Satchel

By Robert Hughes

A memoir by an author who forgets his life. He invents stories about a turtle, a carnivorous human species, a voyageur pilgrim, and in the process, learns about himself. He even forgets language, and by reinventing it, finds its purpose. By the memoir's end, he is ready to begin living.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Makete House Publishing
• Release date: Oct 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781999520809

Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes has been teaching Literature and Composition for 30 years. The interest which informs his work involves identity in relation to the environment. As Hughes says, words, also, make up much of our environment, as do our own actions. The creating of worded works effects (not affects) our environmental identity. Indeed (Hughes notes) McLuhan makes the point that our environment remains for the most part invisible and inaccessible. Hughes tries to make it audible. This effort to investigate and embody identity itself frequently expresses itself in humour and whimsy, but is no less sincere for that. For more about Robert Hughes, visit bodywisdom.press.

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by

Robert Hughes

copyright 2018 © Robert Hughes

email: [e-mail]

Makete House Publishing

www.bodywisdom.press

ISBN 978-1-9995208-0-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or otherwise, without prior permission in writing of the Author.

σάκα - satchel

What and do ; or they’re simultaneous ;

be outdated ,, théories obsolètes.

The new ?

Its ekwétion :

ɒto’hat!-do = od-tah!!’ɒto

a presque palɪndrom

––––––––

None of the following tests the theory. Rather, ɪ‿t’ɪl-lʌstréts.

———————————————————————-

Thɪs my automɛmnoir ɪz current. Warniŋ : tʌʧ ɪt at jɔr dénʤər !

Ri-memberiŋ ɪs kurrent ,,, aktɪv ɪlɛktrɪsɪti.

Robert’s hrod- + berht, beraht, likewhat ;

Which some of make ‘fame’ / ‘bright’ but uh-uh I donot ;

Who my parents begot owdda Burrrns, Rrrobbie

(trill the R’s). Typical tautology.[1]

Hughes busts owdda Deutsch but no, also, not. Cuz

Willit hhh’also gut from Gallois, Snowdonia, Anglesey, Ynys[2] Mon,

Who mine does.

‘Fire’ ‘Creativity’ Whatever. Don’t believe it.

Lesson the Intro :

less on, more of.

From leg-[3] as Homer (if Homer was), Gotta pick something. Go! Shove fingers into satchel to drug something out. What’s where? Gatherings. Stuff. Grabble a what into œil, oreille, and it speaks. In a word,

Rob it!

That’s two words. (Hamlet 5,2,111. Or 159. 141. 130-something.) Redact yourself! Nothing else is heritable. Your sex cells be marked :

you

(not ‘your parents’).

Thought itthinks that cloud looks very like a weasel. (Me too.) Or is it a whale? (Yeah, maybe, yeah, it is.) Acourse, the H maketh up almost the entire signification of the word.[4]

Is ‘thought thinks’ akin to ‘rain rains’? Well we’ll get the bottom o’t.

She thought, he thought, it thought drains.

Pons asinorum.

Speak plain.

I am. I do !

Mobled Dick’s uncircumcised.

I know.

s t o p

Now we’re come to it ,, took 200 words. I & know

What’s this know?

Now this thing here this automɛmnoir, oppo-sits Plantain’s, 芭蕉 (What ? [That’s you.] I don’t read Chinese.) To it : 艹 grass + 巴 the sound Bah ; ditto 蕉, sound jiao : Bah-jiao, Basho[5]. I’m not gonna jnanə the shit owdda it. Cuz it’s γνῶσις, gamma nu omega yada yada ... gnow or know. Whose complection auto-acts. Id est : we each be ‘plek-with’ : plaited.[6]

the k-not k-nows

Rain rains. Thought thinks.

But this thing here this won’t dissolve the knot.

That be the distinction : Basho’s jnana : softens dissipates disappears ; Robert’s know : particlates. Somatidio, if you like (σωματίδιο). bodying.

Have you read the footnotes? Tap toes to tune.

Lesson the Eleventh :

A corpse is not a human.

I thumbed north on King’s Highway 11. A hundred something Canadian miles. (You figure it if you’re inclined.) Then thirty miles east to Algonquin Park. I’d almost arrived. In the dusk I set up tent in Two Rivers Campground, just off King’s highway 60, its signs shaped like a crown-topped shield. Φ : f /ph originally pʊ-hʊ[7] – Φ ! Pʊ-hʊ the King ! O getting paid for our faux-enthusiasm ! My impulse is to trust everyone ; my experience is the opposite : relationships knot me. But no fences owned the bush. Tomorrow I’d journey to the interior.

Bhleg’s the ancient black, ‘to burn, scorch, gleam’, (of which [cup an ear] the H mahket up almost the entire signification), frrrom (trill the R’s) firrre-burrrnt / brrright-darrrk, and so my name’s over under , Raw berrt hughes. Smudged-clear ? (All 名 names be 夕smudged 口 mouths) : both light & dark blind brains.

And under that soot, within that glow, strolled a bear.

I dislike ‘a bear’ [the word] as not particular enough of genus, the spek- (Greek skopein[8]) still a class robbing IT, for this ens’ sex cells be marked ‘IT’, not ‘its species’. As if, in answer to There’s a message. – Who? – A human.

Call it Bhruhn

strolled in the flickering orange-dark smell of pine needles fallen a carpet-umber soles. It – the time/place – rawberrt hughes’d (‘What ?’ [That’s you.] ‘What ?’ As if I hadn’t, or already, said what ! "bright-dark beneath murk /s the glow between". There. I’ve told you my name (one of them) ; tell me yours. Never mind. I’m not listening.) snuffling, minding its Ps & Qs. Robert, lean, fifteen, torn jeans, plaid shirt, squatted fireside’s a flickering inanimate that’ll suddenly sp-hiss. (Feel what I mean ? Don’t underestimate stuff.) Bhruhn between scattered fire-camps clamped in murk. Just like words. As I said, names夕口. When, as Robert watched, five or seven jabbering adrenalines who’d be 22-plus years each, swarmed behind ooh – eee – aah – look – wow ippee, those be the soundlikes emanating from Homo sapiens colonies. When Harry (Robert called him Harry) thirty-fiveish, lout, jumped behind to bang Bhruhn on the tail with a club. Bhruhn ignored the clout. ooh – aah – eee More ! More fun ! Again, whack! Naught. (Canadians don’t say ‘naught’.) Again (daring oh !) jump behind lumbering and thwack ! branch on Bhruhn’s back. Get a reaction !! That’s the buzz : Get a reaction !!

Then Harry’s 11-year-old son joined Dad with a crack on Bhruhn’s rump ∙ Run! Back !! Jump ! Ha ha ha ha ha ! And didn’t Dad do it again, harder, and Bhruhn half-turned with a snarled Φ ! The crowd retreated and Yippee ahk wooo krike zowee ! Ha ha ha ha ha ! (Did it! Got a reaction!) explanation : These are adrenalined Homo sapiens who live in colonies and are the most advanced beings in the universe. That bear is very dangerous and shouldn’t be allowed to blah bl-blah bl-blah. Someone could get hurt.

Bhruhn wandered. Murk murked. Robert fireside sat. Harry, Dolly, Sanberm, Lispa, Kit, Polikman, Wittengrub, Skub dispersed. Robert propernames each thing. Propername’s a verb. How do you tell a verb from a noun ? With the brain.

‘With’’s not the right word. With’s too 夕’d. No. Not ‘with’. Robert didn’t know it then but A’ was digging for it though not knowing it. Know. No. With bewitches that there’s a someone who uses brain. The someone who’s a ghost. A someone ... and a brain.

Uh-uh.

You missed that Robert didn’t say how to tell a verb from a noun. Distraction, that’s the thing.

(Am I repetitive ? Not possible !) The simple of it is, dead / living / blah bl-blah bl-blah / be classes. Definitions. Not actions. Whilst nouns be conveniences for verbalizing, wordalizing, the spontaneous ejaculation of neuronal excreta. ’Nuff said.

Not many know your ass runs faster than. It does! You do. Move your car a pace! yell cabbies. "You’re slow as equus ferrous calipash." (I’m sure I’ve heard them that.)

Why is our iron our iern? I think it’s wild, feral. And that’s of-itself-so.

You’ll never be dead. O.K.? Go!

Oh but, Oh bit, I be, don’t gobble-a-dooky oh! Zip laddee daddee.

No !

I didn’t / Y / have a conniption? Ho ho !!

A corpse is not an inanimate human.

Lesson the Twelfth :

I get asked, "What do you do ?"

"What will you do when you retire ? What did you do when you were young ?"

"What do you do in the dark-bright woods alone ?"

Do and know : the verbs.

Tomaso would burn all his Summaries as so much straw. Who wouldn’t ?

Doesn’t, in fact ?

What Xactly do you think ‘death’ is ?

Not ha ha ha! ‘the opposite of life’ ha ha ha ha ha! Now there’s a distraction super one. Biologists only now daring. But it’s monstrous daring.

And no this isn’t the Catholic Magesterium’s catechism so Φ ‘sin’ off.

No.

‘Death’ is an attitude which, ourobos-like, buggers our heads up our own asses.

Well, we all dig somewhere.

I reinvent the wheel. Always have. It’s my fate.

(Now I know someone’s gonna ask if I believe in fate. Language buggers. The illiterate shouldn’t be allowed to read.)

Up rose the sun, and up rose Rawberrt.

Packed, hiked the highway shoulder west a ways (I’ll talk about gravel later), made the trailhead. Gotta pick something. Go! Punched south into the bush.

The mistake is to make a libation. Never nod to the gods. It’s a sign of, they take it a sign of ; no ; it is a sign of. Put it thisaway : you don’t need to know to do. I’ve got it : an unnecessary distraction.

(Of course I’ve got it is a manner of speech.)

So Robert started on the wrong foot.

You’d think that starting on the wrong foot, and knowing that you’ve started on the wrong foot, you can then with an effort, a hop and a skip, get back onto the right foot. But you || can’teff ort. Only || capa bull’eff oot. (The caesura makes all the difference.) Ask Oedipos for to understand. (That’s pi, omicron, upsilon, sigma. How birth marks a A’!) (hint : I found out (John Lennon reference) you can never under stand). I’ve been digging Xactly that lump ; it’s a H_ollow. H in Greek is ՙ ; in Cree H is ᐦ . H is breath, speech’s canvas. The mistake is even making a ՙ before plunging in.

Trail raised her immortal head where she lay in repose amongst the Algonquin hills. Russet and golden tresses flowed over the smooth copper skin of her shoulders. In raiments of forest greens the goddess stepped lightly across the Madawaska, over Cache and Smoke and Ragged Lakes, up to the heights of Manitou Mountain, all in less than to describe. There she found the inanimate deity sexed, sexless, source of, unsourced, in the guise of a great granite boulder sunning in Dawn’s outpour. Trail approached, her visage contorted, and spoke in annoyance to Manitou.

These tourists tick me off ! Again a Pretender dares my domains as if ! And I’m supposed to ! Curse his soft flesh and tender eyes !

Manitou stirred, wishing to be rid of the vexèd goddess and so restore the calm of morning. What would you ? It asked.

O Manitou. The sky be your lungs and intestines. Strike this ingénue to ashes with a lightning bolt.

What’s ingénue?

Green.

What’s green?

Jumped-up know-nothing irritating prick.

Lightning’s a bit harsh.

Not to me. Blast him to smithereens !

Manitou pondered how quickest to hurry Trail off. It said,

I will send rain. Satisfactory ? I’ll dispatch it in unending batches. Downpours shall soak hill and valley. Day and night I will rain until this intruder regrets his audacity and flees the Algonquin demesne, uh, orbit, um, this whole area around here.

Trail considered the proposal. She knew how unlikely getting more out of Manitou when It was in this mood. She decided.

Thank you, Whose-Bowels-Be-Storms. And I will ask Entymology to arouse mosquitoes in their hordes of thousands and millions also to plague this interloper. He will have no rest, no comfort, no respite from irritation. May he be pestered, sleepless, and frantic !!

And in a single leap Trail leaped from the peak of Manitou Mountain leaping down to the West Highland where she lay her long length winding through the deep woods. Hers was a speckled and splotched, tapering undulation, banded with darknesses, first beckoning the traveler, then disappearing to bafflement and consternation, only to reappear ahead, luring the unwary on and

That late afternoon, Robert, after hours (hours ?), ahfter say, ahfter hiking, crouched in his tent beside Provoking Lake. There, where the rain down sopping and the mosquitoes swarming and the day’s light dying, Robert made a discovery. His super-advanced outer space missions’ freeze-dried grub needed to be cooked. That was a puzzler. How ? In a puddle ? Splashing ? And he’d packed no other foods.

Hmm.

Robert lay down hungry.

Robert likes to listen to rain drumming on a roof. And the dark darkened solid ████. In that density waved hand-in-front-of-face bee el ay en kay, Robert listening to the steady plocketty plack above, after (say ahfter) awhile felt a less than solidity underneath. A squishy cold froggy damp soaked through tent-floor and sleeping bag. During that first stretch of ████, Robert it was, ahbsorbed how (hours ? ; & iron’s iern) in the woods : that : air’s a solid thing, and earth a morass.

[Psst. What Robert learned subsequent to this first solo camp, is that tents are fabricated to allow air – and water – to pass through them. They’re intentionally made to leak ! Otherwise, their occupants find themselves suffocating inside a plastic bag dripping with their own exhaled moisture. But Robert, lean, fifteen, torn jeans, plaid shirt, had never heard of a ‘fly’, that waterproof fabric stretched two inches above the actual tent.] First Day dawned flooded under nonstop Manitou downpours, and Robert might as well have ordered no tent at all to go with zero breakfast.

Crawling out drowndèd, he spread a heavy rainproof poncho directly upon the tent-roof, and immediately mosquitoes lunged in famished droves. (Maybe they plunged in , famine-drove. Or whorled in. Did they whirl ? Or sucked in.) Soot-clouds of them buzzed about Rawberrt, settled, stung blood-sucking needles through chilled skin.

Back into the tent he, slapping at the hundred or so who’d accepted the opportunity, whining (wings) everywhere in ears, hair, eyes. And, poncho weighing the roof, the tent sagged within two inches of Robert’s prone body lying on the drenched sleeping-bag. (Of course he’s lying ; he couldn’t be prone without lying. To tell the truth, not to be, or ,, is it worth painstaking ?)

And,, no fire. No breakfast. And

Rain formed puddles, gutters, streaming rivulets surrounding the tent as it intensified during the day. (‘It’ the rain, not the tent.) Sheets of cascading drumming pounding water pummeled camp.

Morning and evening passed, and Manitou saw that it was wet.

During two more nights and days, occasional sorties were inevitable. Robert went out, mosquitoes came in, and rain deluged sleeping bag, clothes, Rawbert, et al (actually, he ate nothing).

Squished under poncho, soaked through, Robert was reduced to counting mosquito bites on his limbs. He’d get to thirty bites on, say, the back of the left hand, but lose count as bites piled on top of the swells of skin already bitten. Then the mosquitoes began a third layer of bites atop bites on top of bites. Robert wasn’t a mathematician.

And,, no supper or lunch either. Lots of ████.

A dirtbag pursues a calling without ulterior motives, pure for an impulse to. I don’t believe in pure, or soul, or spirit, or. Life’s not a matter for getting something out of.

Not for money, not for fame.

(You see what I said about my name?)

The mesopotamian muck we splatter

Floods from the beacons where mountain beasts gather.

I’ve never been to mesopotamia[9], but I live like a otter. A mad rogue. A’ poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once. Some sacrifice to the gods. A’ dig i’th’ dirt. Dung it & dig i‿’ts a honourable. (B.S. I don’t fig for respekable.)

I was fifteen years old when I missed Woodstock by 317 days. I’m always late at the start. I plan things out.

I’m lying I don’t plan-I-plan sfz ts՜ck.[10]

I bought a tent, backpack, sleeping-bag in a cheap surplus shop downtown T.O., and thought I planned great buying freeze-dried packets of you know they advertized they were technology used for outer space missions so, just add water / boil, lightweight and. Nutritious too. I was 343 days after landing on the moon.

Now your dirtbag doesn’t aim to. She’s focused on what. And that whatever – bird-counting, river-running, rock-climbing, parcours, cricket-tracking, gene-mapping, engine-building, art-installing, surfing, skiing, caving, painting, cooking, diving, gets blocked by, interrupted to the extent that time’s attention’s energy’s taken fromwhat for $$-getting : its interviews, its networking, and so for, and on orth, to enable the what to do. A job, on the other, is nothing but dollars. I was poor as a alley-cat and didn’t give a piss cause I was going camping.

Camping means return-to-origins. To camp is to shed extrinsicals. It’s chthonic. Camping’s not merely a matter of relocating body, but of locating you at all. Planet Earth be the locus in quo.

Third Day, under the downpour-which-never-let-up, a desperate Robert arose, hastily packed a sodden backpack, and in sopping jeans and plastered plaid shirt scurried north for the highway where eventually he emerged into the open foggy green air. Trail snapped Φ U at his ankles. Φ is pʊ-hʊ (originally), now ph / i.e. f. Robert thumbed retreat to Toronto where, some hours later, he scoffed eight hamburgers then fell into bed pondering Bhruhn, skin, weather, food, while scratching at mosquito bites, until too too too a healthy fifteen-year-old’s sleep took him toodly-ooo.

An unnecessary distraction so stated seems benign, as if, a ‘mere’, an indulgence , a. Ha! Literature’s the most dangerous. In this Xample, the Iliad. Some go mad with the beauty. Xenophon couldn’t stir a foot without first ‘reading the signs’[11]. Lennon & Ono ditto. We’re lured to satisfy our imaginations. What’s ‘beauty’ ? Ars. A fitting-together-of. Monkey-brains love a puzzle.

Within a twelvemonth, I’d hitched to the Rockies and climbed Mount Theothanaw (I call it Theothanaw ; θɩοθανα), atop of up, my sweat-soaked arms licked for their salt by insistent, ravenous Keok, Gruta, Temchel, their long pinkpurple tongues, & Seepax, Checharuk, Limwith, Bow, all similar enough one to each that imaginaries class them lumped ‘bighorn sheep’.[12] But especially Gruta, Keok, and Temchel, such that to fend I knocked fist to horns, without effect (I’ll talk about horns later), so famishedly insatiable their throats.

Robert, lean, sixteen, torn jeans, plaid shirt, squatted lakeside on a seven-metre wide beach of sharp skull-sized rocks, halfdownup Theothanaw’s height. This was camp morning ahfter the climb (you say the B but don’t hear it). There were no other so-called Homo sapiens. Down the beach to his right appeared Ropst with her cub a football-field’s length, sauntering lakeside in my direction. Related to Bhruhn (aren’t we all). I did nothing. I put on shoes. I sat where I was sitting. The slight air blew from them to me, so, when within seven metres, I gently arm-waved twice : semaphored : Hi. I’m here. As if, but, of course, already, they sensèd.[13]

Without a pause, without hurry, without investigation, with in-their-own-time, they meandered to their left (on my right) in a semi-circle around my sit, up off the beach, behind me through my camp set in the low beach-edge brush, past my tent (with a fly on it !), and back to lakeside, now on my left, and onways, all without a sound from any either of us. A polite passerby on our own businesses. (All my many encounters similar since thus or like.)

Pause the First :

There is no pause.

G-r-a-v-e-l the cause, O the cause, my soul.

There is no soul.

(That strikes as declarative, there is no soul, in this mimanihow[14], provocative and contentious, but that would be a topical take, whereas here there is no soul ain’t, butwhat, plainchat. Feel the H.)

Squatting highway’s shoulder, Thessalon was my bête noir.[15] Three days and, I finally had to walk my way off the precincts. Not a bum’s fuck would pick me up. None !

That’s to know gravel, kuh-now. Kuh-runch.

I don’t want to talk about that particular spot.

Every hitcher has one. Tales circulate the hostels. Wawa was some’s. White River others’. Three days just to get out of Ontario. (Hitching westwards goes without saying. Eastbound trips don’t count.)

Ignace I remember. Way up beyond the Lakehead. North north. There (Ignace) me sitting on the for westbound traffic, across from me on the Transcanada’s south side, smoothed a hump of lichen-stuck granite, perhaps two+plus metres tall, forty-feet long. Whale-back. The road flat forever. In the relative desolate. And O! this is the dryland North ! Muskeg in definite. Pine needles. Tar-bits. Asphalt. Heat. Guh-err guh-err-a-v-e-l.

An old shed sat in the sun.

Not a Homo sapiens in the ether.

There is no ether. (Again. It’s not needed for calculations to work out.)

In this orbit, I don’t remember the number, I was avid Exile on Main Street, though most were not, then, when new, and my head plonked & plucked disk one side one, and disk two side one, and also some Neil Young, so who wants to research can figure it out. Vinyl-era, évidemment. Listening to gravel.

In ~1972 I knew, we knew, they knew, it knew, now this thing here this infinits. Don’t give me your shit. skei-, German scheissen, English shit, ‘separated’, is retained. As old and worn out as, It remains. Light strikes in bits. Planck constants. Death is an attitude, but this recunts new crap out. Not