: Daring Pete, UK’s sixteenth most renowned Yo-Yo Tactician! Yo-yo tricks is one thing my dear, dog shit on a wipe clean linoleum flooring system with Lego to the left and dolls in aisle four is another entirely, ha ha! No it’s a trick I’m performing is all, it just eventually looks a little like walking a dog on a lead on a fine May morning. Let me demonstrate… (to the imaginary band with the imaginary snare drum) ready maestro… (Daring Pete provides a primitive soggy drum-roll from his own mouth to prepare the bored crowd of three for his dog walking yo-yo trick. One of them is unable to escape, suffering seeming entire body paralysis). And here it… (the suspense hangs before it can plummet)… IS! (The yo-yo wobbles and wiggles on its string and finally ceases all motion before it reaches anywhere even near the ground. An indifferent hush). All right, all right… (Daring Pete reddens, looks the yo-yo deep). You fucking thing! (The toy is thrown into the glass cabinet containing battery robots and tin soldiers). Fucking show me up, you fuck!” – and the cloth is laid with the covering of full stomach for optimum sperm protection. Zip, the fly screams! Rhythmic pumps of glands in the sad mid-morning light, up to down, slow to fast, watching a-giggle the foreskin playing over the tip like a bear climbing a short tree more to kill time than for any fun, and the movement doesn’t feel good anymore, nothing does after this many times, it’s all a bicep-test for the ejaculation and the spunk mountain when it becomes a worthwhile sport – “Welcome to sports day you old bastard! The boys by the track jack off for a trophy… loser? Gobble the juice up!” – and as it all builds up the nightmare builds with it…
KNOCK-KNOCK: “Son?”: oh shit it’s the door right in the middle of my…
“Fuck I mean, yeah?”
“I’m… I’m coming in.”
“Nah, fucking nah mum.” The door is open and mum is on the bed, sitting on its edge in a pleated ill-shit brown knee length… doesn’t look half bad for a woman her age maybe but hell look I can’t stop it my arm’s got locked into the motion and I’m damn well going for it all the way frantic as you like while my fucking mum’s watching on…
“You think I can’t ever smell it, son, when I’m down in the kitchen? Today it was too much – right over the tomato soup and the roast potatoes. It was there, refusing to be extracted by the extractor fan. And I couldn’t not come up here and have a… go.”
Weird woman that mother, oh god, I’m so clo-ose. A race of ecstasy miniatures crawled to the hole in the very tip of the length and they jump out together toward the cloth I laid out previous and I can feel the heat all on my chest even through the cotton and there’s mum…
“You know son, I use balls. Special balls. You know? Special… vagina balls.”
And she’s guzzling it up faster than I can pump it out, like a virgin cocktail man in a darkened queer bar, licking the sperm up with one hand on her tits, and I’m just yelping uncontrollably…
“What a ZANG, I really deeply felt like that ZANG, ah such a fucking ZANG, ZANG, ZANG, ZANGGGGGGGGGGG!”
*
A Japanese cartoon character: “No one will ever defeat you, mighty ZANG, for the pure of heart shall never face conventional destruction! Take this, the ancient Sword of Defiance… and this, the contemporary Firearm of Incomprehensible Power! With this bounty you will forever prevail against the feared Bastard From The Mountain.”
Close up on ZANG’S face.
The background freezes.
“Good Oracle Nymph of the village bakery, I prostrate myself in thought at your symbolic feet! With these dangerous weapons in my knapsack, and with such love in my soul, the evils of the Bastard can never destroy the peace loving people of my beloved native village, from which I was so cruelly separated by a wicked alien plague in my formative years, found floating and forgotten as a baby on the River of Local Supremacy by my sensei and saviour, who taught me of my fate and heritage, and prepared me for the day that he knew would one day come: today. It is now this heritage which I must defend from the debauchery which sweeps the valley! My life has led to this moment… I shall finally destroy the Mountain of Evil.”
A mountain looms in focus in the background.
Lightning stereotypes its peak.
A distant cackle is heard.
“Only I, ZANG, can save the village and, ultimately, the world!”
Phallic tentacles dominate!
Hundreds of rounds of the Firearm of Incomprehensible Power are unloaded into the sky in jubilation!
The sky darkens!
Close-ups… long shots… theme tunes!
“ZANG! ZANG! ZANG!
ZANG will beat the evil!
Born of a pure mother,
And a semi-pure father,
Made ZANG himself pure, too;
Today he fights
For the purity of others
And largely succeeds in his quests
Because of the purity in himself
And while ZANG is fond of the ladies
It is only in the context of a meaningful relationship
Built of respect
It’s so good to respect the world!
ZANG!”
*
A medium to bad rock ‘n’ roll band: ZANG are bottom of the bill and flop after one long guitar solo… no saxophones… no groupies… the road manager got laid, but it was by his wife, and three years before the ZANG gig happened. It was a synthesizer doom outfit gone wrong.
I
Sure
Feel
Like
Zang!
*
A street slang neologism: achtung! The masturbation! Oh goodness the terribility of the awful scenario! The knuckles are cracked or cracking like a professional yo-yo expert ready to demonstrate to a small crowd in an even smaller toy shop the wild stunts of his youth and his father’s youth before him – “and here ladies and gentlemen you may yelp as I ‘walk the dog’, yes, ‘walk the dog’… no no my love I’m not walking a real dog here in a toy shop am I, that’d be a crazy stunt for even me: Daring Pete, UK’s sixteenth most renowned Yo-Yo Tactician! Yo-yo tricks is one thing my dear, dog shit on a wipe clean linoleum flooring system with Lego to the left and dolls in aisle four is another entirely, ha ha! No it’s a trick I’m performing is all, it just eventually looks a little like walking a dog on a lead on a fine May morning. Let me demonstrate… (to the imaginary band with the imaginary snare drum) ready maestro… (Daring Pete provides a primitive soggy drum-roll from his own mouth to prepare the bored crowd of three for his dog walking yo-yo trick. One of them is unable to escape, suffering seeming entire body paralysis). And here it… (the suspense hangs before it can plummet)… IS! (The yo-yo wobbles and wiggles on its string and finally ceases all motion before it reaches anywhere even near the ground. An indifferent hush). All right, all right… (Daring Pete reddens, looks the yo-yo deep). You fucking thing! (The toy is thrown into the glass cabinet containing battery robots and tin soldiers). Fucking show me up, you fuck!” – and the cloth is laid with the covering of full stomach for optimum sperm protection. Zip, the fly screams! Rhythmic pumps of glands in the sad mid-morning light, up to down, slow to fast, watching a-giggle the foreskin playing over the tip like a bear climbing a short tree more to kill time than for any fun, and the movement doesn’t feel good anymore, nothing does after this many times, it’s all a bicep-test for the ejaculation and the spunk mountain when it becomes a worthwhile sport – “Welcome to sports day you old bastard! The boys by the track jack off for a trophy… loser? Gobble the juice up!” – and as it all builds up the nightmare builds with it…
KNOCK-KNOCK: “Son?”: oh shit it’s the door right in the middle of my…
“Fuck I mean, yeah?”
“I’m… I’m coming in.”
“Nah, fucking nah mum.” The door is open and mum is on the bed, sitting on its edge in a pleated ill-shit brown knee length… doesn’t look half bad for a woman her age maybe but hell look I can’t stop it my arm’s got locked into the motion and I’m damn well going for it all the way frantic as you like while my fucking mum’s watching on…
“You think I can’t ever smell it, son, when I’m down in the kitchen? Today it was too much – right over the tomato soup and the roast potatoes. It was there, refusing to be extracted by the extractor fan. And I couldn’t not come up here and have a… go.”
Weird woman that mother, oh god, I’m so clo-ose. A race of ecstasy miniatures crawled to the hole in the very tip of the length and they jump out together toward the cloth I laid out previous and I can feel the heat all on my chest even through the cotton and there’s mum…
“You know son, I use balls. Special balls. You know? Special… vagina balls.”
And she’s guzzling it up faster than I can pump it out, like a virgin cocktail man in a darkened queer bar, licking the sperm up with one hand on her tits, and I’m just yelping uncontrollably…
“What a ZANG, I really deeply felt like that ZANG, ah such a fucking ZANG, ZANG, ZANG, ZANGGGGGGGGGGG!”
*
A Japanese cartoon character: “No one will ever defeat you, mighty ZANG, for the pure of heart shall never face conventional destruction! Take this, the ancient Sword of Defiance… and this, the contemporary Firearm of Incomprehensible Power! With this bounty you will forever prevail against the feared Bastard From The Mountain.”
Close up on ZANG’S face.
The background freezes.
“Good Oracle Nymph of the village bakery, I prostrate myself in thought at your symbolic feet! With these dangerous weapons in my knapsack, and with such love in my soul, the evils of the Bastard can never destroy the peace loving people of my beloved native village, from which I was so cruelly separated by a wicked alien plague in my formative years, found floating and forgotten as a baby on the River of Local Supremacy by my sensei and saviour, who taught me of my fate and heritage, and prepared me for the day that he knew would one day come: today. It is now this heritage which I must defend from the debauchery which sweeps the valley! My life has led to this moment… I shall finally destroy the Mountain of Evil.”
A mountain looms in focus in the background.
Lightning stereotypes its peak.
A distant cackle is heard.
“Only I, ZANG, can save the village and, ultimately, the world!”
Phallic tentacles dominate!
Hundreds of rounds of the Firearm of Incomprehensible Power are unloaded into the sky in jubilation!
The sky darkens!
Close-ups… long shots… theme tunes!
“ZANG! ZANG! ZANG!
ZANG will beat the evil!
Born of a pure mother,
And a semi-pure father,
Made ZANG himself pure, too;
Today he fights
For the purity of others
And largely succeeds in his quests
Because of the purity in himself
And while ZANG is fond of the ladies
It is only in the context of a meaningful relationship
Built of respect
It’s so good to respect the world!
ZANG!”
*
A medium to bad rock ‘n’ roll band: ZANG are bottom of the bill and flop after one long guitar solo… no saxophones… no groupies… the road manager got laid, but it was by his wife, and three years before the ZANG gig happened. It was a synthesizer doom outfit gone wrong.
I
Sure
Feel
Like
Zang!
Saturday, November 22, 2008
from the archives
John didn’t like Steve, because Steve had a thing about Harry, but Harry had made Julian unsociable once and everyone, including elderly Barry and even diminutive Timothy from the nearby flats, thought that Harry’s influence was enough to make anyone become as much of a recluse as Peter, who hadn’t left his flat since Louis decided that Norris was actually called David and that Frank once had a pal called Richard who fathered two sons – Oscar and Charlie – before befriending big Daniel and his brother James so that they might form a team of four with Geoffrey, only Geoffrey wanted Jeffrey to be a part of it but Jeffrey didn’t want to be a part of anything unless Alexander was prepared to participate, and Alexander was a huge fan of William who in turn acted as a kind of middle man, trying hard to bring in not only the boys from the Shropshire Arms, being Colin, Douglas, George, Henry and Robert, but also all of his friends from the Devonshire Constitutional, like Simon, but Simon had developed a reputation and this had put off the likes of poor Paul and his eldest son Gary, who worked in an abattoir, while Michael, the friend of Johnson, wanted his old college buddy Ernest to be welcomed into the team, but the hot temper of Frederick made this an impossibility, as Lawrence had no choice but to introduce the local fishmonger, Arthur, to the master of meats and butchery, Ian, who sold spare animal parts to the scientist, Roderick, for experimentation, and fresh livers to Brian for use in his pies, but the farmer and landowner Leonard hated Dale so much for being tall that he decided to hire the simpleton Anthony to use his secret weapon, Francis, to get Dale via Kenneth who knew Jack who was an ex-business partner of Philip, the friend of Ivor, who had created Thomas in the back of Terry’s old Ford Cortina which was sold to him by Howard who once played a hand of poker with Eddie who was a friend of a friend of Alan who had apparently overheard a conversation between Christopher and Adrian who both met Andrew at a dinner function once and who are good friends with Graham who lent a lawnmower to Duncan whose mother’s boyfriend Samuel owned a small allotment right up the road from Benjamin’s place, and he had once played football with a team who claimed to have known Reginald, the second cousin of Nicholas who once brushed shoulders with Dale in a busy supermarket when he talked to Nathaniel about garden tools and car parking space, the specialist subject of Dennis, who was busy with his only uncle Edgar in the shed with Rhys, who was known to be dangerous and trustworthy, so Leonard would get Dale like that. Then every man realised he didn’t have a cock.
Sunday, November 09, 2008
the boy
I met the boy on the burning bridge. He wore trunks and sandals, and sat on the red hot iron rail with his legs swinging slightly over the sides as though he were somewhere else. It was Bishop’s Bridge. The boy looked serious.
“What are you doing?” I asked weakly to the starkness of outside. “What are you doing?” Firmer, stronger.
He turned to me disinterestedly, then turned away. He spat into the river.
I felt a compulsion to approach him, picking my way through the heat of flames. I placed a tentative hand onto his shoulder. The flesh was cooking like pork and burnt me; all the same I left it there. We watched the river trying to flow, me and the boy, and the bridge as it burnt.
*
The boy came to my place. I cooled him with moisturiser and ice packs and frozen peas, and fed him the insides of a loaf of bread, doughy like bleached white guts, which he chewed gravely before the off TV set. I threw the crust away hungrily.
*
The boy told me about his school and how it worked like a distant memory. In school all the boys burnt and life was to be forgotten. It was a top school.
*
We went to the park in an afternoon and threw a Frisbee, the boy unusual in his trunks, his charred skin like spoiled barbeque. Children cried in a circle about us, in a way that seemed involuntary, and the boy kept on throwing the Frisbee. He was very proficient.
*
It built up for many days before I kissed the boy. He was unresponsive at first, and throughout the kiss, but he didn’t try to stop me. When I went to touch his slight dick he slowly moved my hand away, but didn’t say anything. I tried to kiss him again, only this time he laughed and looked past me at the blank screen. It was late.
*
The boy emptied the fridge with a passion for milk. I didn’t mind. He seemed to bask in the electrical light that was activated by the opening door. It shone on his abs and his back and I drank water from a glass and watched him.
*
The boy couldn’t stop burning himself. It had started on the bridge, or maybe not. Maybe the bridge was the middle of something far bigger. He burnt my car, seats first, then my table, my soft furnishings, my house.
*
The boy was the culmination of a lifetime of promises.
*
The boy sang a heavenly silent song, the notes inconsequential to the point of epic. He was a master of the glamour of alternative lifestyles.
*
The boy exhibited adjacent characteristics.
*
The boy used the bathtub for his interior excavations, an odd habit but one I found reassuring. The bathroom smelt terrible, brown and full, but I still washed it out daily without complaint, the boy watching curiously from the kitchen door, his eyes a-glaze with clandestine examination.
*
The boy knew not the ways of the mattress, asleep instead on a loose carpet patch in the draft of the front door, itself warped by poor weather and bad construction, his eyes open like fish eyes in the dark.
*
He was gone when I woke up, nothing but a boy shaped mark left on the carpet. It wasn’t as if I needed the boy or knew him that well, but all the same I was crippled with the reality of myself, and cried at the thought of my ill-conceived memories, longing for the burnt browned hues of his flesh, the frailty of his imagined touch, the physical companionship of his mysterious genitalia.
*
I wonder where the boy is now.
*
Without the boy I was ash falling into the river, I was twisted hot metal, I was humanity engulfed in the spreading heat, I was children burning and hanging in their blank classrooms, I was man.
“What are you doing?” I asked weakly to the starkness of outside. “What are you doing?” Firmer, stronger.
He turned to me disinterestedly, then turned away. He spat into the river.
I felt a compulsion to approach him, picking my way through the heat of flames. I placed a tentative hand onto his shoulder. The flesh was cooking like pork and burnt me; all the same I left it there. We watched the river trying to flow, me and the boy, and the bridge as it burnt.
*
The boy came to my place. I cooled him with moisturiser and ice packs and frozen peas, and fed him the insides of a loaf of bread, doughy like bleached white guts, which he chewed gravely before the off TV set. I threw the crust away hungrily.
*
The boy told me about his school and how it worked like a distant memory. In school all the boys burnt and life was to be forgotten. It was a top school.
*
We went to the park in an afternoon and threw a Frisbee, the boy unusual in his trunks, his charred skin like spoiled barbeque. Children cried in a circle about us, in a way that seemed involuntary, and the boy kept on throwing the Frisbee. He was very proficient.
*
It built up for many days before I kissed the boy. He was unresponsive at first, and throughout the kiss, but he didn’t try to stop me. When I went to touch his slight dick he slowly moved my hand away, but didn’t say anything. I tried to kiss him again, only this time he laughed and looked past me at the blank screen. It was late.
*
The boy emptied the fridge with a passion for milk. I didn’t mind. He seemed to bask in the electrical light that was activated by the opening door. It shone on his abs and his back and I drank water from a glass and watched him.
*
The boy couldn’t stop burning himself. It had started on the bridge, or maybe not. Maybe the bridge was the middle of something far bigger. He burnt my car, seats first, then my table, my soft furnishings, my house.
*
The boy was the culmination of a lifetime of promises.
*
The boy sang a heavenly silent song, the notes inconsequential to the point of epic. He was a master of the glamour of alternative lifestyles.
*
The boy exhibited adjacent characteristics.
*
The boy used the bathtub for his interior excavations, an odd habit but one I found reassuring. The bathroom smelt terrible, brown and full, but I still washed it out daily without complaint, the boy watching curiously from the kitchen door, his eyes a-glaze with clandestine examination.
*
The boy knew not the ways of the mattress, asleep instead on a loose carpet patch in the draft of the front door, itself warped by poor weather and bad construction, his eyes open like fish eyes in the dark.
*
He was gone when I woke up, nothing but a boy shaped mark left on the carpet. It wasn’t as if I needed the boy or knew him that well, but all the same I was crippled with the reality of myself, and cried at the thought of my ill-conceived memories, longing for the burnt browned hues of his flesh, the frailty of his imagined touch, the physical companionship of his mysterious genitalia.
*
I wonder where the boy is now.
*
Without the boy I was ash falling into the river, I was twisted hot metal, I was humanity engulfed in the spreading heat, I was children burning and hanging in their blank classrooms, I was man.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Havelock: the demise, the dementia, the end
Havelock’s third obsession, then, as touched upon already, was with coitus itself, an obsession of great pride for the man Pippin, and one which he validated, practised, exemplified, displayed and performed most publically and with a frequency and gusto more common in men a fraction of his age. Whilst the young Havelock – enraptured as he was with the sandwich laden sirens of my previous account, and the mystical curves and passageways that constructed their physical feminine form – was rapidly initiated in the ways of physical intercourse, it wasn’t until he was well into his 30s (and by then into the twentieth century) that his sexual compulsivity became increasingly prominent.
What began as a simple desire for the momentary physical pleasure of orgasm had become, by Havelock’s fortieth year (shortly before the birth of his first son), a recurrent engagement in extreme acts of lewd sex without control, consideration or the attempted reduction of said acts. His life became devoted to the obtaining of these deviant types of congress, the likes of which rapidly grew in severity and psychopathy as time progressed. Whilst a great many people may devote significant thought to fantasies and imaginings of a sexual nature, that same majority is equally able to do so in a realm separate from the reality of their day-to-day lives, and any genital depravity they might duly contemplate occurs within the comparative safety of the mind and does not infringe upon of the social order of their public lives. Havelock had no such ability for separation, and by the time Elizabeth Rose had fallen pregnant with the zygote that would grow into Christopher Havelock, his life had become, in effect, one long sexual encounter – be it in procuring, having, or recovering from intercourse of any type, and with anybody.
He did not live a double life, far from it. Elizabeth was well aware of his carnal pursuits, and Pippin made no attempt to hide them. One can only assume that, regardless of his mania, Havelock remained in every other sense a decent man and an exemplary husband, providing material and emotional support in the abundance required of him. It so happened that alongside his otherwise flawless approach to familial provision, Havelock was, he would say, “immersed entirely in the most powerful drug of all”.
To quote his writings:
“I am a man possessed, possessed by the need for sexual completion at any cost and without regard for any further circumstance. This is how I know I am addicted, as an opium addict is to his drug. Neither my wife, my public standing, my reputation, my estate – none of it matters in the light of a vagina, or an anus; indeed none of it matters in the transitory reality one sees at the point of orgasm. I freely admit that the very world might end around me, and if there was sex to be had I would be there with trousers down. I am a rational man, perhaps too rational, and it is this same rationality that can provide me with such a clear insight into my addiction. I well know that it could be considered a problem, but I simply do not care. My wife has become secondary to my sexual needs. Whilst I do feel a tenderness towards her, developed from a contended lifetime companionship which I have no desire to terminate, with the exception of the sandwich – that most masterful food, itself a composite orgasm for the taste buds – everything in life falls secondary to my pleasure. It is the very man I became.”
Pippin’s desires grew rapidly from normal explorative sexual relations with his wife on discovery of an old copy of The Arabian Nights, and the couple would contort themselves into bizarre positions of vaginal entry, to Elizabeth’s indifference and Havelock’s red-faced delight. As the addiction grew, however, Havelock found the rather conservative outlook of Elizabeth’s draconian preference somewhat tiresome, and he began a constant search for ever more dramatic forms of genital relief. This started with simple sodomy in the marital bed (which although he never says as much within his journals, I get the distinct impression was significantly less than consensual, Elizabeth herself of Christian mentality and already with child), but soon escalated out of the privacy of the homestead and into the taverns and brothels of Norwich city.
No accounts of Elizabeth’s were found amongst Havelock’s papers, and I find it difficult to imagine the complexity of her feeling about her husband’s gruesome infidelities.
“A fine woman she may be,” he wrote in June of 1927, “but her inherent inflexibility into positions of sexual transcendence and vaginal manipulation is not conducive to the explosive ejaculations to which I have become accustomed, or even demand of my sexual experiences.”
There is no doubt that Havelock was the talk of Norwich, as he engaged in his depraved sex across town with any willing participant, even earning himself the title Pippin de Sade, resultant from his penchant for buggery, and, latterly, of the incontinent specifically. In fact, his own “bugger the incontinent” becoming something of a catchphrase for the man, and an integral part of Norwich history (Brown Bugger Walk being one such example, one of the many historically vice filled streets where Havelock sought out the more dirty coitus he had grown to love).
In reference to his penchant for faecally charged anal intercourse, Pippin states:
“I can’t stop, and won’t stop. It is an urge I refuse to fight against, a natural urge, and I would fear myself if I were to cease such engagement,” he writes. “Let no man unfamiliar with the glory of the brown storm of sprayed liquid excrement raining with the force of the earth around their own rigid self possibly condemn the act. There is a very real beauty to it, an urgency, a unity with the essence of life.”
This sexual addiction lasted throughout many years of Havelock’s life, including the whole childhood of his two young children, yet never was a doubt cast in his mind – or, by all accounts, the minds of others – as to his devotion and suitability as a father. And why should it? He is adamant that, despite the ferocity of his sexual output, the security of his wife and children was never threatened, and he would simply never have allowed his actions to have had a directly adverse affect on their well being. Whilst like any other addict Havelock’s thoughts were ultimately aflame with his next dark encounter, he retained enough presence of mind to consider his family and his responsibilities to them, and to treat them with nothing but the love they deserved (often only minutes after orgasm elsewhere). Despite the moral questionability of his chosen lifestyle, the people of Norwich left him largely to his own devices, partly of out of politeness and partly out of a respect for the eccentricities that made him such a character and very much a product of Norfolk (in fact, Havelock has made several references in his writing to a locally published book of anecdotes and jokes relating to his varying addictions and manias, entitled “Havelock: Anecdotes and Risqué Humours of a Singularly Physical Man”. Unfortunately, there is neither a copy of the book or any reproduction of its pages within Havelock’s papers, and my research at the library here has so far yielded no results).
It was, however, his family that eventually brought other manias to the forefront of his mind, far more harmful than his sexual frequency. As I have already written at length, it was Christopher’s drowning in 1937 that irreversibly engulfed the man in the Mandrake delusions that would ultimately spell his downfall. In his grief at losing his eldest child, Havelock suffered a bout of impotence that would haunt him to his death. “Can I call myself a man any longer?” he asked. “The ugly flap of skin between my legs is truly the folly of the male. How pointless it has all been, this quest to bring it to attention. Without [Christopher], now, I am empty like the blood vessels inside it.” Despite trying to satisfy his urges voyeuristically, without the finality of orgasm Havelock no longer took the same blind pleasure from acts of the flesh, and not a vagina in the world could release him from the vice-like grip of Christopher’s death, and the Anatidaen subspecies he held so responsible for it.
Havelock’s own decline happened quite rapidly after his son’s death. Without intercourse as his incentive, he ceased the majority of his contact with the outside world, only leaving his estate to make observations pertaining to the Mandrake for his own analyses. Otherwise he remained locked within his study, producing page after page of rambling reports and hypotheses (which I will not even attempt to start publishing here, due to their massive length and largely nonsensical polemic).
Only three years after Christopher’s death, Havelock had decayed into the onset of dementia. Understandably, his writings seem to have dried up by this point, with very little output (or at least very little in my possession). The written silence is only broken by the last dated writings I have uncovered, from 1942 (despite the decline of his memory and general faculties), immediately following his arrest for the almost ritual slaughter of a mallard in Wensum Park, a revenge act five years in the making and, for police and doctors involved in Pippin’s case, exhibiting evidence of “irreparable psychiatric damage, resultant of dementia, and of danger to both himself and the public well being”.
Havelock wrote:
“From the haze my mind had become following the death of my beloved son, and following an end to the virility that first gave him his life, from this haze had awoken a beast of incredible clarity. I saw then that the only choice left to me was one of revenge. Where my rational pleas to our so-called men of science had failed, perhaps the irrationality of emotion would necessitate a reclassification of the natural order, in keeping with my Mandrake discoveries? My theory had run its course, and physical evidence was the final step in the legitimisation of the Mandrake as the monster it has become in our municipal gardens. I set out to trap a Mandrake, to keep it alive, as walking evidence of my claims, yet my emotion betrayed me. Entrenched in the passion of my history, the Mandrake was slain in the Norwich afternoon, and as its fragile neck gave way beneath my palms I felt the possibility of a dismissed mistake, but saw nothing beyond my awful tears.”
Pippin was found in Wensum Park wearing only a white shirt, covered in fresh blood. Around him were the misplaced feathers of the mallard he held, very much dead, in his hands, its neck clearly broken, one wing literally torn off, guts wrenched open. On the floor at Havelock’s feet were the mallard’s two legs, both only inches long (and not the ten or so feet Havelock claimed of the Mandrakes). There was blood around Havelock’s mouth, suggestive of his having gnawed at the duck in the chaos of the slaughter. Police reported having responded to a loud disturbance consistent with the cries of a very distressed duck from the park vicinity. On arrival they found Havelock at the scene as described. He was calm and did not resist arrest.
Found only to be stricken with the unspent grief of his long-dead son, and riddled with dementia, Havelock escaped a prison sentence and was instead sent – for convalescence (and public safety) – to Fletcher’s Convalescent Home in the nearby coastal town of Cromer. In truth, Havelock had no chance of convalescence, his dementia was at too advanced a stage for that, and at the time no treatments were available to slow the process. His transferral to Fletcher’s was really the result of the great affection that Norwich still felt for the man, and the desire it had as a city to avoid any stricter punishment for him.
The limited records I could find show that Havelock died, with Elizabeth and Frances at his side (although it is unlikely that he recognised them by that stage in his illness), on September 5th, 1947. It was his birthday. He was sixty years old.
*
For me, Havelock’s story represents something far greater than at first one might consider. In its way, it goes beyond the story of one man and becomes the story of a city, or of a county, or of mankind itself. I think there is a bit of us all in Havelock, and certainly a bit of Havelock in us all. He was great man, a man of passion and determination, a man of compulsions and manias and often skewed moralities, but really a good man, a man who loved his life and life itself, a man who loved Norwich. Havelock represents something wonderful about humanity, about the things we can achieve – or not – and about the incredible beauty of the functioning, sensory, human organism. I read his words and I feel that he is the culmination of something much bigger than himself, and no matter how outlandish his claims ever were they ring with a truth that is so rare today, a truth that comes from the sheer force of his own existence.
Within the pile of papers I acquired there are myriad other writings, including a rather Sadean and often quite tedious encyclopaedic account of hundreds of his sexual exploits, and many pages of journals and correspondence that – while quoting in some places or paraphrasing in others – I simply do not have the time or inclination to publish here.
Also amidst the documents was Pippin’s recipe for his purported “Ultimate Sandwich”, which he believed was the final logical conclusion to the sandwich puzzle to which he had devoted so much of his life, in short: construction of the perfect sandwich and its component parts. Based on two decades of trial and research, I thought the safest place for this recipe and its place in culinary infamy was within the archives of the Museum of Culinary History and Alimentation, in London. I did, of course, make the sandwich according to Havelock’s recipe, but it was really nothing special. I guess you had to be there.
Fletcher’s Convalescent Home stands derelict now, a fine building on the Cromer skyline, hidden behind a modern redbrick one-storey old person’s home called Benjamin Court, at the Cromer entrance to Roughton Road. I have been trying to arrange a tour of the abandoned premises, but have had no luck in contacting anyone so far. I have heard rumour that the last Manager of the home before its decommissioning lives locally to me now, and I will endeavour to track him down and try to find out more clues about the last months of Havelock, prior to his death.
It somehow feels like a terrible betrayal to come to the end of a story like this one. There are always more facts to uncover, more people to talk to, and despite the arduousness of my reading I don’t think I’m ready to let Havelock go. As long as the papers sit in my drawer I will be pulled into his world, of Mandrakes, of intercourse, of sandwiches, of belief. It’s as if I need to know, but I don’t yet know what.
I just can’t ignore the enigma of Charles Phillip Havelock, III.
What began as a simple desire for the momentary physical pleasure of orgasm had become, by Havelock’s fortieth year (shortly before the birth of his first son), a recurrent engagement in extreme acts of lewd sex without control, consideration or the attempted reduction of said acts. His life became devoted to the obtaining of these deviant types of congress, the likes of which rapidly grew in severity and psychopathy as time progressed. Whilst a great many people may devote significant thought to fantasies and imaginings of a sexual nature, that same majority is equally able to do so in a realm separate from the reality of their day-to-day lives, and any genital depravity they might duly contemplate occurs within the comparative safety of the mind and does not infringe upon of the social order of their public lives. Havelock had no such ability for separation, and by the time Elizabeth Rose had fallen pregnant with the zygote that would grow into Christopher Havelock, his life had become, in effect, one long sexual encounter – be it in procuring, having, or recovering from intercourse of any type, and with anybody.
He did not live a double life, far from it. Elizabeth was well aware of his carnal pursuits, and Pippin made no attempt to hide them. One can only assume that, regardless of his mania, Havelock remained in every other sense a decent man and an exemplary husband, providing material and emotional support in the abundance required of him. It so happened that alongside his otherwise flawless approach to familial provision, Havelock was, he would say, “immersed entirely in the most powerful drug of all”.
To quote his writings:
“I am a man possessed, possessed by the need for sexual completion at any cost and without regard for any further circumstance. This is how I know I am addicted, as an opium addict is to his drug. Neither my wife, my public standing, my reputation, my estate – none of it matters in the light of a vagina, or an anus; indeed none of it matters in the transitory reality one sees at the point of orgasm. I freely admit that the very world might end around me, and if there was sex to be had I would be there with trousers down. I am a rational man, perhaps too rational, and it is this same rationality that can provide me with such a clear insight into my addiction. I well know that it could be considered a problem, but I simply do not care. My wife has become secondary to my sexual needs. Whilst I do feel a tenderness towards her, developed from a contended lifetime companionship which I have no desire to terminate, with the exception of the sandwich – that most masterful food, itself a composite orgasm for the taste buds – everything in life falls secondary to my pleasure. It is the very man I became.”
Pippin’s desires grew rapidly from normal explorative sexual relations with his wife on discovery of an old copy of The Arabian Nights, and the couple would contort themselves into bizarre positions of vaginal entry, to Elizabeth’s indifference and Havelock’s red-faced delight. As the addiction grew, however, Havelock found the rather conservative outlook of Elizabeth’s draconian preference somewhat tiresome, and he began a constant search for ever more dramatic forms of genital relief. This started with simple sodomy in the marital bed (which although he never says as much within his journals, I get the distinct impression was significantly less than consensual, Elizabeth herself of Christian mentality and already with child), but soon escalated out of the privacy of the homestead and into the taverns and brothels of Norwich city.
No accounts of Elizabeth’s were found amongst Havelock’s papers, and I find it difficult to imagine the complexity of her feeling about her husband’s gruesome infidelities.
“A fine woman she may be,” he wrote in June of 1927, “but her inherent inflexibility into positions of sexual transcendence and vaginal manipulation is not conducive to the explosive ejaculations to which I have become accustomed, or even demand of my sexual experiences.”
There is no doubt that Havelock was the talk of Norwich, as he engaged in his depraved sex across town with any willing participant, even earning himself the title Pippin de Sade, resultant from his penchant for buggery, and, latterly, of the incontinent specifically. In fact, his own “bugger the incontinent” becoming something of a catchphrase for the man, and an integral part of Norwich history (Brown Bugger Walk being one such example, one of the many historically vice filled streets where Havelock sought out the more dirty coitus he had grown to love).
In reference to his penchant for faecally charged anal intercourse, Pippin states:
“I can’t stop, and won’t stop. It is an urge I refuse to fight against, a natural urge, and I would fear myself if I were to cease such engagement,” he writes. “Let no man unfamiliar with the glory of the brown storm of sprayed liquid excrement raining with the force of the earth around their own rigid self possibly condemn the act. There is a very real beauty to it, an urgency, a unity with the essence of life.”
This sexual addiction lasted throughout many years of Havelock’s life, including the whole childhood of his two young children, yet never was a doubt cast in his mind – or, by all accounts, the minds of others – as to his devotion and suitability as a father. And why should it? He is adamant that, despite the ferocity of his sexual output, the security of his wife and children was never threatened, and he would simply never have allowed his actions to have had a directly adverse affect on their well being. Whilst like any other addict Havelock’s thoughts were ultimately aflame with his next dark encounter, he retained enough presence of mind to consider his family and his responsibilities to them, and to treat them with nothing but the love they deserved (often only minutes after orgasm elsewhere). Despite the moral questionability of his chosen lifestyle, the people of Norwich left him largely to his own devices, partly of out of politeness and partly out of a respect for the eccentricities that made him such a character and very much a product of Norfolk (in fact, Havelock has made several references in his writing to a locally published book of anecdotes and jokes relating to his varying addictions and manias, entitled “Havelock: Anecdotes and Risqué Humours of a Singularly Physical Man”. Unfortunately, there is neither a copy of the book or any reproduction of its pages within Havelock’s papers, and my research at the library here has so far yielded no results).
It was, however, his family that eventually brought other manias to the forefront of his mind, far more harmful than his sexual frequency. As I have already written at length, it was Christopher’s drowning in 1937 that irreversibly engulfed the man in the Mandrake delusions that would ultimately spell his downfall. In his grief at losing his eldest child, Havelock suffered a bout of impotence that would haunt him to his death. “Can I call myself a man any longer?” he asked. “The ugly flap of skin between my legs is truly the folly of the male. How pointless it has all been, this quest to bring it to attention. Without [Christopher], now, I am empty like the blood vessels inside it.” Despite trying to satisfy his urges voyeuristically, without the finality of orgasm Havelock no longer took the same blind pleasure from acts of the flesh, and not a vagina in the world could release him from the vice-like grip of Christopher’s death, and the Anatidaen subspecies he held so responsible for it.
Havelock’s own decline happened quite rapidly after his son’s death. Without intercourse as his incentive, he ceased the majority of his contact with the outside world, only leaving his estate to make observations pertaining to the Mandrake for his own analyses. Otherwise he remained locked within his study, producing page after page of rambling reports and hypotheses (which I will not even attempt to start publishing here, due to their massive length and largely nonsensical polemic).
Only three years after Christopher’s death, Havelock had decayed into the onset of dementia. Understandably, his writings seem to have dried up by this point, with very little output (or at least very little in my possession). The written silence is only broken by the last dated writings I have uncovered, from 1942 (despite the decline of his memory and general faculties), immediately following his arrest for the almost ritual slaughter of a mallard in Wensum Park, a revenge act five years in the making and, for police and doctors involved in Pippin’s case, exhibiting evidence of “irreparable psychiatric damage, resultant of dementia, and of danger to both himself and the public well being”.
Havelock wrote:
“From the haze my mind had become following the death of my beloved son, and following an end to the virility that first gave him his life, from this haze had awoken a beast of incredible clarity. I saw then that the only choice left to me was one of revenge. Where my rational pleas to our so-called men of science had failed, perhaps the irrationality of emotion would necessitate a reclassification of the natural order, in keeping with my Mandrake discoveries? My theory had run its course, and physical evidence was the final step in the legitimisation of the Mandrake as the monster it has become in our municipal gardens. I set out to trap a Mandrake, to keep it alive, as walking evidence of my claims, yet my emotion betrayed me. Entrenched in the passion of my history, the Mandrake was slain in the Norwich afternoon, and as its fragile neck gave way beneath my palms I felt the possibility of a dismissed mistake, but saw nothing beyond my awful tears.”
Pippin was found in Wensum Park wearing only a white shirt, covered in fresh blood. Around him were the misplaced feathers of the mallard he held, very much dead, in his hands, its neck clearly broken, one wing literally torn off, guts wrenched open. On the floor at Havelock’s feet were the mallard’s two legs, both only inches long (and not the ten or so feet Havelock claimed of the Mandrakes). There was blood around Havelock’s mouth, suggestive of his having gnawed at the duck in the chaos of the slaughter. Police reported having responded to a loud disturbance consistent with the cries of a very distressed duck from the park vicinity. On arrival they found Havelock at the scene as described. He was calm and did not resist arrest.
Found only to be stricken with the unspent grief of his long-dead son, and riddled with dementia, Havelock escaped a prison sentence and was instead sent – for convalescence (and public safety) – to Fletcher’s Convalescent Home in the nearby coastal town of Cromer. In truth, Havelock had no chance of convalescence, his dementia was at too advanced a stage for that, and at the time no treatments were available to slow the process. His transferral to Fletcher’s was really the result of the great affection that Norwich still felt for the man, and the desire it had as a city to avoid any stricter punishment for him.
The limited records I could find show that Havelock died, with Elizabeth and Frances at his side (although it is unlikely that he recognised them by that stage in his illness), on September 5th, 1947. It was his birthday. He was sixty years old.
*
For me, Havelock’s story represents something far greater than at first one might consider. In its way, it goes beyond the story of one man and becomes the story of a city, or of a county, or of mankind itself. I think there is a bit of us all in Havelock, and certainly a bit of Havelock in us all. He was great man, a man of passion and determination, a man of compulsions and manias and often skewed moralities, but really a good man, a man who loved his life and life itself, a man who loved Norwich. Havelock represents something wonderful about humanity, about the things we can achieve – or not – and about the incredible beauty of the functioning, sensory, human organism. I read his words and I feel that he is the culmination of something much bigger than himself, and no matter how outlandish his claims ever were they ring with a truth that is so rare today, a truth that comes from the sheer force of his own existence.
Within the pile of papers I acquired there are myriad other writings, including a rather Sadean and often quite tedious encyclopaedic account of hundreds of his sexual exploits, and many pages of journals and correspondence that – while quoting in some places or paraphrasing in others – I simply do not have the time or inclination to publish here.
Also amidst the documents was Pippin’s recipe for his purported “Ultimate Sandwich”, which he believed was the final logical conclusion to the sandwich puzzle to which he had devoted so much of his life, in short: construction of the perfect sandwich and its component parts. Based on two decades of trial and research, I thought the safest place for this recipe and its place in culinary infamy was within the archives of the Museum of Culinary History and Alimentation, in London. I did, of course, make the sandwich according to Havelock’s recipe, but it was really nothing special. I guess you had to be there.
Fletcher’s Convalescent Home stands derelict now, a fine building on the Cromer skyline, hidden behind a modern redbrick one-storey old person’s home called Benjamin Court, at the Cromer entrance to Roughton Road. I have been trying to arrange a tour of the abandoned premises, but have had no luck in contacting anyone so far. I have heard rumour that the last Manager of the home before its decommissioning lives locally to me now, and I will endeavour to track him down and try to find out more clues about the last months of Havelock, prior to his death.
It somehow feels like a terrible betrayal to come to the end of a story like this one. There are always more facts to uncover, more people to talk to, and despite the arduousness of my reading I don’t think I’m ready to let Havelock go. As long as the papers sit in my drawer I will be pulled into his world, of Mandrakes, of intercourse, of sandwiches, of belief. It’s as if I need to know, but I don’t yet know what.
I just can’t ignore the enigma of Charles Phillip Havelock, III.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Havelock: on sandwiches
Another of Havelock’s obsessions that so plagued him throughout his life was the sandwich, that masterful construction of, at its simplest, two slices of leavened bread containing within the perimeters of its doughy surfaces a filling, commonly comprising a meat or cheese product as its working base, although the myriad possibilities for gastronomic development on this most simplistic blueprint of convention (comprising condiments, salad articles etc.) were what became a matter of extensive contemplation for our hero, one Charles Phillip Havelock III – Pippin to friends and nemeses alike.
The obsession began in childhood, when the young Pippin accompanied his father to one of their many local taverns (of which Norwich has always had something of a plethora) for a night of gambling and drinking with some family associates. Largely uninterested in the proceedings of the men, the eleven year old Pippin was more intrigued by the [in his own words] “ladies of the night, who careened about the premises in all of their painted finery, the flesh of their breasts moved with tantalising waves so apparently directly to an inexperienced lad such as myself, and I blushed with an erection of such ferocity that even cold water could not dislodge it from its prominence within the fabric of my trouser.”
He goes on: “As they moved about the room, with their feminine ejaculations of sonorous laughter and their shapely volumes, their heavenly posteriors like the spheres themselves, I felt the spirit awaken within me, as though a candle had been struck alight in the very depths of my human soul. It was a candle that would burn strong and bright for the whole of my life, and that only the most delicate flower of the female form might ever satisfy, enshrouding me in the moisture – like morning dew – of its scarlet folds. How many times I took my leave to the lavatory that night, refuting the angels whom so pulsed their energies through the length of my stiffness, expelling my silk into the liberty of the free world!”
It was these same ‘ladies of the night’ – although whether he is referring to prostitutes or simply to the tavern barmaids is unclear, and Havelock himself seldom makes a distinction between the two professions throughout the entirety of his life’s writings – who, during the course of the evening brought a plate laden with sandwiches to the table of the gambling men, as was often the case amongst hungry drinkers demanding effectively self-contained food of convenience and efficiency.
This bountiful plate had a further profound and lasting effect on the man Pippin, often swamped by the little things, who had this to say of his first sandwich, eaten with devastating gusto amidst the belching of gentlemen in the Norwich tavern that night:
“And so drained by my independent carnal sins of the evening, there I saw it in approach, before the full ripe breasts of a nubile maid that so inflamed my already beaten loins, the plate of sandwiches. And my how I gasped, in mixed horror and delight, at the sheer scale of the sight I had never before seen. This was my first trip to the tavern, and never before in my personal life had the sandwich entered my consciousness, but now that it had – and before I took even my first bite of the delicious foodstuff – I knew that it would never again leave it, for it is truly a masterpiece of culinary design, a wonder of intelligence and creation that only the finery of man could conceive. Simple, yet with the capacity for an incredible brilliance impossible in the lesser food forms. The night had made a man of me at last!”
As Havelock took his first bite into the freshly prepared sandwiches – off-white bread with thick slices of gammon, smeared with an unspecified fat spread and local Colman’s mustard – on which his elder companions gorged themselves without hesitation, appreciation or decorum, he underwent something close to epiphany.
“I swooned,” he wrote later, “devastated to near unconsciousness by the deliciousness of the interweaving flavours, the magnificence of textures, the unadulterated play of the imagination at work within the food. It was something so [...] very subtle in its construction that I at once had little doubt about its power. With eyes clasped shut I swallowed, chewed and chewed and swallowed again, myself swallowed into the marvellous potential of the food I had consumed. I felt tears of joy streaming down my cheeks as I ran from the table, upsetting the cards of my father’s gamble, and shouted with the delights of one possessed by the holy ghost, much to the amusement of the gathered ladies. As they pulled me sobbing into the sanctity of their bosom, and I wept delighted in the natural perfume of their bodies, I took my final bite of the food and, immersed deep in the beauty of sex and sandwich, I let fly my seed once more into the very trousers I stood up in, without shame, without horror, with nothing but love for the world and its ways, for the one pure truth of the sandwich!”
Here then began a love affair between man, leavened bakery product and suitability formulated fillings devised in concordance with an appropriate interplay of flavour combinations. In many places throughout his notes, Pippin makes recurring reference to his own ‘epic’ poem, “The Day of the Sandwich”, a vast text which evolved consistently into a sprawling linguistic existence parallel to and alongside Havelock’s own life. Commencing that very night of revelation, in 1898, Havelock’s writing of the poem continued as an ongoing project throughout much of his life, a constantly updated record of the passion he felt towards the sandwich (although it would eventually fall by the wayside as the magnitude of his Mandrake obsession claimed the acuity of his reason). The poem grew with him and lived with him, almost taking on a life of its own for Havelock, who refers to it very much as a person, a sentient being of its own action.
Alas, despite a conservative estimate of the poems length to be within the region of three thousand pages (of varying size and quality), very little of the poem exists today, or rather very little has fallen into my possession. Throughout the entire case of Havelock’s papers which I have acquired, I could find only a handful of tatty excerpts, each page numbered but in no corresponding order with the last, and each exhibiting a large area which has apparently been torn from its bottom. The sentiment of the piece, however, loses none of its potency in its alienation from the unabridged – near mythical – whole, which may well never be appreciated in the length of its almost gratuitous entirety. It is, at the very least, an ode, a pledge of love and the deepest, most profound affection, a heartfelt statement of the very physical lust that one man feels for his food.
I reproduce here the first excerpt of the poem (best described, I suppose, as free verse) “The Day of the Sandwich”, by one Charles Phillip Havelock III:
“I spoke – at length – to a baker friend of mine
he who had told me of his ‘special batch’
and winked as the words formed from his thick Semitic lips
his beigel-scented fingers adept in the arts of dough
“Supposing,” says I, “I want a loaf of this” –
and I whispered – “Special batch?”
A conversation swamped in gestures.
He writes an almost illegible time on the smallest scrap of paper
and a place beneath it. “There,” he says
“Come alone and don’t be late”
A fair request, authoritative – meaningfully so.
The deal struck
a deal among gentlemen
of liaisons in the dark, of bakery passions, of petty cash.
It occurred without complication or error
I an hour early and he an hour late
the bread still warm between my fingertips
he wept in the few streaks of light that broke in
through the boarded former windows
like a parent kissing their first-born goodbye
pawing his eyes dry with a floury hand.
He smelt reassuring in his gingham trousers
and neither of us spoke, not a word
*
At this point the page is torn.
The obsession began in childhood, when the young Pippin accompanied his father to one of their many local taverns (of which Norwich has always had something of a plethora) for a night of gambling and drinking with some family associates. Largely uninterested in the proceedings of the men, the eleven year old Pippin was more intrigued by the [in his own words] “ladies of the night, who careened about the premises in all of their painted finery, the flesh of their breasts moved with tantalising waves so apparently directly to an inexperienced lad such as myself, and I blushed with an erection of such ferocity that even cold water could not dislodge it from its prominence within the fabric of my trouser.”
He goes on: “As they moved about the room, with their feminine ejaculations of sonorous laughter and their shapely volumes, their heavenly posteriors like the spheres themselves, I felt the spirit awaken within me, as though a candle had been struck alight in the very depths of my human soul. It was a candle that would burn strong and bright for the whole of my life, and that only the most delicate flower of the female form might ever satisfy, enshrouding me in the moisture – like morning dew – of its scarlet folds. How many times I took my leave to the lavatory that night, refuting the angels whom so pulsed their energies through the length of my stiffness, expelling my silk into the liberty of the free world!”
It was these same ‘ladies of the night’ – although whether he is referring to prostitutes or simply to the tavern barmaids is unclear, and Havelock himself seldom makes a distinction between the two professions throughout the entirety of his life’s writings – who, during the course of the evening brought a plate laden with sandwiches to the table of the gambling men, as was often the case amongst hungry drinkers demanding effectively self-contained food of convenience and efficiency.
This bountiful plate had a further profound and lasting effect on the man Pippin, often swamped by the little things, who had this to say of his first sandwich, eaten with devastating gusto amidst the belching of gentlemen in the Norwich tavern that night:
“And so drained by my independent carnal sins of the evening, there I saw it in approach, before the full ripe breasts of a nubile maid that so inflamed my already beaten loins, the plate of sandwiches. And my how I gasped, in mixed horror and delight, at the sheer scale of the sight I had never before seen. This was my first trip to the tavern, and never before in my personal life had the sandwich entered my consciousness, but now that it had – and before I took even my first bite of the delicious foodstuff – I knew that it would never again leave it, for it is truly a masterpiece of culinary design, a wonder of intelligence and creation that only the finery of man could conceive. Simple, yet with the capacity for an incredible brilliance impossible in the lesser food forms. The night had made a man of me at last!”
As Havelock took his first bite into the freshly prepared sandwiches – off-white bread with thick slices of gammon, smeared with an unspecified fat spread and local Colman’s mustard – on which his elder companions gorged themselves without hesitation, appreciation or decorum, he underwent something close to epiphany.
“I swooned,” he wrote later, “devastated to near unconsciousness by the deliciousness of the interweaving flavours, the magnificence of textures, the unadulterated play of the imagination at work within the food. It was something so [...] very subtle in its construction that I at once had little doubt about its power. With eyes clasped shut I swallowed, chewed and chewed and swallowed again, myself swallowed into the marvellous potential of the food I had consumed. I felt tears of joy streaming down my cheeks as I ran from the table, upsetting the cards of my father’s gamble, and shouted with the delights of one possessed by the holy ghost, much to the amusement of the gathered ladies. As they pulled me sobbing into the sanctity of their bosom, and I wept delighted in the natural perfume of their bodies, I took my final bite of the food and, immersed deep in the beauty of sex and sandwich, I let fly my seed once more into the very trousers I stood up in, without shame, without horror, with nothing but love for the world and its ways, for the one pure truth of the sandwich!”
Here then began a love affair between man, leavened bakery product and suitability formulated fillings devised in concordance with an appropriate interplay of flavour combinations. In many places throughout his notes, Pippin makes recurring reference to his own ‘epic’ poem, “The Day of the Sandwich”, a vast text which evolved consistently into a sprawling linguistic existence parallel to and alongside Havelock’s own life. Commencing that very night of revelation, in 1898, Havelock’s writing of the poem continued as an ongoing project throughout much of his life, a constantly updated record of the passion he felt towards the sandwich (although it would eventually fall by the wayside as the magnitude of his Mandrake obsession claimed the acuity of his reason). The poem grew with him and lived with him, almost taking on a life of its own for Havelock, who refers to it very much as a person, a sentient being of its own action.
Alas, despite a conservative estimate of the poems length to be within the region of three thousand pages (of varying size and quality), very little of the poem exists today, or rather very little has fallen into my possession. Throughout the entire case of Havelock’s papers which I have acquired, I could find only a handful of tatty excerpts, each page numbered but in no corresponding order with the last, and each exhibiting a large area which has apparently been torn from its bottom. The sentiment of the piece, however, loses none of its potency in its alienation from the unabridged – near mythical – whole, which may well never be appreciated in the length of its almost gratuitous entirety. It is, at the very least, an ode, a pledge of love and the deepest, most profound affection, a heartfelt statement of the very physical lust that one man feels for his food.
I reproduce here the first excerpt of the poem (best described, I suppose, as free verse) “The Day of the Sandwich”, by one Charles Phillip Havelock III:
“I spoke – at length – to a baker friend of mine
he who had told me of his ‘special batch’
and winked as the words formed from his thick Semitic lips
his beigel-scented fingers adept in the arts of dough
“Supposing,” says I, “I want a loaf of this” –
and I whispered – “Special batch?”
A conversation swamped in gestures.
He writes an almost illegible time on the smallest scrap of paper
and a place beneath it. “There,” he says
“Come alone and don’t be late”
A fair request, authoritative – meaningfully so.
The deal struck
a deal among gentlemen
of liaisons in the dark, of bakery passions, of petty cash.
It occurred without complication or error
I an hour early and he an hour late
the bread still warm between my fingertips
he wept in the few streaks of light that broke in
through the boarded former windows
like a parent kissing their first-born goodbye
pawing his eyes dry with a floury hand.
He smelt reassuring in his gingham trousers
and neither of us spoke, not a word
*
At this point the page is torn.
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Havelock: Desperate Fraud or Tortured Genius?
“The day my son was born I wept like a woman. The day my daughter followed him I sang like a gentleman. O my children! Scourge of the bedtime, wonder of the known universe! I love you, I love you, I love you!”
Charles Phillip Havelock III, writing in 1935
More, Havelock, more!
The more I read of his ramblings on the Mandrake, the further the depths of his instability seem to sink. Tucked amongst other papers – from his youthful ‘sandwich’ years, which I shall discuss further at another time – I found some almost devastating texts which shed much new light on his apparently methodical examining of the Mandrake phenomenon he claims to have observed in the waters of Norwich.
Firstly, much to my surprise and despite his well-documented sexual promiscuities and the unusual nature of his near lifelong manias, Havelock was married, to Mrs Elizabeth Rose Havelock (née Habberton). Also born in Norwich but in 1899, she married Pippin in 1922, aged just 23 to his 35. By many accounts a nervous woman, Mrs Havelock nonetheless formed the constant backbone of stability, constancy and support necessary to keep her increasingly obsessive husband rational for as long as he was. Whilst developing into a state of ultimate lovelessness, their marriage did remain a tender companionship throughout all of Havelock’s life, and still provided him with a – slightly routine if uncomplaining – sexual outlet up until his death.
Secondly, he had two children of names Christopher and Frances. A gap of two years separated the children’s births (Christopher in 1928, Frances in 1930).
However, it is around the children that the seed of doubt is irrevocably cast upon Havelock’s Mandrake suppositions. As documented in his own personal records, Christopher died a tragic death at the age of 9, drowning in Havelock’s beloved Wensum Park. Whilst Pippin and Lizzie, as she liked to be known, played idly with the young Fran on the landscaped grasses of that attractive park, Christopher had himself apparently initiated his own waterside recreation. The details following are unclear from Havelock’s notes, and a lack of witnesses corroboration made complete piecing together of the fatal circumstances incredibly difficult, but Pippin was alerted to disaster by the screams of a passing woman, who saw “arms, arms it was, struggling against the motion of the water”. Instantly mobile, Pippin was at water’s edge within a second, but was already too late to save his eldest child, who lay face down and still in the mighty Wensum.
In his [Havelock’s] own words:
“There I saw him, my Christopher, and I knew he had passed on, on and away from this earth. In desperation I flung myself – against my better judgement, considering the numbers of Mandrake congregated a mere stone’s throw from where I stood – into the current, as if challenging the river to take me in his place, somehow forcing it to submit to my will, but to no avail. My son was dead. Engulfed more in sadness than in the river, I clutched with one hand to my son’s dear delicate coat, and swam to shore, where with public assistance I pulled his lifeless body back to land, collapsing helplessly at his side, swooning in the ferocity of growing crowd of public interest. It was then I first noticed them – the beak wounds, the work of the devil himself. A new clarity dawned. This was not an accident but murder, vicious and unprovoked.”
In his grief, Havelock had convinced himself that Christopher’s terrible death was the result not of misfortune but of deliberate attack on the part of the Mandrakes (to which he had been devoting significant personal study and report for at least the decade preceding the death). Indeed, where others saw the slightest abrasions, probably from the child’s short struggle against the random debris of the river, Havelock saw wounds suggestive of a beak-led violence through his Mandrake-tinted spectacles.
For me – in the cold light of the twenty-first century, and admittedly with hindsight and distance from this tragic occurrence – the specifics of this event in Havelock’s domestic life are particularly troubling to the possible veracity of his claims relating the Mandrakes purported existence. In fact, following his son’s death, what seemed to start off as a rigorous method intent on proving the existence of these creatures soon became a very personal and largely irrational conviction that his son was the victim of a vicious attack by these – still zoologically unrecognised – animals, and that the same posed an immense threat to the future stability and public safety of humankind. It was the death of his son that had really, understandably, consumed him; Havelock then proceeded to construct his own reason for it in the only way that made sense to him, the only way in which he could alleviate the guilt he himself felt for his momentary lack of parental supervision. Devoured by grief, Havelock fuelled his own Mandrake fantasy until, for him, it was inseparable from truth. Although Christopher’s death was, by all accounts, an accident, Pippin needed to absolve himself from the responsibility he felt, and the best way he had of so doing was in having a sentient agent to whom blame can be extended in his place. In short, his Mandrakes.
The day of Christopher’s death, 25th April 1937, really signified the loss of Havelock’s already tenuous grip on sanity, and ultimately pushed him over the metaphorical edge.
What I find saddening about Pippin’s story is that, despite the outlandishness of some of his scientific ideas, he argued for them with such conviction and respect that it couldn’t help but give them credence. His self-assuredness and self-confessed devotion to “the observable naturalistic phenomena of Norfolk’s parks, public spaces and hinterlands” seemed to suggest a very real authenticity to his hypotheses, one led by scientific method and not some personal faith. And yet his previous writings – all unpublished until now, of course – were very much dismissed by an already dubious scientific community following Christopher’s death and Havelock’s new growing preoccupation with strategy, planned attack and conflict (rather than observation, record and further observation). His decade of thought, committed to the Mandrake phenomena and in constant struggle to garner the scientific attention and due, recognisable study the evolutionary anomaly deserved, had been rendered meaningless by the desperation that any parent must feel on losing their child, but that pushed Havelock into illogical, emotive suppositions.
In truth, the scientists of the time had no doubt been waiting for an opportunity to put Havelock ‘back in his place’, and they leapt at the chance to posit the idea that he was, in fact, an understandably grieving man of more than unsound mind, and not the best representative of the natural sciences that one would require to verify the Mandrakes existence. As long as no other reported sightings of Mandrakes had been reported (none had) they thought it prudent to dismiss his lengthy reports as the folly of a man broken by the loss of a son. They did not so much dismiss the reports as turn Havelock into a figure of national public ridicule, the insult which drove him, on top of his mental instability, to a state of complete reclusiveness.
His wife, too, was a broken woman, losing far more than a child on that dreadful day under Norwich skies. Her husband sacrificed the very essence of himself to the severity of his own beliefs, and was never the same man again (Havelock was eventually ridden with debilitating dementia, but I shall examine this further later).
Of course, there is still the chance that Havelock was right. It is all too easy to dismiss his hypothesis as the work of melancholy, influenced not by observable fact but by a desperation for answers, for reason in the most unreasonable of tragedies. In his work of 1970, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Thomas Kuhn examines the parallels between myth and science, stating:
“If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sort of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge. If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today.”
Like myth, science is created as a narrative within a particular paradigm, and its only claim to verifiable truth lies within the fact that it has not been disproved. Yet. Science is built upon the understanding that things can – and will – be disproved with further research and knowledge. Kuhn continues: “Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none. New and unsuspected phenomena are, however, repeatedly uncovered.” For Kuhn, an anomaly to which does not fit into the established paradigm will be often be discovered, and that paradigm will have to be reassessed to incorporate this new information.
Truth is fragile.
It is difficult to fairly assess Havelock’s many treaties on the Mandrake so far out of the context in which he wrote them. In fact, it is all-too-easy to dismiss them as the ravings of a madman, supported by no meaningful evidence save the passionate beliefs of that singular individual so intent on a kind of intellectual justice for his own child. However, one thing that science has proved many times – since Copernicus and onwards – is that truth is not absolute, and that truth for one generation may be the ridicule for another. Science is forever waiting a revolution of knowledge. Such theories of Mandrakes may be beyond our comprehension and beyond the field of our personal experience, but are they so far from the possible as to render them worthless?
For myself, and for Havelock, the answer is no. I will admit to feeling slightly violated by the historical facts of his familial loss, knowing as I do of the enhanced paranoia of the man following his son’s early demise, but the evidence I have read has been too great to ignore. If nothing else it merits further investigation, something the figureheads of the zoological world refused to grant the so-called madman during his life.
Charles Phillip Havelock III, writing in 1935
More, Havelock, more!
The more I read of his ramblings on the Mandrake, the further the depths of his instability seem to sink. Tucked amongst other papers – from his youthful ‘sandwich’ years, which I shall discuss further at another time – I found some almost devastating texts which shed much new light on his apparently methodical examining of the Mandrake phenomenon he claims to have observed in the waters of Norwich.
Firstly, much to my surprise and despite his well-documented sexual promiscuities and the unusual nature of his near lifelong manias, Havelock was married, to Mrs Elizabeth Rose Havelock (née Habberton). Also born in Norwich but in 1899, she married Pippin in 1922, aged just 23 to his 35. By many accounts a nervous woman, Mrs Havelock nonetheless formed the constant backbone of stability, constancy and support necessary to keep her increasingly obsessive husband rational for as long as he was. Whilst developing into a state of ultimate lovelessness, their marriage did remain a tender companionship throughout all of Havelock’s life, and still provided him with a – slightly routine if uncomplaining – sexual outlet up until his death.
Secondly, he had two children of names Christopher and Frances. A gap of two years separated the children’s births (Christopher in 1928, Frances in 1930).
However, it is around the children that the seed of doubt is irrevocably cast upon Havelock’s Mandrake suppositions. As documented in his own personal records, Christopher died a tragic death at the age of 9, drowning in Havelock’s beloved Wensum Park. Whilst Pippin and Lizzie, as she liked to be known, played idly with the young Fran on the landscaped grasses of that attractive park, Christopher had himself apparently initiated his own waterside recreation. The details following are unclear from Havelock’s notes, and a lack of witnesses corroboration made complete piecing together of the fatal circumstances incredibly difficult, but Pippin was alerted to disaster by the screams of a passing woman, who saw “arms, arms it was, struggling against the motion of the water”. Instantly mobile, Pippin was at water’s edge within a second, but was already too late to save his eldest child, who lay face down and still in the mighty Wensum.
In his [Havelock’s] own words:
“There I saw him, my Christopher, and I knew he had passed on, on and away from this earth. In desperation I flung myself – against my better judgement, considering the numbers of Mandrake congregated a mere stone’s throw from where I stood – into the current, as if challenging the river to take me in his place, somehow forcing it to submit to my will, but to no avail. My son was dead. Engulfed more in sadness than in the river, I clutched with one hand to my son’s dear delicate coat, and swam to shore, where with public assistance I pulled his lifeless body back to land, collapsing helplessly at his side, swooning in the ferocity of growing crowd of public interest. It was then I first noticed them – the beak wounds, the work of the devil himself. A new clarity dawned. This was not an accident but murder, vicious and unprovoked.”
In his grief, Havelock had convinced himself that Christopher’s terrible death was the result not of misfortune but of deliberate attack on the part of the Mandrakes (to which he had been devoting significant personal study and report for at least the decade preceding the death). Indeed, where others saw the slightest abrasions, probably from the child’s short struggle against the random debris of the river, Havelock saw wounds suggestive of a beak-led violence through his Mandrake-tinted spectacles.
For me – in the cold light of the twenty-first century, and admittedly with hindsight and distance from this tragic occurrence – the specifics of this event in Havelock’s domestic life are particularly troubling to the possible veracity of his claims relating the Mandrakes purported existence. In fact, following his son’s death, what seemed to start off as a rigorous method intent on proving the existence of these creatures soon became a very personal and largely irrational conviction that his son was the victim of a vicious attack by these – still zoologically unrecognised – animals, and that the same posed an immense threat to the future stability and public safety of humankind. It was the death of his son that had really, understandably, consumed him; Havelock then proceeded to construct his own reason for it in the only way that made sense to him, the only way in which he could alleviate the guilt he himself felt for his momentary lack of parental supervision. Devoured by grief, Havelock fuelled his own Mandrake fantasy until, for him, it was inseparable from truth. Although Christopher’s death was, by all accounts, an accident, Pippin needed to absolve himself from the responsibility he felt, and the best way he had of so doing was in having a sentient agent to whom blame can be extended in his place. In short, his Mandrakes.
The day of Christopher’s death, 25th April 1937, really signified the loss of Havelock’s already tenuous grip on sanity, and ultimately pushed him over the metaphorical edge.
What I find saddening about Pippin’s story is that, despite the outlandishness of some of his scientific ideas, he argued for them with such conviction and respect that it couldn’t help but give them credence. His self-assuredness and self-confessed devotion to “the observable naturalistic phenomena of Norfolk’s parks, public spaces and hinterlands” seemed to suggest a very real authenticity to his hypotheses, one led by scientific method and not some personal faith. And yet his previous writings – all unpublished until now, of course – were very much dismissed by an already dubious scientific community following Christopher’s death and Havelock’s new growing preoccupation with strategy, planned attack and conflict (rather than observation, record and further observation). His decade of thought, committed to the Mandrake phenomena and in constant struggle to garner the scientific attention and due, recognisable study the evolutionary anomaly deserved, had been rendered meaningless by the desperation that any parent must feel on losing their child, but that pushed Havelock into illogical, emotive suppositions.
In truth, the scientists of the time had no doubt been waiting for an opportunity to put Havelock ‘back in his place’, and they leapt at the chance to posit the idea that he was, in fact, an understandably grieving man of more than unsound mind, and not the best representative of the natural sciences that one would require to verify the Mandrakes existence. As long as no other reported sightings of Mandrakes had been reported (none had) they thought it prudent to dismiss his lengthy reports as the folly of a man broken by the loss of a son. They did not so much dismiss the reports as turn Havelock into a figure of national public ridicule, the insult which drove him, on top of his mental instability, to a state of complete reclusiveness.
His wife, too, was a broken woman, losing far more than a child on that dreadful day under Norwich skies. Her husband sacrificed the very essence of himself to the severity of his own beliefs, and was never the same man again (Havelock was eventually ridden with debilitating dementia, but I shall examine this further later).
Of course, there is still the chance that Havelock was right. It is all too easy to dismiss his hypothesis as the work of melancholy, influenced not by observable fact but by a desperation for answers, for reason in the most unreasonable of tragedies. In his work of 1970, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Thomas Kuhn examines the parallels between myth and science, stating:
“If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sort of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge. If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today.”
Like myth, science is created as a narrative within a particular paradigm, and its only claim to verifiable truth lies within the fact that it has not been disproved. Yet. Science is built upon the understanding that things can – and will – be disproved with further research and knowledge. Kuhn continues: “Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none. New and unsuspected phenomena are, however, repeatedly uncovered.” For Kuhn, an anomaly to which does not fit into the established paradigm will be often be discovered, and that paradigm will have to be reassessed to incorporate this new information.
Truth is fragile.
It is difficult to fairly assess Havelock’s many treaties on the Mandrake so far out of the context in which he wrote them. In fact, it is all-too-easy to dismiss them as the ravings of a madman, supported by no meaningful evidence save the passionate beliefs of that singular individual so intent on a kind of intellectual justice for his own child. However, one thing that science has proved many times – since Copernicus and onwards – is that truth is not absolute, and that truth for one generation may be the ridicule for another. Science is forever waiting a revolution of knowledge. Such theories of Mandrakes may be beyond our comprehension and beyond the field of our personal experience, but are they so far from the possible as to render them worthless?
For myself, and for Havelock, the answer is no. I will admit to feeling slightly violated by the historical facts of his familial loss, knowing as I do of the enhanced paranoia of the man following his son’s early demise, but the evidence I have read has been too great to ignore. If nothing else it merits further investigation, something the figureheads of the zoological world refused to grant the so-called madman during his life.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Havelock: on the Mandrake
I’ve spent much of the week reading through the first chunk of Havelock’s notes, this batch largely about the Mandrake. The volume of the work is incredible, so I’m only going to publish a few excerpts for now, which might hopefully give us a better understanding of both the man and his legacy. All are taken from primarily untitled longer pieces:
“Our parks are rife with horror. As of yet, there may be no bloodshed, but there will be, of that much I am sure. All of humanity will feel the pain, the pain gestating in our municipal areas. For this horror is not human. It does not operate from the cold calculation of human reason, with comprehensible psychologies that we might, as thinkers, hope to quantify, to explain. It is borne wholly of the madness of nature, unpredictable in its movements and devastating in its effect.
This horror I call Mandrake.
Darwin, in his genius, speaks of his ‘Survival of the fittest’, and I quote him here: “in the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.”
This supposition is central to my own. Namely, a process of evolution is in operation within the workings of the planet earth, and humanity itself is merely an aspect of that process. There is no realisable ‘end’ to the process, but a perpetual development of natural selection. In simplicity – and it is the simplicity of Darwin’s claims that are perhaps most crushing to the folly of the spiritual community – all life is descendent from a common ancestor. It has then branched off into its myriad directions and possibilities through this aptly termed natural selection, which posits that, over periods of time, certain characteristics favourable to the longevity of a species will be duplicated in their future offspring. Any trait that better meets the need to, say, hunt or reproduce, will be desirable, whilst those which fail to augment these natural necessities or even hinder them would be, quite clearly, undesirable. By omitting these undesirable characteristics, often over periods of many thousands of years, an altogether stronger example of the species is so slowly created, by evolution, one in which the traits which once, perhaps, slowed the creature down, made it vulnerable prey to a more adapted predator, have been eventually deemed of an unsatisfactory quality and, ultimately and in short, superseded by those which better suit a fruitful life within the functioning planet. Therein lies the adaptation Darwin so eloquently exhorts. A successful species will adapt to the environment in which it finds itself; if hot, it will adapt accordingly, if cold or sparse of vegetation or prey, likewise.
It is this ability to adapt, over time, that eventually brought about the growth of sentient life, and which saw the loss of a great many species throughout the our earth’s history, simply because of their failure to suitably adapt to the demands placed on them by changing circumstance.
It is a theory dowsed in elegance, yet also at once the theory which elucidates the very horror I speak of, the fear that has consumed me, swallowed into the darkness of a search for an unbelievable truth in an enlightened age. I say again the word, and implore your audience: Mandrake. Feel the word pass your lips, the chilled spine of its consonants, the nausea of its vowels. Feel the word with the sadness of bereavement.
The Mandrake will destroy us. They have already infiltrated...”
*
“And what is this Mandrake, you ask, and rightly so. Put in the simplest terms, the Mandrake is of the family Anatidae, that is to say, duck. With the superficial characteristics of the common mallard (a species known not only for its propensity towards interbreeding but also its rapid evolution), the Mandrake has evolved with one inherent difference from its cousins, pertaining in specifics to the observable leg measurement of the creature. Where one might expect a leg of 2 – 3 inches, say, on an everyday duck, the Mandrake – adapted fully to the available underwater dimensions of its day-to-day habitat – possess legs of a basically identical appearance but growing to sizes as large as 10 feet in length (with a width in suitable concordance to that length).
With such legs in place, the Mandrake is free to explore the new aspects of life so associated with species of a far larger constitution. Rather than swimming atop the surface of a pond, for example, the Mandrake will simply ‘walk’ along the bottom, its sternly constructed limbs providing more than sufficient resistance and flexibility against the currents. Yet it is the potential of what the Mandrake could provoke when out of the water that so terrifies me.
As a keen ornithologist and amateur zoologist, I have seen only too often the sheer brutality of the natural world. It operates without emotion, functioning through the veracity of a desire for survival. Likewise, so many animals within this system are themselves governed by similar primitive urges and desires, to breed and prosper. It is only the ingenuity of the human species that has, to date, secured us our position of apparent dominion over the lesser beasts of the earth, but the authority we like to assume of ourselves is infinitely more tenuous than one would either hope or expect. Considered within the scale of even the known universe, our meagre technologies – which so embolden us to conceitedly label our own as genius, as approved caretakers and guardians of the earth – simper with their own insignificance. The power we consider ourselves to have, as men, is not exclusive to us, is not a birth right of the species. It is simply representative of the fact that, at the present time, we have struggled our way over the millennia to the top of what one might call the food chain, using our large brains and (comparatively) large physical size to ensure that the threat of predators is minimized satisfactorily.
History would suggest that the day will come when a new predator will overpower the human contingent, will take back the earth we have colonised and expropriated for our own greedy ends, will make humanity serve penance for the authority it claimed, over life, land and sea. Considered thus, it somehow puts into perspective the frail meaninglessness, the fragility of our perceived custodial privileges over the natural world.
I posit that this predator is here, now, and it is called the Mandrake.
But can a duck, even a 10-foot duck, really threaten the human race?
Of course the simple answer is a crashing yes. Even the smallest changes to a precision system such as this earth have the most profound consequences upon its functioning, and therefore on the functioning of those species within it. The evolutionary passage from common duck to Mandrake is not a small change, quite the opposite; it represents adaptation on a colossal scale, the result of which has the potential to reverberate around the globe with a significance synonymous with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Imagine it, if you can. Like all animals, the ducks have lived as servants to mankind, as the oppressed classes. They exist in unison with ourselves; we grant them that, but solely on the terms that we ourselves sanction. They may swim the ponds, lakes and rivers, bob for their titbits, ‘quack’, even, but within the strict understanding that we are their rulers, their masters. We will eat them roasted as it takes our fancy, will feed them the bread we would otherwise dispose of solely for the purposes of our own entertainment, and not for any care or consideration for the animals themselves. When the Mandrakes take their steps from our municipal waters, the oppressed will have finally found their voice, and the centuries of abuse, consumption and slavery will be over, the Anatidae emancipation will be complete. Man will fall at the legs of the Mandrake but there will be no reconciliation. They will enslave us, leaving the human race doomed to an eternity of servitude. It will start quietly, the change, the liberation – inexplicable drownings, reports freak duck attacks – but when it has sustained its climax the face of the world will have irrevocably shifted. The foothold of man will be webbed.
The question that remains, perhaps, most prominent in my mind is precisely why it is that this species remains so undocumented, studied and reported throughout not only the scientific community, but the social community also. I assume that the only explanation for this bizarre anomaly is that people are scared. Scared not only of the realistic possibilities of the Mandrakes existence and what that would mean for human society, but scared of change, and of what any change can mean for the world at large. The public do not have the time for Mandrakes in the hustle and bustle of the everyday; they may see a duck as they saunter through the parks, but nothing further will register, they have no reason to delve deeper into the animals submerged world. I fear that even a direct experience of the Mandrakes would do little to convince the simple masses – they are simply not prepared to accept so obvious a breakdown of the paradigms with which they structure and make sense of the world.
Furthermore, there is a distinct failure on the part of the academic scientific community to conduct due research and experiment into the phenomena, despite my best efforts. My correspondence to Cambridge University has fallen on deaf ears, it would seem, despite my thorough tabulation, logged sightings, and hypotheses which, whilst perhaps not conducted in accordance with the rigours of the academic standard of control, would certainly – I would suggest – warrant the further investigation by the Department of Zoology that the discovery of any new species would demand. And yet John Stanley Gardner, esteemed Professor of Zoology, will not deign to grace me with a response. For the scientists, I am little more than a madman, a lunatic, infringing the purity of the scientific method with personal manias, obsessions. Yet is the history of science not itself composed of these lunatics, the bold few men with an outlandish hypothesis who dared to stand up and force the world to change its theories, to reconsider the very essence of our understanding of the world, the bold few men who can truly call themselves genius? Most certainly.
For the academics of our time, my suppositions are simply too far out of their accepted world order. Despite the growing body of evidence I have collated in support of the existence of the Mandrake, the scientists I have approached have singularly refused to investigate my claims further. Again, I believe, this wilful ignorance is a product of fear. They are afraid to have their established knowledge undermined by the truth about the Mandrake. Despite the empiricism of the scientific approach, disproving current assumptions and models with newly meticulously assessed alternatives, tweaking the truth into its purest form, it is no doubt a painful process for the scientists. In the case of the Mandrake, the sheer scale of the threat of this evolutionary incongruity posed to the civilised, enlightened world is so great that it is perhaps simplest for those very men who should be examining its existence and finding solutions for the threat to instead ignore it, to place their hope in the faith that they have so effectively destroyed.
As fearful as I am of these Mandrakes, I don’t doubt our human capacity to stop their rapid colonisation, if we act with sufficient force and within a suitable timescale. Without the interplay of these two factors the human race might well consider itself thwarted, outrun by the immense hidden legs of these sub aqua monsters. The first step must lie in research. The second – and I disgust myself with the knowledge that this may be the only option – in conflict.
*
*
On the origins of the word itself, Havelock has this to say:
“Mandrake (ˈman-ˌdrāk) – a compound noun attempting to convey, linguistically, the curiosity of this hitherto unrecorded species. The word comprises both ‘man’ – a reference to the enhanced leg measurements of the species more in keeping with the perceived view of man as tall, even superior, of leg and therefore height – and ‘drake’ – pertaining to the masculinity of the duck. Presently my still very limited research into the Mandrake has found exemplars of the species only in the male gender. Whilst I am not yet in a position to hypothesize about this fact, and whether it is consistent with a larger pattern of common monosexuality to the species, it is an interesting aside nonetheless, and I have drawn attention to it in the twice utilised masculine form of its compound (I do sincerely doubt that the unlikely adaptations of the Mandrakes leg would similarly feature a solely male species, thereby rendering itself incapable of conventional reproduction and propagation, unless of course their reproduction functions with the efficiency of some kind of asexual division, wholly separate from their Anatidaen relatives).
Whilst not to be confused with the plant root of identical nomenclature, there are a number of interesting and wholly unintentional parallels one could conceivably draw (although I would like to clarify at this juncture that the name of Mandrake, as pertaining to the Anatidae, was devised in an act of spontaneous linguistic expression on my own part, based on a knee-jerk response, of sorts, to the immensity of my discovery within the parks of Norwich City and its environs. I had, at the time, conducted no research into the plant genus of the Mandragora, of which the mandrake is one such member, and had no insight into the possible connotations of the word. These findings very much followed my initial naming of the unrecorded animal species, and have since ‘stuck’).
Firstly, the roots of the mandrake (belonging to the nightshade family) have long been used within magic rituals, despite their toxicity, due to their deliriant hallucinogenic properties, and there are legends suggestive of the fact that the dug root of the mandrake will omit a scream, killing all who hear it. However, I am curious as to wondering whether perhaps such ancient legends and near mythologizing of these mandrake, of the regard they are so greatly held in, is not itself implicating the existence of the Mandrakes of the family Anatidae for a period far longer than I might hitherto have assumed?
In his translation of Arthur Edward Waite’s 1896 work, “Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie”, Eliphas Levi writes: “The first men were, in this case, a family of gigantic, sensitive mandragores (mandrakes), animated by the sun...” Whilst I am not naive enough, in the 1920s, to presuppose the presence of my Mandrake in some primitive creation fable, it nonetheless strikes me as remarkable, at the very least. Do such myths really make reference to the plant species that bears this striking name, or could it not be suggested that instead these references are made to the Mandrake of my writings? Were the Mandrakes once a respected, almost divine element of the animal kingdom, God’s amongst men, worshipped, revered, adored in their majesty and grace? It is no doubt a matter of interpreting the legend suitably, such as in the scriptural references to manna, but I would posit that these ritualistic usages of purported mandrake root in Wiccan religions might well, in fact, represent the symbolic consumption of the ancient Anatidae Mandrake. Humanity consumes duck to this day, and I do not consider it so fantastic a leap to conclude that a more archaic system of beliefs would consider the actual physical consumption of the “first men”, the “gigantic sensitive mandrakes” to in some way harness mystical powers for the diner. Indeed, one might similarly conclude that this devout consumption of the flesh initiated man’s dominance over his once magnificent Mandrake Gods, and gave him the greed necessary to force the species into the subservience of prey. In short, initiated the animosity still existent to this day between man and his grand Anatidae counterparts.
There is further suggestion of the spiritual significance of the Mandrake written in the Judeo-Christian Scripture. In Genesis chapter 30, Reuben, son of Jacob and Leah, comes across Mandrakes in the fields. Rachel, sister of Leah and second wife to Jacob, asks for the Mandrakes and agrees that in return for them Leah may spend a night with Jacob. “’You must sleep with me,’ she said. ‘I have hired you with my son’s Mandrakes.’” Leah, who believes herself barren, bears a further child from the act, thus associating Mandrakes with conception (a myth which is concurrent with many other belief systems), and thereby associating Mandrakes with the God who breathes the life into all men. Were Mandrakes considered Gods?
It would certainly seem to point towards a deep spiritual union between man and Mandrake throughout the historical past, but a union now severed in the twentieth century by generations of human aggressors and the growing threat of Mandrake revolt.
Of course, such supposition is beyond my field of expertise, preferring as I do to work with observable fact rather than conjecture. However, it would certainly make for a fascinating point of study into the historical and cultural significance of the true Mandrake. For me currently, there are simply too many anomalies with these observations, as curious as they may be. Firstly, how could Mandrake and man have existed on the same earth for so many thousands of years without extensive report and documentation existing of the former? Secondly, the very gravity of my terror pertaining to the Mandrake stems from the certain knowledge I possess – as a result of behavioural study – that humanity itself is at risk from these creatures. It would be inexplicable to assume that no past incidences of Mandrake attack would have been recorded throughout the annals of history.
No, the one certainty I have at this present juncture is that Mandrakes do exist now. I cannot comment on the past, I shall leave such work to the historians and anthropologists whom I pray shall follow me and my work, but I know, as a point of unarguable fact, that there are Mandrakes in our parks.
I note the homonyms above merely out of a certain academic curiosity. Perhaps these differing meanings and their poetic, often supernatural history take on a striking new resonance when considered alongside my own, as extensions of it, of each other?”
*
Later in his life, Havelock, a once spiritual man (although apparently largely religious by default and not by practice, he still believed vehemently in the existence of a ‘higher power’, as he termed it) lost his faith completely. This, too, was directly resultant of his Mandrake ‘discovery’:
“[so I ask you] can science really hope to explain the Mandrake phenomena? Answer me this, I say: what but the icy hopeless distance of the indifferent world could ever create such monsters? This is not the work of a divinity, for what benevolent God would ever create such beasts? Where God fails, only the quantifiable and emotionless facts of science – outside of humanity, some silent, motiveless instigator – can create a comprehensible narrative around the Mandrake. It is that narrative we so desperately need should we ever hope to understand them.”
And further:
“God? I once looked into a jar of Colman’s mustard and saw God’s work, yet now I see that of man. I look in the eyes of the Mandrake, on the hand, and I see God’s death. The two simply do not require one another, you see, and I have certainly experienced the one.”
*
Havelock gives significant attention to the so-called ‘Song of the Mandrake’. On this his notes are very garbled, almost unreadable for the better part. He talks briefly about the existence of an audio recording he had made of the song, but as far as I can see there is no further reference to it among the documents. If it did ever exist it is no doubt lost, forever forgotten as a meaningless noise:
“I have seen it written, and what better description of the haunting Mandrakes cry is there but this?: ‘And shrieks like Mandrakes, torn out of the earth, that living mortals hearing them, run mad.’ For this is the sound they make! It is not the gentle communication of their smaller kin but a most deathly, macabre sound, their Siren song luring many a man to the shipwreck of madness! No, it is not the alluring sweetness of the Mandrakes call that devours their prey, but instead its hideousness, which sinks beneath the skin and destroys the functioning body from the inside out. It is made of a sound unlike any on this earth; it is a warning, a threat, a call to arms for the Mandrakes of the country. It is awful, wretched, grotesque.”
“I have seen grown men fall to the floor on hearing the Mandrakes song. There is something intolerable about its pitch, its tone, its atonality that can drive even the sanest of men to catatonia. It may be rare to hear it, and rarer yet to tell the tale, but it is there. I have heard it myself, on several occasions, and whilst I retain my larger faculties, of thought and process, I would be foolish to deny the profound effect it has had on me. I am, in every sense, a man broken by the Song of the Mandrake.”
I find it interesting that he uses the Sirens as a reference point here, in this slightly manic passage, the Sirens themselves being seductive ‘bird-women’ who would lure travellers to their end with the majesty of their song. I couldn’t help noticing the significance of the symbolism of human sized bird-woman hybrids, a symbolism undeniably close to the Mandrakes that so plagued Havelock’s mind.
Unfortunately there is little legible notation of a descriptive nature referring to the song. Havelock’s senses seem to have been marred by this – I think later – point in his life, and he struggles with both handwriting and coherence, the notes often breaking into erratic obscurity rather than structured language.
*
Finally, I include this ‘Table of Sightings’, as prepared by Havelock for the year of 1924. The original document was so faded that the scanner couldn’t translate the text into an adequate digital format, so I have had to re-type the entries with all the clarity of the postmodern:
*
I have, as yet, barely skimmed the surface of the immeasurable wealth of Havelock’s Mandrake writings, and I will publish more as I get to it. The more I read, the more convinced I am that he was an authentic character, a man carved from the very oddity of the Norwich streets which he loved so much.
“Our parks are rife with horror. As of yet, there may be no bloodshed, but there will be, of that much I am sure. All of humanity will feel the pain, the pain gestating in our municipal areas. For this horror is not human. It does not operate from the cold calculation of human reason, with comprehensible psychologies that we might, as thinkers, hope to quantify, to explain. It is borne wholly of the madness of nature, unpredictable in its movements and devastating in its effect.
This horror I call Mandrake.
Darwin, in his genius, speaks of his ‘Survival of the fittest’, and I quote him here: “in the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.”
This supposition is central to my own. Namely, a process of evolution is in operation within the workings of the planet earth, and humanity itself is merely an aspect of that process. There is no realisable ‘end’ to the process, but a perpetual development of natural selection. In simplicity – and it is the simplicity of Darwin’s claims that are perhaps most crushing to the folly of the spiritual community – all life is descendent from a common ancestor. It has then branched off into its myriad directions and possibilities through this aptly termed natural selection, which posits that, over periods of time, certain characteristics favourable to the longevity of a species will be duplicated in their future offspring. Any trait that better meets the need to, say, hunt or reproduce, will be desirable, whilst those which fail to augment these natural necessities or even hinder them would be, quite clearly, undesirable. By omitting these undesirable characteristics, often over periods of many thousands of years, an altogether stronger example of the species is so slowly created, by evolution, one in which the traits which once, perhaps, slowed the creature down, made it vulnerable prey to a more adapted predator, have been eventually deemed of an unsatisfactory quality and, ultimately and in short, superseded by those which better suit a fruitful life within the functioning planet. Therein lies the adaptation Darwin so eloquently exhorts. A successful species will adapt to the environment in which it finds itself; if hot, it will adapt accordingly, if cold or sparse of vegetation or prey, likewise.
It is this ability to adapt, over time, that eventually brought about the growth of sentient life, and which saw the loss of a great many species throughout the our earth’s history, simply because of their failure to suitably adapt to the demands placed on them by changing circumstance.
It is a theory dowsed in elegance, yet also at once the theory which elucidates the very horror I speak of, the fear that has consumed me, swallowed into the darkness of a search for an unbelievable truth in an enlightened age. I say again the word, and implore your audience: Mandrake. Feel the word pass your lips, the chilled spine of its consonants, the nausea of its vowels. Feel the word with the sadness of bereavement.
The Mandrake will destroy us. They have already infiltrated...”
*
“And what is this Mandrake, you ask, and rightly so. Put in the simplest terms, the Mandrake is of the family Anatidae, that is to say, duck. With the superficial characteristics of the common mallard (a species known not only for its propensity towards interbreeding but also its rapid evolution), the Mandrake has evolved with one inherent difference from its cousins, pertaining in specifics to the observable leg measurement of the creature. Where one might expect a leg of 2 – 3 inches, say, on an everyday duck, the Mandrake – adapted fully to the available underwater dimensions of its day-to-day habitat – possess legs of a basically identical appearance but growing to sizes as large as 10 feet in length (with a width in suitable concordance to that length).
With such legs in place, the Mandrake is free to explore the new aspects of life so associated with species of a far larger constitution. Rather than swimming atop the surface of a pond, for example, the Mandrake will simply ‘walk’ along the bottom, its sternly constructed limbs providing more than sufficient resistance and flexibility against the currents. Yet it is the potential of what the Mandrake could provoke when out of the water that so terrifies me.
As a keen ornithologist and amateur zoologist, I have seen only too often the sheer brutality of the natural world. It operates without emotion, functioning through the veracity of a desire for survival. Likewise, so many animals within this system are themselves governed by similar primitive urges and desires, to breed and prosper. It is only the ingenuity of the human species that has, to date, secured us our position of apparent dominion over the lesser beasts of the earth, but the authority we like to assume of ourselves is infinitely more tenuous than one would either hope or expect. Considered within the scale of even the known universe, our meagre technologies – which so embolden us to conceitedly label our own as genius, as approved caretakers and guardians of the earth – simper with their own insignificance. The power we consider ourselves to have, as men, is not exclusive to us, is not a birth right of the species. It is simply representative of the fact that, at the present time, we have struggled our way over the millennia to the top of what one might call the food chain, using our large brains and (comparatively) large physical size to ensure that the threat of predators is minimized satisfactorily.
History would suggest that the day will come when a new predator will overpower the human contingent, will take back the earth we have colonised and expropriated for our own greedy ends, will make humanity serve penance for the authority it claimed, over life, land and sea. Considered thus, it somehow puts into perspective the frail meaninglessness, the fragility of our perceived custodial privileges over the natural world.
I posit that this predator is here, now, and it is called the Mandrake.
But can a duck, even a 10-foot duck, really threaten the human race?
Of course the simple answer is a crashing yes. Even the smallest changes to a precision system such as this earth have the most profound consequences upon its functioning, and therefore on the functioning of those species within it. The evolutionary passage from common duck to Mandrake is not a small change, quite the opposite; it represents adaptation on a colossal scale, the result of which has the potential to reverberate around the globe with a significance synonymous with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Imagine it, if you can. Like all animals, the ducks have lived as servants to mankind, as the oppressed classes. They exist in unison with ourselves; we grant them that, but solely on the terms that we ourselves sanction. They may swim the ponds, lakes and rivers, bob for their titbits, ‘quack’, even, but within the strict understanding that we are their rulers, their masters. We will eat them roasted as it takes our fancy, will feed them the bread we would otherwise dispose of solely for the purposes of our own entertainment, and not for any care or consideration for the animals themselves. When the Mandrakes take their steps from our municipal waters, the oppressed will have finally found their voice, and the centuries of abuse, consumption and slavery will be over, the Anatidae emancipation will be complete. Man will fall at the legs of the Mandrake but there will be no reconciliation. They will enslave us, leaving the human race doomed to an eternity of servitude. It will start quietly, the change, the liberation – inexplicable drownings, reports freak duck attacks – but when it has sustained its climax the face of the world will have irrevocably shifted. The foothold of man will be webbed.
The question that remains, perhaps, most prominent in my mind is precisely why it is that this species remains so undocumented, studied and reported throughout not only the scientific community, but the social community also. I assume that the only explanation for this bizarre anomaly is that people are scared. Scared not only of the realistic possibilities of the Mandrakes existence and what that would mean for human society, but scared of change, and of what any change can mean for the world at large. The public do not have the time for Mandrakes in the hustle and bustle of the everyday; they may see a duck as they saunter through the parks, but nothing further will register, they have no reason to delve deeper into the animals submerged world. I fear that even a direct experience of the Mandrakes would do little to convince the simple masses – they are simply not prepared to accept so obvious a breakdown of the paradigms with which they structure and make sense of the world.
Furthermore, there is a distinct failure on the part of the academic scientific community to conduct due research and experiment into the phenomena, despite my best efforts. My correspondence to Cambridge University has fallen on deaf ears, it would seem, despite my thorough tabulation, logged sightings, and hypotheses which, whilst perhaps not conducted in accordance with the rigours of the academic standard of control, would certainly – I would suggest – warrant the further investigation by the Department of Zoology that the discovery of any new species would demand. And yet John Stanley Gardner, esteemed Professor of Zoology, will not deign to grace me with a response. For the scientists, I am little more than a madman, a lunatic, infringing the purity of the scientific method with personal manias, obsessions. Yet is the history of science not itself composed of these lunatics, the bold few men with an outlandish hypothesis who dared to stand up and force the world to change its theories, to reconsider the very essence of our understanding of the world, the bold few men who can truly call themselves genius? Most certainly.
For the academics of our time, my suppositions are simply too far out of their accepted world order. Despite the growing body of evidence I have collated in support of the existence of the Mandrake, the scientists I have approached have singularly refused to investigate my claims further. Again, I believe, this wilful ignorance is a product of fear. They are afraid to have their established knowledge undermined by the truth about the Mandrake. Despite the empiricism of the scientific approach, disproving current assumptions and models with newly meticulously assessed alternatives, tweaking the truth into its purest form, it is no doubt a painful process for the scientists. In the case of the Mandrake, the sheer scale of the threat of this evolutionary incongruity posed to the civilised, enlightened world is so great that it is perhaps simplest for those very men who should be examining its existence and finding solutions for the threat to instead ignore it, to place their hope in the faith that they have so effectively destroyed.
As fearful as I am of these Mandrakes, I don’t doubt our human capacity to stop their rapid colonisation, if we act with sufficient force and within a suitable timescale. Without the interplay of these two factors the human race might well consider itself thwarted, outrun by the immense hidden legs of these sub aqua monsters. The first step must lie in research. The second – and I disgust myself with the knowledge that this may be the only option – in conflict.
*
*
On the origins of the word itself, Havelock has this to say:
“Mandrake (ˈman-ˌdrāk) – a compound noun attempting to convey, linguistically, the curiosity of this hitherto unrecorded species. The word comprises both ‘man’ – a reference to the enhanced leg measurements of the species more in keeping with the perceived view of man as tall, even superior, of leg and therefore height – and ‘drake’ – pertaining to the masculinity of the duck. Presently my still very limited research into the Mandrake has found exemplars of the species only in the male gender. Whilst I am not yet in a position to hypothesize about this fact, and whether it is consistent with a larger pattern of common monosexuality to the species, it is an interesting aside nonetheless, and I have drawn attention to it in the twice utilised masculine form of its compound (I do sincerely doubt that the unlikely adaptations of the Mandrakes leg would similarly feature a solely male species, thereby rendering itself incapable of conventional reproduction and propagation, unless of course their reproduction functions with the efficiency of some kind of asexual division, wholly separate from their Anatidaen relatives).
Whilst not to be confused with the plant root of identical nomenclature, there are a number of interesting and wholly unintentional parallels one could conceivably draw (although I would like to clarify at this juncture that the name of Mandrake, as pertaining to the Anatidae, was devised in an act of spontaneous linguistic expression on my own part, based on a knee-jerk response, of sorts, to the immensity of my discovery within the parks of Norwich City and its environs. I had, at the time, conducted no research into the plant genus of the Mandragora, of which the mandrake is one such member, and had no insight into the possible connotations of the word. These findings very much followed my initial naming of the unrecorded animal species, and have since ‘stuck’).
Firstly, the roots of the mandrake (belonging to the nightshade family) have long been used within magic rituals, despite their toxicity, due to their deliriant hallucinogenic properties, and there are legends suggestive of the fact that the dug root of the mandrake will omit a scream, killing all who hear it. However, I am curious as to wondering whether perhaps such ancient legends and near mythologizing of these mandrake, of the regard they are so greatly held in, is not itself implicating the existence of the Mandrakes of the family Anatidae for a period far longer than I might hitherto have assumed?
In his translation of Arthur Edward Waite’s 1896 work, “Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie”, Eliphas Levi writes: “The first men were, in this case, a family of gigantic, sensitive mandragores (mandrakes), animated by the sun...” Whilst I am not naive enough, in the 1920s, to presuppose the presence of my Mandrake in some primitive creation fable, it nonetheless strikes me as remarkable, at the very least. Do such myths really make reference to the plant species that bears this striking name, or could it not be suggested that instead these references are made to the Mandrake of my writings? Were the Mandrakes once a respected, almost divine element of the animal kingdom, God’s amongst men, worshipped, revered, adored in their majesty and grace? It is no doubt a matter of interpreting the legend suitably, such as in the scriptural references to manna, but I would posit that these ritualistic usages of purported mandrake root in Wiccan religions might well, in fact, represent the symbolic consumption of the ancient Anatidae Mandrake. Humanity consumes duck to this day, and I do not consider it so fantastic a leap to conclude that a more archaic system of beliefs would consider the actual physical consumption of the “first men”, the “gigantic sensitive mandrakes” to in some way harness mystical powers for the diner. Indeed, one might similarly conclude that this devout consumption of the flesh initiated man’s dominance over his once magnificent Mandrake Gods, and gave him the greed necessary to force the species into the subservience of prey. In short, initiated the animosity still existent to this day between man and his grand Anatidae counterparts.
There is further suggestion of the spiritual significance of the Mandrake written in the Judeo-Christian Scripture. In Genesis chapter 30, Reuben, son of Jacob and Leah, comes across Mandrakes in the fields. Rachel, sister of Leah and second wife to Jacob, asks for the Mandrakes and agrees that in return for them Leah may spend a night with Jacob. “’You must sleep with me,’ she said. ‘I have hired you with my son’s Mandrakes.’” Leah, who believes herself barren, bears a further child from the act, thus associating Mandrakes with conception (a myth which is concurrent with many other belief systems), and thereby associating Mandrakes with the God who breathes the life into all men. Were Mandrakes considered Gods?
It would certainly seem to point towards a deep spiritual union between man and Mandrake throughout the historical past, but a union now severed in the twentieth century by generations of human aggressors and the growing threat of Mandrake revolt.
Of course, such supposition is beyond my field of expertise, preferring as I do to work with observable fact rather than conjecture. However, it would certainly make for a fascinating point of study into the historical and cultural significance of the true Mandrake. For me currently, there are simply too many anomalies with these observations, as curious as they may be. Firstly, how could Mandrake and man have existed on the same earth for so many thousands of years without extensive report and documentation existing of the former? Secondly, the very gravity of my terror pertaining to the Mandrake stems from the certain knowledge I possess – as a result of behavioural study – that humanity itself is at risk from these creatures. It would be inexplicable to assume that no past incidences of Mandrake attack would have been recorded throughout the annals of history.
No, the one certainty I have at this present juncture is that Mandrakes do exist now. I cannot comment on the past, I shall leave such work to the historians and anthropologists whom I pray shall follow me and my work, but I know, as a point of unarguable fact, that there are Mandrakes in our parks.
I note the homonyms above merely out of a certain academic curiosity. Perhaps these differing meanings and their poetic, often supernatural history take on a striking new resonance when considered alongside my own, as extensions of it, of each other?”
*
Later in his life, Havelock, a once spiritual man (although apparently largely religious by default and not by practice, he still believed vehemently in the existence of a ‘higher power’, as he termed it) lost his faith completely. This, too, was directly resultant of his Mandrake ‘discovery’:
“[so I ask you] can science really hope to explain the Mandrake phenomena? Answer me this, I say: what but the icy hopeless distance of the indifferent world could ever create such monsters? This is not the work of a divinity, for what benevolent God would ever create such beasts? Where God fails, only the quantifiable and emotionless facts of science – outside of humanity, some silent, motiveless instigator – can create a comprehensible narrative around the Mandrake. It is that narrative we so desperately need should we ever hope to understand them.”
And further:
“God? I once looked into a jar of Colman’s mustard and saw God’s work, yet now I see that of man. I look in the eyes of the Mandrake, on the hand, and I see God’s death. The two simply do not require one another, you see, and I have certainly experienced the one.”
*
Havelock gives significant attention to the so-called ‘Song of the Mandrake’. On this his notes are very garbled, almost unreadable for the better part. He talks briefly about the existence of an audio recording he had made of the song, but as far as I can see there is no further reference to it among the documents. If it did ever exist it is no doubt lost, forever forgotten as a meaningless noise:
“I have seen it written, and what better description of the haunting Mandrakes cry is there but this?: ‘And shrieks like Mandrakes, torn out of the earth, that living mortals hearing them, run mad.’ For this is the sound they make! It is not the gentle communication of their smaller kin but a most deathly, macabre sound, their Siren song luring many a man to the shipwreck of madness! No, it is not the alluring sweetness of the Mandrakes call that devours their prey, but instead its hideousness, which sinks beneath the skin and destroys the functioning body from the inside out. It is made of a sound unlike any on this earth; it is a warning, a threat, a call to arms for the Mandrakes of the country. It is awful, wretched, grotesque.”
“I have seen grown men fall to the floor on hearing the Mandrakes song. There is something intolerable about its pitch, its tone, its atonality that can drive even the sanest of men to catatonia. It may be rare to hear it, and rarer yet to tell the tale, but it is there. I have heard it myself, on several occasions, and whilst I retain my larger faculties, of thought and process, I would be foolish to deny the profound effect it has had on me. I am, in every sense, a man broken by the Song of the Mandrake.”
I find it interesting that he uses the Sirens as a reference point here, in this slightly manic passage, the Sirens themselves being seductive ‘bird-women’ who would lure travellers to their end with the majesty of their song. I couldn’t help noticing the significance of the symbolism of human sized bird-woman hybrids, a symbolism undeniably close to the Mandrakes that so plagued Havelock’s mind.
Unfortunately there is little legible notation of a descriptive nature referring to the song. Havelock’s senses seem to have been marred by this – I think later – point in his life, and he struggles with both handwriting and coherence, the notes often breaking into erratic obscurity rather than structured language.
*
Finally, I include this ‘Table of Sightings’, as prepared by Havelock for the year of 1924. The original document was so faded that the scanner couldn’t translate the text into an adequate digital format, so I have had to re-type the entries with all the clarity of the postmodern:
*
I have, as yet, barely skimmed the surface of the immeasurable wealth of Havelock’s Mandrake writings, and I will publish more as I get to it. The more I read, the more convinced I am that he was an authentic character, a man carved from the very oddity of the Norwich streets which he loved so much.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Charles Phillip Havelock, III
A few afternoons ago I stopped off in a second hand bookshop on a street in Norwich called Elm Hill. It’s an attractive cobbled street full of pleasant-looking but ultimately banal antique shops, but wedged between them is a shop specialising in board games and trading cards and this second hand bookshop, called The Dormouse. I rummaged around through the local interest books but didn’t find much worth picking up, all odes to small yachts and tabulated ferry information, and as far as I could see there wasn’t much in the whole shop that really intrigued me, aside from the owner. His name was David Simmonds, and on seeing my dismay at the quality of his stock he told me his name and said straight away that I could call him either David Simmonds or Mr Simmonds. He was one of those kinds of people, and he wore yellow corduroy trousers and deep brown brogues.
We chatted briefly about the kind of thing I might be looking for, but I struggled to explain my plans to write a novel called “Meet Fuckface”, which would be enshrouded in the historical mysteries of petty crimes, the East Anglian witchcraft trials and the early railway network. He nodded disinterestedly while manually cataloguing a huge box of musty-smelling books which he had told me had come from a local house clearance. I smiled politely and went to leave, but David Simmonds halted me with a barked exclamation. When I turned back to face him he was grinning unusually, which made me feel quite uncomfortable, and instead of speaking in methods in keeping with consensual politeness he simply thrust a battered leather case towards me, gesturing for me to look inside. I did as he said.
It was full of papers, masses of them, reams and reams of yellowed, faded, crumpled documents pertaining to all manner of things. There seemed to be a healthy mixture of personal correspondence, essays, official documents, philosophical ramblings and even some photographs. I automatically picked out what looked like a comparatively recent copy (of the short version) of a far older birth certificate, which was sitting at the top of the pile. It belonged to someone called Charles Phillip Havelock III, born in Norwich in 1887.
Among some of the old photographs was one of a gentleman, scrawled on the back of which in almost unreadable ink were the letters CPH III – Charles Phillip Havelock, I’d guess, the same man.
One other thing immediately caught my attention, an onionskin document of several pages containing faint – at times illegible – type-written words aligned in a visual presentation suggestive of poetry, the piece emerging from the title “The Day of The Sandwich” in what at first glance appeared to be composed in a quite irregular form. It was an incredible title, and made me instantly curious and excited in equal measure. I noticed that the pages had all been torn off at the bottom end. The rip still looked fresh like a recent murder.
While I had been looking at the documents, David Simmonds had edged out from behind the counter and was now standing right next to me. Before I could continue with the poem he had touched my shoulder gently and I jumped violently from my state of enraptured concentration, dropping all of the papers at my feet. I bent down to pick them up, apologising stupidly, but he was already scuttling about on the floor as though genuinely enjoying himself.
“You like these documents?” he asked. “You want them?”
I laughed defensively. “I can’t afford them,” I said, and tapped my pocket. Its emptiness echoed around the silence of the bookshelves.
“How much have you got?” he asked. He had shuffled the papers back into some kind of order and was forcing them back into the case. I took out my wallet and looked inside it. There was a five pound note stuck defiantly between cards.
“Only five pounds,” I said, sure that it wouldn’t be enough for the entire personal history of an individual, the feelings that he had committed to paper in a desperate attempt to somehow remain in the physical world he had left behind, as a bizarre education for the future generations of Norwich. It was like peering into the diary of this man Havelock, or the brain itself. With paper he had enmeshed himself with the history of the world, had left his imprint in the future. Surely five pounds couldn’t buy that?
“That’s okay,” said David Simmonds. I didn’t really want to spend the five pounds because I had been saving it for food, but I was intrigued by the documents, and by the thoughts of this Havelock, who looked out from his photograph as though inviting me to receive the answer to a question I hadn’t yet thought to ask. It was the same voyeuristic urge that made you guiltily read other people’s postcards, even if you knew neither the writer nor the recipient. I had given him the five pounds before I knew what was happening and was on my way home to look through the documents.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I started reading that afternoon, the scope and the implications of the theories that Havelock had spent a lifetime outlining and methodically logging. From my preliminary readings (including some vivid correspondence between Havelock - who seemed to favour the moniker 'Pippin' - and a number of psychiatrists), it appeared as though he had suffered from varying psychotic symptoms throughout his life, from which consequently developed three primary, deep-rooted obsessions that eventually engulfed his personality in their persistent recurrence. These three, in short, as so far discovered, and thus with no claim to obsessive exclusivity in the thoughts of Havelock, can be briefly listed as follows:
1.Sandwiches – the foodstuff comprising leavened bread slices and their composite interior fillings.
2.The mandrake – a purported duck-like creature, consistent with the physical characteristics of the common mallard but with legs of an entirely disproportionate length.
3.(Largely compulsive) Acts of – often inappropriate – sexual intercourse or contact.
Although I am yet to have read the full extent of the documents of the man in my possession, it is clear that his obsessions were developed under a ferocious intellect with a stringent attention to detail. Whilst in no position, currently, to objectify the veracity of his more seemingly outlandish reports, the painstaking accuracy and sheer prolific extent of his work would appear to suggest either (a) a profound level of academic expertise in his field (of the family Anatidae, for example); or rather (b) a complete immersion in a fantasy world of his own construction, which had entirely replaced his perception of any meaningful shared reality as experienced by others, and for which he had created a parallel natural order, of sorts, an alternate zoology, in concordance therewith his off-kilter reality and to which he was entirely, crushingly devoted, as if it were the essence of Truth itself. My own early reactions to his often florid prose would favour the latter at this early stage in my familiarisation with his writing, but until I have conducted further research into the man, his claims and his life, I do not feel qualified to condemn this intriguing character to the historical waste bins of psychosis.
I will publish excerpts from his writings here on further reading, and as I come across and digest them myself.
We chatted briefly about the kind of thing I might be looking for, but I struggled to explain my plans to write a novel called “Meet Fuckface”, which would be enshrouded in the historical mysteries of petty crimes, the East Anglian witchcraft trials and the early railway network. He nodded disinterestedly while manually cataloguing a huge box of musty-smelling books which he had told me had come from a local house clearance. I smiled politely and went to leave, but David Simmonds halted me with a barked exclamation. When I turned back to face him he was grinning unusually, which made me feel quite uncomfortable, and instead of speaking in methods in keeping with consensual politeness he simply thrust a battered leather case towards me, gesturing for me to look inside. I did as he said.
It was full of papers, masses of them, reams and reams of yellowed, faded, crumpled documents pertaining to all manner of things. There seemed to be a healthy mixture of personal correspondence, essays, official documents, philosophical ramblings and even some photographs. I automatically picked out what looked like a comparatively recent copy (of the short version) of a far older birth certificate, which was sitting at the top of the pile. It belonged to someone called Charles Phillip Havelock III, born in Norwich in 1887.
Among some of the old photographs was one of a gentleman, scrawled on the back of which in almost unreadable ink were the letters CPH III – Charles Phillip Havelock, I’d guess, the same man.
One other thing immediately caught my attention, an onionskin document of several pages containing faint – at times illegible – type-written words aligned in a visual presentation suggestive of poetry, the piece emerging from the title “The Day of The Sandwich” in what at first glance appeared to be composed in a quite irregular form. It was an incredible title, and made me instantly curious and excited in equal measure. I noticed that the pages had all been torn off at the bottom end. The rip still looked fresh like a recent murder.
While I had been looking at the documents, David Simmonds had edged out from behind the counter and was now standing right next to me. Before I could continue with the poem he had touched my shoulder gently and I jumped violently from my state of enraptured concentration, dropping all of the papers at my feet. I bent down to pick them up, apologising stupidly, but he was already scuttling about on the floor as though genuinely enjoying himself.
“You like these documents?” he asked. “You want them?”
I laughed defensively. “I can’t afford them,” I said, and tapped my pocket. Its emptiness echoed around the silence of the bookshelves.
“How much have you got?” he asked. He had shuffled the papers back into some kind of order and was forcing them back into the case. I took out my wallet and looked inside it. There was a five pound note stuck defiantly between cards.
“Only five pounds,” I said, sure that it wouldn’t be enough for the entire personal history of an individual, the feelings that he had committed to paper in a desperate attempt to somehow remain in the physical world he had left behind, as a bizarre education for the future generations of Norwich. It was like peering into the diary of this man Havelock, or the brain itself. With paper he had enmeshed himself with the history of the world, had left his imprint in the future. Surely five pounds couldn’t buy that?
“That’s okay,” said David Simmonds. I didn’t really want to spend the five pounds because I had been saving it for food, but I was intrigued by the documents, and by the thoughts of this Havelock, who looked out from his photograph as though inviting me to receive the answer to a question I hadn’t yet thought to ask. It was the same voyeuristic urge that made you guiltily read other people’s postcards, even if you knew neither the writer nor the recipient. I had given him the five pounds before I knew what was happening and was on my way home to look through the documents.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I started reading that afternoon, the scope and the implications of the theories that Havelock had spent a lifetime outlining and methodically logging. From my preliminary readings (including some vivid correspondence between Havelock - who seemed to favour the moniker 'Pippin' - and a number of psychiatrists), it appeared as though he had suffered from varying psychotic symptoms throughout his life, from which consequently developed three primary, deep-rooted obsessions that eventually engulfed his personality in their persistent recurrence. These three, in short, as so far discovered, and thus with no claim to obsessive exclusivity in the thoughts of Havelock, can be briefly listed as follows:
1.Sandwiches – the foodstuff comprising leavened bread slices and their composite interior fillings.
2.The mandrake – a purported duck-like creature, consistent with the physical characteristics of the common mallard but with legs of an entirely disproportionate length.
3.(Largely compulsive) Acts of – often inappropriate – sexual intercourse or contact.
Although I am yet to have read the full extent of the documents of the man in my possession, it is clear that his obsessions were developed under a ferocious intellect with a stringent attention to detail. Whilst in no position, currently, to objectify the veracity of his more seemingly outlandish reports, the painstaking accuracy and sheer prolific extent of his work would appear to suggest either (a) a profound level of academic expertise in his field (of the family Anatidae, for example); or rather (b) a complete immersion in a fantasy world of his own construction, which had entirely replaced his perception of any meaningful shared reality as experienced by others, and for which he had created a parallel natural order, of sorts, an alternate zoology, in concordance therewith his off-kilter reality and to which he was entirely, crushingly devoted, as if it were the essence of Truth itself. My own early reactions to his often florid prose would favour the latter at this early stage in my familiarisation with his writing, but until I have conducted further research into the man, his claims and his life, I do not feel qualified to condemn this intriguing character to the historical waste bins of psychosis.
I will publish excerpts from his writings here on further reading, and as I come across and digest them myself.
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