Identistories 1, 2, 3

By R Frederick Finlayson

These 'identistories' explore notions of identity and perception in three linked components that argue about language and presence. They were written between 1984 and 1989.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Room editions
• Release date: Oct 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215316733

R Frederick Finlayson

R Frederick Finlayson lives on a mountain near a forest.

Book preview

Identistories 1, 2, 3

or

The Murdered Investigates

The Hypnotised Theatre

Detectives in Love

Identistory 1 or The Murdered Investigates

1. I am at the main suburban station, Flinstone, about to proceed into the West. The entrance to F. is littered with fear, for I crawl up my own spine when passers-by accost me like ghosts or, rather, more aptly, parodies. I am wearing a black-and-grey tweed overcoat that I found in a plastic bag on an Opportune Moments shop doorstep and a grey felt hat with a hole worn in the prow of the crown where I, and the wearer before me, would hold it to place on and off our heads. At the entrance to F., clothed thus, in a parody myself of the Common Man of forty or fifty years ago, I am approached by a man younger than I, filthy, wearing a grey overcoat, a beaten felt hat, and a face beaten black and blue. I am approached and I pass. I, I cut a striking figure, undesired at present, and to be captured by more suffering would be unendurable. Thus, I travel down the ramps and endure the glances, dismissals, as I give and dismiss. Today, I, I am not calm. And, naturally, the station is filthy, as filthy as the young man who accosted me, reflecting he and I, each of us, and the train that travels underground.

Numerous authors speak small fragments, vistas of a mood, to me. I, unformed, can still appreciate my informants and prepare myself to step from the train at the Gateway to the West where I must attempt to find peace and calm. Therefore, this I ceases at this, diminishing, point.

2. I am very serene, as serene as I can be, given the noise. The noise is junk. There is a vast amount of junk: names, scenarios, humiliations, victories, sensations. I have already ‘forgotten’ the junk, the particular junk, of the preceding intensely serene twenty minutes. The serenity now is greater than before because of the junk. Now, the only junk is this and, because it is purposeful, concrete, so to speak, ordered junk, it does not need as much attention or, rather, it is not as loud, as demanding. Interesting, that I discuss junk and not the serenity. Is the serenity implied by the presence of the junk? At present, yes, but I expect the junk to be replaced by that which is more purposeful and specific, other than this. I expect that this will have lasting benefits. I may be wrong.

3. Before I pass on (because I am so much moving: there isn’t time to stop and coalesce the little items, memories, fragrant opportunities that are fantasies, that happen always, especially alone and at the Markets of the City, early on a quiet morning, with stallholders so interested in their mugs of soup, coffee, tea. I must think of all the colours of what I must buy and their locations in the Markets. Where is the desired orange? Will that green, in that shape, suffice? Is that yellow able to sustain that scent without its bedmates or must I take them with me? Thus, an arduous intellectual activity as the many colours raise questions of the other senses. And my body, I, I want to shit, I want to eat, I want to avoid that man yelling at himself in Greek is it, or yelling at who, his phantoms, yelling, laughing back at the other man with the trolley. I have to shit; I have to eat. Neverending decisions that become only bearable by once-hateful familiarity. (All the things you know!) I must say that the man walking towards me, or who did walk past me, not because of me, perhaps, but because of everything else, wore clothes that indicated he understood the ‘essentials of a style’. One could say that he was ‘striking’. Or ‘a show-off’. I am connected secondarily with a middle-aged man, dressed in the epitome of his particular style. And these men are both the same, though they would not meet, they would not talk. Acknowledgement may only be a roll of: hmmmmmmmm.

4. Looseness, and I have fallen into a hole in the mat. But, really, it’s not that serious. I have time to be bored or lie back and dream, sit in a chair and listen idly to passing traffic. There is nothing to be done unless I distinctly decide, for three-quarters of an hour. Prior to noting this, I had begun, I admit, to quietly panic. Hence this notation: everything in its place, a place for everything. The comfort of silly phrases aptly placed.

5. Sighs of pain here but the smell is extraordinarily pleasant. I sit as herbs, fossilised dinosaur bones, melanterite, dried bat guano, tortoise shell, centipede, deer horn, line the walls in glass jars. I relax here, since it is not I sighing with pain, or groaning, laughing behind the partition.

6. Light, sun, everywhere today. It is morning and I, I am walking in the morning, striding through light. A cold wind, a breeze only, surely, but the light! It is only possible to loosen my thoughts, they do indeed gambol. I compose ridiculous sentences, pomposities, laughing at my brashness. I impress no one. Today, it is impossible to stop walking, hard enough to stop reading the fatuous newspaper at breakfast. Breakfast is a feast of hours, huge gaps of time, relegating reports of floods, droughts, assassinations, assignations to mouths of incomprehension. So pleased, I cannot move!

7. Wind, and promised Summer disperses. An easy flick of Antarctic head. What’s left of the Old World? I sit in a red damasked chair with wooden arms curved. I turn my cracking ankle round and round and say, at those points of exterior comprehension, that the air is cold without the Sun.

8. Still in this chair, days later. I have become pieces of those I once was, years ago, in a day, yesterday. I must now also be pieces of those I shall become. I wear a black-and-white jumper and am reminded of Bima, whose black-and-white apron symbolised the ‘death’ of passion. I am much thinner than Bima is another, immediate, facile thought. I can’t stop joking! I know you’re all serious and I, I am, too, but I just can’t stop! Later, I will go into another room and speak differently. Perhaps you won’t recognise me?

9. Oddly enough, I am underground again. ‘Isolated’ is the word I confront myself with. It is so familiar it requires closer attention. I become less isolated through the attention I offer. A small sacrifice of attention and I am left less isolated, more ‘suffused’. Isolation is stepping out into a night of wind and rain or pulling down the window in a train speeding through the dark countryside and putting one’s head out: even briefly, a wild act, a refusal to be civilised. Though if one stays there for a long time and the stars stay fixed and hanging, quiet amidst the noise of the air, then isolation cancels itself. But how often will one stay there? Isolation is being at war with one’s self and others and the cited metaphors are acts of risk and exclusion from humanity. Are hermits so? At war within themselves? Naturally. Or in harmony? Of course. Does exclusion from humanity imply harmony with the non-human, the elements and creatures? I have wandered a long way here but am happier for it.

10. Happiness is a word resembling in meaning a loud, disturbing noise at night. During the day, expected, but at night, unwarranted.

As my birth date approaches, as I approach this arbitrary delineator, as we, both from nothing personified, approach each other, I am less and less able to move from this splendid chair. Granted, I am not alone, and my social etiquette, my intimate niceties, do not, let us say, exude perfume. The chair I am fond of because it is extremely solid, certainly in comparison to the table upon which I write. This table is of the folding sort and I, I sometimes lean too heavily upon its limited intentions, causing me to worry about its potential collapse, adjust my weight accordingly, or even withdraw, appalled at the heaviness, the brutality of my touch.

As I proceed, I tire, become frightened at where I could possibly, imaginably, be. Have I come all this way, beginning with such excitement, merely to camp, turgidly, here, wherever this place is? Perhaps tomorrow I will eat my way out of this pudding?

11. Soon I shall be below ground once again; for the third time. Even though it is only a train, I thrill at the importance of that first sentence. Doesn’t it offer such history, so many possibilities, excitement! My hand around the pen seems paler and thinner than usual, and unfamiliar aches reside in its bones and those of my arms. However, it is night, Winter, I ache and I am alive. Every week I travel to the West amongst the smokestacks and purveyors of exotic goods, to breathe. It is something of a Pilgrimage and hence I note its significance by travelling into the depths below the City, emerging to be renewed. Such a short life, yet always, constant renewal.

To be calm, quiet, with a spirit which governs my mind, my mind my body, is not a simple matter. It would be simple, however, to despair and do nothing. This is what I can say upon my return or, indeed, at any time, since they are mere words that require a sentence at most, a suitable voice, or pen. I, I have said and written a considerable amount that is not true, in many senses, and no longer wish to, but can’t help myself, given that I am in a variable mortal state.

12. To be on holiday in one’s own City requires a certain state of mind, a way of seeing all as new, of allowing oneself to leisurely wander through the tram until the perfect seat is found. It requires some sunshine, usually, but not always, and one of those unexpected days of having planned nothing. It need not be unexpected but