Archipelago: A Problem

By GH Neale

ARCHIPELAGO, a literary fiction of four characters’ discrete lives one random day in one random town.

The reader is chaperoned through the animated reality of this town. A town which “not in all historie, any memorable thing concerning it” occurred and, through performances of the characters, is invited to consider his own communal actions.

The novel commences with inquisitive poet Philomena Isabela Cordova passing her second novel to newly found friend Parveen Pattni, a young Hindu lesbian and burgeoning fine artist. Parveen begins to read Philomena’s book at the same time as Stephen Rei, disillusioned and hedonistic literary agent of some fifty years, is reading another one of Philomena’s “scribblings”. Philomena is lustily pursued by her step-sister’s husband and, as per the classical myth, Stephen and Parveen read of her assault, her retribution and more.

For ARCHIPELAGO is a very queer affair, unbearably queer perhaps

• Language: English
• Publisher: GH Neale
• Release date: Jun 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310149658

GH Neale

Mr GH Neale was born the same week as the death penalty was abolished in the United Kingdom – a matter of some good fortune. He is accomplished and accompanied occasionally by his wife and three children as he traverses the highways and byways of the Kentish countryside.

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ARCHIPELAGO

First Published 2015

Copyright © G H Neale

All rights reserve

Giraffe Has Nothing Publications

ISBN : 978-1514353462

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

ARCHIPELAGO

a problem

GH NEALE

"Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly.

Everything that can be said can be said clearly."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

For my lovely and courageous wife

who with much forbearance

has got us through this dreadful year.

In Memoriam

Billie Honor Whitelaw CBE (6 June 1932 – 21 December 2014)

ISLANDS | CHAPTERS

01 Española 18 Corona Del Diablo

02 Marchena 19 Rábida

03 Seymour Norte 20 Genovesa

04 Santa Cruz 21 Wolf

05 Daphne 22 Isabela

06 Santiago 23 Mosquera

07 Pinzón 24 Enderby

08 Floreana 25 Campión

09 Bartolomé 26 Santa Fé

10 Caldwell 27 Cowley

11 Guy Fawkes 28 Eden

12 Gardner 29 Baltra

13 Darwin 30 Fernandina

14 Tortuga 31 Pinta

15 San Cristóbal 32 Beagle

16 Plaza 33 Sin Nombre

17 Cuatro Hermanos Sources and References

Española

The birth of an albatross

Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

We come from singularity, the omphalos, to here, the defined. This is such progress indeed. And after coming into existence we move forward in days. It strains through our calendars to the here and now where we perpetually measure, document and make judgement. All our experiences are felt as they fall. For this is our purpose: to gather the ineluctable and make it explainable, codify it; and yet our true empirical recordings remain beyond reach and still seem to be somehow ‘empty.’ We have scanned so far back in the constellation of Fornax and realised at this point that, yes, whilst we are all made of stardust and ninety two elements, where is the quality that is us? Where does that reside? We are separated somehow in our disconnection between what is real and what we understand of the real. Somehow we are lost as we gaze skyward, through increasing numbers of satellites occluding our horizons with their new technology and we are conscious of how lonely we are: how lonely all mankind is; but blessed with the virtue of communion, we still journey, still reach.

For we are not brutal.

So come. Deep. Deep down. Let us consociate. Hush now! The babies are snugly-sleeping, so recently cut at the navel. In them the progress resides. We must make them be with what we have. The darkness of inconsiderations can become and can be made and shall be filled with jubilant stars! We live beyond Fornax, so cut, so much more to know than is known. We are next stages: James Webb is being constructed. Shall we remember nothing and pass on more. We are born starless like tiny little things. (Billie Whitelaw’s mouth was all that was needed to speak of prematures). Indeed, all of humanity is unripe. Push … She … Yes. And the billy is passed and may be so for centuries. Spinning like a black object, sometimes used to crush skulls: the jawbone of an ass. But let us not worry, for today let us get under the covers where it is warm and deep and in the warmth make star-stuff. Let us rapture the enjoyment and dig like blind, anthracite moles, feeling our way darkly. This is the relay to which we all relate to. Every one of us Adam and Eves in it. Yahweh is the one who causes us to be. He is the man of dust, born relative to the narrative one and half million days ago. Let us razor-away the artifice and see in the deep darkness what is discoverable. Let us enjoy ourselves too. For this is meant to be enjoyable.

A metaphor is needed for this, something that can be used to pull you deep and in constellation explain. To make a work of aesthetic virtú shall require much effort and, in part, the autobiography herewith is my epitaph too, for I am dying. I am too so cut and alone in the silence, divested and leafless in all the galaxies. My own chick and where my own tale end have their remnants here. So seeing the world in a single grain of sand is much the same for me now but I shall try my very best, work hard with this sand and try and produce something, something that is somewhere in between these things, a sum of their parts. Swa sceal geong guma gode gewyrcean. I hope in my age I can still do her justice.

To explain …

Even in geardagum this tale is known. All things are a part of this disclosure: that all of mankind will be surpassed by non-human knowledge, super intelligence that will build successive generations of increasingly powerful minds. This is a given. Our time is limited. Here comes Proxima Centauri and here comes the end of everyone. It is just the nature of how this shall happen and the endpoint … shanti shanti shanti. This terrifies me I think. So I must rush to get this all out before the cold and clawing sweats of my own life pass over. I must get this out before I am unable to think or feel and before I return to that cave in the Field of Machpelah. Each day I am more dead. I am running out of sand now and the horror of being alone looms like dirty, dark clouds. Read on. Hold the flag on the page, here erected and chosen, as my Underriver runs past Riverhead and its environs, away, along and alone. Like a starling with versicoloured breast, taken to the wing over rows of homes, sky-sweeping to where the sky swept to, silently as the moon, as terrible as claustrophobia. Will I be unable to imitate the human voice? O the beauteous and variegated nature where man’s indolence could knife-edge itself but fails to cut through because of lack of edge. Will I be unable to describe the scene? Will this alone exist to the exclusion of everything else I have ever done? I am capable of being a part of that murmuration of starlings and here I must try harder for her sake, lest opportunities are missed.

These words that have been chosen and these words that will be simply: are. The letters procured in procedure, reproduce. Each inky glyph is held in conjunction with another, as Mars and Venus circumgyrate around the Sun. Syntactic and semantic rules and conditions under which this lexicon is laid down ensure that these sentences can’t just mean anything. Their significance presupposes a normal linguistic meaning, with the supposition being that I intend a normal meaning: Wie Nachtlieddes Fisches. It is just so; and as the self views the self, pondering, trying to make head or a tail out of it, we work, as you will abrasively read, towards becoming new men, with legs like men and arms of a fish; and we search for ultimate freedom to be able to fly across rows of homes, unseen in oursels as ithers see us, we swim our beautiful lakes. Or will we step into a pure world of sensation, ce qu’on a senti, or future-think and neologise with a quiz. We may step out of the page, where we are, to know, to know to be. But in that do we acquire meaning and in that may we Volapük? Or we will strive towards never having to do anything or saying anything. Is that it? Just to exist. We will work hell or waters high to discover that arcadia. But no; this is not the way of mankind. We are not indolent. We are like actively discharging electrons, co-valiantly bonding our existence with our experiences. So no. Non. Raison d’être de travail, to improve the lot of all mankind. The artisan with the ragstone wall, the ploughman and philosopher, the publisher and biologist, the musician, each of these improves. This is what we do and we do this in our world of language.

Towards …

You were there, lying prematurely in your royal blue pram. Your first thoughts, the memory as you were placed there, the memory of the day before. You knew who your parents were in an imprinted, motherese, goose and gosling way. You were placed daily in the same garden. Good for you, so said, suffocating in the boredom of the fresh air. You looked up at the increasing sky and speculated, Would every day be like this? The surprise at five upon seeing the red plastic giraffe tumble into your breakfast bowl. The tiny grains of sand you played with as a child, all toe-crunching irritant warmth on that holiday beach. O the sugary food and such sun, burning through your joyful déshabillé and your happiness-filled body, which ran and ran past the white, rusting promenades of Marine Terrace. On and on you went. The Royal Pier, built by the AIC, jutting out into the unknown of dark Carmarthen Bay. Such joy that was: ice cream, doughnuts and chips and the dodging of Manx Shearwaters. Then, so tired in the car journeys, home to holiday abode and memory-drowsed sleepings: up the A487 to that bay window in your guest-dusted bedroom, which was planked across to form a big shelf: china-ornamented and light blue. It was poorly painted, flaky and splintered. The only interesting feature in your grandparent’s Welsh home. All summers long you lay there with your forever thoughts gazing through that window. You picked these memories up and let them drizzle through your tight fist. Gravity dragged them down to join with the rest. Memories chipped the paint with the sand under your fingernails; but they became into you somehow and got retained with epiphanies of roughly hewn floorboards and thread-walked mats, uneven ceilings, smoke-stained ochre, sash-shut, claustrophobic windows. The, not supposed to be adult hearings of, … up there, you know she would go with men for fifty pence and come down all brazen like, down the road like. The dirty girl with her skirts all up, so she was, was all whispered over sizzling braising steak and boiled potatoes. You ran away from this horror, alone and along past ‘Snows’ that blue shop that sold everything, probably everything that was made from 1874 too. There was a market in that town which had been going for seven hundred years. You were sure some ancient commodities were still available in there. Are plastic goods the only things that are immortal and individually discolour in the sun, you thought. That shop had them all, all discolouring and shabbily sitting there on shelves unsold. From the junction of Heol Maengwyn and Heol Pentrerhedyn, past ‘Wheelers’ and escaping from growing up, escaping from becoming discoloured too. You flew up Plas Efail to endless thoughts and endless skies, to get away from it all. You discovered you were left-footed and left-handed. The former due to being half flat-footed, unable to curl toe towards heel, like you could on your other foot; the latter not fully understood, like you. You thought. And none of ‘all of it’ was what you wanted; although at the time your young epiphanies never made this clear. The endless peace of the deep, silent Bala Lake, the lake of beauty, which for a few moments beckoned with miles of stillness, solitude and reflection, was as close as you ever got and was just a glimpse of how it could have been. Those lost low sounds on that shore.

Marchena

Here mysterious dead bodies were found

Water, Tomatoes, Apples, Beef, Rice, Glucose Syrup, Salt, Acetic Acid, Ginger, Curry Powder, Vegetable Oil, Sugar, Modified Cornflour, Wheat Flour, Salt (again), Cornflour (twice?), Plain Caramel and Herb Extract.

Mr Stephen Michael Rei inspected the contents of that day’s breakfast and tore away a plump piece of last night’s buckwheat roti to supplement its state. Dunking it in and fishing it out, he wondered, as he pushed it inside his maw, if the soup would give him bad breath.

Still best brush teeth soon and shave. AP and C. Yes of course. Always.

Wiping away the last sludges with the remaining roti, he permitted himself ventilation.

E yerpp … er. Better. Easy that was good, nice really. Do what I like. No one heard.

He stood up and took the bowl to the stainless steel, slippery, stained sink and then, holding the spoon briefly in the air, he marvelled at how the sunlight, from all of that distance, through his kitchen window, came to uniquely hit it. He genuflected and placed the spoon and bowl into the fairy-liquified water to be left until later.

No point doing it now. Stubble, later more today. Micah filling the hand of the Levite. I must get round to repairing the toaster.

Checking his watch he went up his stairs two at a time. Upon doing this, he did as he always he did: he stammered on the penultimate, odd step. But he steadied himself and carried along to the bathroom.

Size of a pea. Not too big. On.

All cleaned, he licked his hand and exhaled into the cup of it, sniffed and agreed.

Fine. Important today. Respectful really.

Stephen’s razor was placed, blade upwards, into jets of buretted, broiling water. Then, stretching his skin with his free hand, he proceeded to shave, waggling the steel in the warmed water as he went.

Ninety percent protein, polypeptide bonds, once all alive now all dead and parts of me being removed. Missed that bit. Done. Always that spot. Position of the razor under the right of the chin? Again. Check. Done. Wrong-handed. Sikhism and Islam covering of the hair, orthodox Jews too but hair is dead. Puzzle. There are parts of my body that grow out of me that are dead. A problem.

The water ingurgitated by the plug hole, spun away. Watching it spin, Stephen remembered how others believed that it swirled the other way round where he came from.

Side-to-side on the equator. Perhaps. NFI. You can balance eggs on their ends at the equator, zero degrees attitude.

He laughed at his malaprop. It was the linguistic style of his characterful wife. If style was the correct word. It was infectious though. Stephen was in a good mood. Today could mean something for him. He flannelled away a little pearl earring of shaving foam which, surprisingly, his reflected troine embodiment had missed upon his initial perlustration.

Ms Philomena Isabela Iris Cordova began to write, knowing that she would be unable send, a letter.

Dear Chris,

Words of writing and words of speech are never enough to convey true meanings. On a few occasions when I have bought such a things as a magazine sometimes I am given the wrong change and like that action I know I have given you wrong change too. You know you make me want to exploded sometimes and on other occasions, more relazed than anyone has made me feel before. If was truly in ‘the situation’ I would truly like to be in but I am not. I am nervous of saying things to you, silly me. Please I don’t want tears. I want to hear you laugh and I hope you will be able to give me this one day. Maybe I should not even ask but my heart compels me. I Know I am stupid and intense and maybe this has become too complicated but I am innocent of a lot of things. Perhaps pity me for I am

She grimaced. It was no good. It was so very badly written; and she was a little cross with herself. She scrunched the paper into her fist. It was so very badly written, repeating words and such like. Crushed with the desperation of it and being a little cross with herself, she, like Stephen earlier, realised that now, she too, would have to get ready. She drank the last drops of her pomegranate juice. She knew the letter would not, could not, get sent and could never get anything, as it were ‘ready.’ She wondered why she wrote it. Maybe it was a signal, an end point, a flag signifying time, the cessation even of a period of her life. Or maybe it was to concentrate thoughts. Or maybe she wasn’t much of a writer after all.

Would this be as close as Philomena got?

She wandered away from the kitchen table, her juice, her paper and her pen.

Awkwardly, Stephen checked himself in the hall mirror and pulled his gabardine around him. Holding his head at an angle, a mannerism he had been experimenting with for years, he decided that it would do, he would do, the coat would do and everything would be done. He left his house.

Handle. Keys. Latching up of the door. Did I? Yes.

With a wallet-tapping he checked. But no more than a few paces away he considered the idea of returning back just to see if the door was shut. (twice, again)

Yes?

Uncertain as the man who glimpses at his watch but knowing more or less what time of day it was he pondered and procrastinated in the pointlessness of his personal return. He was a creature of watchfulness and felt unable to let go the various divisions of his ticking habits that he had accumulated in his lifetime. He had, after all, so much to lose.

Gambling on a negative. Just things. Wonder what this manuscript is like.

Pulling the coat tighter so the belt, under strain had more to do than its duty could, he deceived himself that it was OK and sufficient and wandered down the road, through the grey-landscaped town and icing-sugared crispness that cloyed that autumnal morning.

Shit there. Must be careful. On my shoes. No good. Not today. Any day really. Bonfire, sulphurous smells surely not here. What was that smell though?

Bee-following, he queued for his ticket and boarded the train. His right hand clenched as he lowered himself, sat and smoothed down his attire, in an adroit manner of professionalism and respectability. Yet he amounted in amongst inconsistent allotropes of stained cigarette ends and crushed cans that lurched and clattered noisily as the train moved off. The locomotion squealed and shuffled the detritus away to rattle underneath smelly, hidey-hole seats.

He allowed himself another check of his deodorant. His left-handed fingers slipped inside his coat, his shirt, to the socket of his right-handed armpit, then, suitably steeped, to his left-nostrilled nostril. It was no good. He knew now he should not have had that curry the night before. Now the contents were coming out.

Festy. Strewth.

It was too late to do much about it. Maybe he had to keep calm and try to forget about it.

Nervousness makes you sweat. I need to wash the sting out of my worries. Why am I worried anyway? Hurry, arriving at 11:36.

The train entered Chelsfield tunnel. In an awkward instance his reflection flashed at him. He angled his head again, checked his watch face again and then checked his own face once more.

Look at that narcissist nod blouse there. What a lompy cheese-bug. Looks like a city boy. Hate him I do. Not an Oiscings. Grr damn types. All worky-days and Saturdays. Foreigner.

Stephen became conscious of the fact that from the other end of the compartment a younger man was staring at him, interrupting his tidying and ordering thoughts. He knew that he had probably been seen peacocking at the window. Now he was being scrutinised.

Scrutinised?

Yes. He was sure of it. He decided to stare ahead, about half a meter ahead, into the empty space where his eyes should have been at their most free of focus and relaxed. They were not and Stephen felt somewhat intimated. He did know though that he had to keep dead, dead calm.

No use otherwise. How many more stops? Maybe he will. Time?

Attired in a military jacket, the younger man kept on observing our hero. With flaxen hair and cold steel eye, his sight remained rammed on Stephen’s tincture. His jeans were fashionable ripped above the knee; and he wore black, heavy thug boots. Never flinching, thrush-like, he sought out his personal entertainment: making Stephen squirm.

O well. The letter. God I am a silly moo bag. Best get ready. Check with Debra? Noooooo. Ibex to differ. Yes she probably would. I won’t tell her about it.

She laughed.

Debra was called Antelope by almost everyone. It was because of her eyelashes, slender legs, tawny, russet hair and fawn-coloured eyes. She was prepossessing and delicate. Philomena had allowed her step-sister to stay over but now she was, to speak plainly, in the way. Philomena was due to go out, had to go out, and Debra, although Philomena loved her dearly, was in the way and even though she could be relied upon to lock up, Philomena still felt it was appropriate, the correct thing to do, however awkward, to ask her to leave now before her, now, before her, that was. She pulled up the roman blind in the front room, hoping that the light and the repetitious, clattery noises would awaken her and awaken her ideas.

C’mon Ante. Shift your fat bum.

Philomena dug her hand, possibly a bit harder than she ought to have done, into the proximal location of Debra’s shoulders. Debra’s head appeared drowsily from under the hidey-hole thicket of the spare duvet.