[>>> TCOTM]

She stopped in the lodge and ransomed her travels for good. Sophia Reich was made of fibres. In sally gardens where a former suicide pact had left us alive, we drank milk and blood, buoyant with maudlin promise. Indiscretions in abbreviated forms were austere manifestos upon the characters of a rock. Led by customs to knowledge of moonshine ratios, we were in-commensurable figments, hi-fidelity skeletal junkie-stations, insignia of simulation. Spoken powers and knowers leapt upon our bandwagon. The species of composition, offspring of red setters’ component precipitations, were voiced in a space between antiquity and the surface of a mysterious unpredictability. No-one wants to be a statistic!

José and the Ziegfeld girls, the follies, reached a crescendo exquisite as human sacrifice. The Winter bride played a game of swans. Midnight fishermen provided food. The consumptives with azure poise and balance of the words of the sea were slow-flowing out of this era. Our brothers’ and sisters’ pride swelled the gates of the citadel, ageing the lakes and the rivers. Antagonism darkened the sentries with a fiendish raiment of punishment: the reasoning of Man. Without astonishment, José endured. Market sellers and barmaids had found an affinity in his animal / trickster renaissance, sustenance for an extraordinary “Scientific American”.

Sophia Reich was soaking wet, as if she’d been out in the rain for a long time. And she smiled. Reluctantly, I asked whether the laughing helped. The hoax of finiteness was incandescent in any prejudicial study. That kind of registered bestiality, though, we’d had enough of. Bizarrely, in accordance with melodic meditation upon the vendor, Paganini was found placated by the engine roars of the henchmen, hirelings of the autocratic and brutish protégé of ———. The cats howled out in the yard.

The all-terrain vehicles taking a pounding for homeland over Inca formations at a snow-covered peak, at the plateau for the red setters were set for the forgotten Eldorados. The gorilla men were on adrenalin, the birds on the reserves migrating. An artificial hornets’ nest was believed to have been robbed by the Russians, no less. No-one could object to Sophia and I running amok. Even if some of the employees did still have copies of our initial letters.

A student renting a cottage in the Highlands of Scotland said: “Maybe you are catching butterflies with vinegar instead of honey”.

José mentioned at the Trade Fair at the Planetarium that he was good at drawing analogies. So, he helped himself arrogantly to the nearest, which had already collapsed next to a cement mixer. As though he couldn’t believe he’d be all chewed up, still was he as dazzling as Hermes.

I, Don Antonioni, discarded metaphor. And I, Don Antonioni, mutilated the mercantile, ingratiate pet. Because I planted aluminium vigils, my plant was the gypsy lizard cadaver.

Horseback was resurrected at the crusade, then unlocked. Speculation in the Nebula was at a ratio radiantly over-imaging a tale of omnivorous subterranean pagans whose ancient art, poetry and relics were of one character, the ruins of their folklore and romantic ritual – wounds of paradise in bronze – another. The laser construct of control in the social habits of harvesters was poisoning with backbreaking teamwork, with diamonds and lasers, the skeletons of clergymen and sheriffs.

“Good commission”, I said, when cedar resin passed for money for cattle, camouflaged across my breast.

I was frolicking with one of the cats. Without talking shop, the creature lifted its tranquil flank against the bark of the pine. It would rather have rested there than learn of my travelling salesman’s unanimous malice. My nostrils flared with the decay of prophetic reverie on its predestined orbit, articulate, but too well-conducted and mediæval. And like a Moorish rapid erosion, never quite the sun slender on the plaza, my cruelty pumped into those who coincided, returned to their own pleading voices.

The key was Sophia Reich. I was holding onto the workers’ lathes on average. I took responsibility for her teenage years. Longing for our conservatory conversations where we didn’t listen to “each other”, our sunken dreams were hooked to the inspectorate, fools suffocated by classification, buried like the monuments to Cordelia’s shadows. No joking, Cordelia’s shadows united by eloquence of an insurance broker who had estimated a misappropriation of capabilities. Those aristocrats, judges, those cops and those medical men, they were all so… lifelike. The details of their eyes and skin colour were like the withdrawn products of anti-democracy.

Our Martian, revolutionary republic was armed with the emblem of an arcane order which had brought vaccines and soothing balms after my torture at the hands of the media pundits. The shapes of the skulls of a workers’ discussion group were anti-democratic. After the party appointments, we adopted the nationalists clockwise and anticlockwise in their hordes. Storm troopers appeared at the Eastern front, their maternal intelligences flourishing. We glanced over the delinquency notice and barefoot departed back to the conservatory, accurately as tissues pinned to the sky. We’d take care of the too steep and wide. The turf had paled but we couldn’t be selfish. We had sold all our works to see kin-folk to fit.

In a spare room in a filthy house, sharks were crossing the Pacific ocean. Earth’s continents, fragments of its colonies under the floorboards, were insatiably of a belief that a lighthouse sets fire to ships. In another mausoleum, the National War Savings Committee was reconstituted by deselected laws of inheritance. Nomadic wanderers were dear to the Colossus. Roaming became the continuity of citizenship. The Great Pyramid where immortals’ spectacular fantasies transcended its very function for glinting, spirit-driven money, rivalled time. Yet time feared only the Sphinx. Dominated young mongrel minds in the column spaces were febrile in their bid to harness or subdue pyramids.

Sniffing, ubiquitous, more frequent and arbitrary toward the end of the afternoon, the most aeronautic, monkfish dune, in less than five minutes, began to smell of a cemetery smell. A preying mantis’ gang of road workers built the sleepwalkers’ false omens.

Then equilibrium was answered. And I, Don Antonioni, denoted the place of universal gravitation by the crystallisation of earthenware sculptures. A rodent spitting venom over the far side of capricious obeisance was hermetically sealed into the revelling by iron crossbeams.

Sophia Reich was in a sesshin without informing the nation. She had the lives of her loved ones in tow. Her galvanised heart was unbroken testimony to the token of a sentiment. Not by how it ticked, but cataclysmically reduced to another review of her heroinism. Unfortunates were cut to the quick. To belong to the Phenomenal World, anybody has to have at least a mediocre brain. Rather more, a universal deep thought with no more diplomas than the honorary. She believed she should have the integrity of hazardous cause and the genetic consequence to all doubt. Speechless, she invaded the square root of invasion plan bases for the onslaught.

Driven away and denied to confer, converse, or compromise on the embargo issue, the description was complete:

I. SEAL IMHAIGR ESU
II. COIMSMISL NELUKA
III. BRATHAI RO
V. CONGU FO IENAS

On the telephone, the concert was in an hour. The deepening crimson sky was streaked with azure. There was a dizziness in the chest. On the psychometrist’s plastic chair was a brochure with an hilarious message. I was dangerously addicted to such jests. “As Time Goes By”! The number of staff was confirmed. No grandparents were bewitched. Sandalwood and pine scent filled the air. Comic were the fatal results of wisecracks drifting in from the park on helium.

Late afternoon, I sauntered over to a Victorian bandstand. There she was with her mind-control smile, her raven hair, her violin and laptop. I squeezed her in her riding coat, and we danced right up past the clouds to kiss the crescent moon.

“Hey!” cried the saxophonist, “Here’s a tune for you.”

Sophia Reich gloated while condescending a distant view. Like song sheets of the Elizabethans, the park trees’ cosmic phrase-love was of a splendour worthy of the light of intuition. To think that Sophia, a voluptuary, lived in a forgotten movie instead of a dream of dying. She had fair skin, wore plastic boots. She entered a taxi cab.

My stupor was relentlessly replenished. Sophia took up her lantern and dispensed with the crocodile teeth. She kept the inferno in the lantern. But not the receipt. An amorous scent of sandalwood and pine pervaded the mass. I watched the spectators as she opened a bittersweet letter, talking about her mourning and the lantern. She wondered, “How splendid?”, and made polite excuses for her sister who had once slept with her next to the lantern. Her sister’s hair had caught fire, what with sleeping under the same roof as Sophia and all that. I caught a rare sight of this Titaness in an enlightening mood. Whenever she spoke of the lantern it was taken, covered in a quite plain lace. Inside she installed her friends, home and drinking again, with increasing gaiety.

Conclusive artefacts were produced from the caravan. Triggering a chain reaction, sleeping through the noise, my syrupy prayers went running, tallying with ultraviolet bars at the root of the canal. Even the pigeons could see what we couldn’t be doing. The honeymoon did some talking with nothing to fear. Those aligned with our fragments, with property’s providence, had been alerted by a soothsayer’s enemy fire. In the jaws of the crocodile, its teeth were neither rivers or mirrors, or hearts of darkness. The front stood transfixed, summoned over the edge of the world by random search and destroy patterns.

With deserved respect, we resumed as mere data, for when our bones were decomposed we’d eventually be sent the memory of our lost childhoods encrypted. Plainly without any mind for what had transpired, our only concern now was for how we could gaffer-tape them down. Out of an act of guaranteeing a surveillance visor, at close of day the sanctuaries were opened. At close of business, our skeletons were still playing draughts while consulting the clients. Secure in clean lucre, no substantial attitude of ingenuous or true memory could eliminate any of the records belonging with the tropical heat of angelic order. The central identification had made its match with perverted spin doctors. Any geographical error had us scavenging for scraps of the past.

So the attack had a change of plan. Government statistics had been decomposed by flunkies, non-civilians who were always disappearing into a dancing bear’s whiskers. The ringmaster, sucking on lime rind from the clown’s punch, recommended communing with lost kilometres. Uncertainty took life-as-data as missing from the serialisation of continuity, with hieroglyphics, disappointingly, and not by definition detained as such. The flags of our perverse realisation were raised. We had been moulded together upside-down out of peat and fog.

In the laboratory, the Colossus was fantasising about classical drowning universes retrieved and stolen from the wreckage. He gained a large following outside of the core. Over many of the mountains, tongues were in cash. The material was beginning to acquire properties. We constituted a fine mesh between fragments of live ammunition and the metal detectors.

It was Summer. Sophia and I were absent from all discipline, bedecked in dazzling and elaborate costumes. Perilously, shining with feathers, we had adopted the prophesied fury. Our first step was to say how in the press we’d been compared to unknown animals. If fortune failed to shine upon us, then we were just like all the other effigies. Assembling in the riot of perfume, and at one within an immaculate chaos, the garden, once hard-bitten by Winter, was now terrific for our jubilant leisure. By the tributary, we were led upon a great roof of gold. The aqueduct savoury of abject peoples were spoils of the pill age risen in whirlwinds. Discrepancies in the true science of the proper names of the founders were taken away, permeated with the breath of a departure from idolatry. Our one refuge was found in lethal release, in ashes, in slow motion. Through this hourglass, we fell into our combined breath. It was paramount to return to greater arguments. Why we ever waited for the hive-off, the nestling of deliverances – our forces’ projection, its logic was to provide the answer for. The prospectus depicted forgetting.

Fainting, the sweet loyalty of our allegiance was positing another life instinct. Unfettered and unmoved, José, our beloved aggressor and friend, had fabricated a philosophy. Destroyed and unnatural, smashed on monotony in a special room where speaking and eating overcame him, his honorary degree was a chemical product of delusion. All our superstitious beliefs and controversial dreams together founded a new breakthrough.

When the hearts began, when the brains began, we decided how and when. We, us, could annihilate or fertilise our memories by pinpointing the location of our identities in cardboard cartons. A very delicate retracing of dissident curiosity in this empowerment was a living critique, a tribute to the war between the civilised and the barbarian. The colour of our contentment alone was dependent on the provision of material food, shelter for an underground city, pushed from the lips, totally. The stealer sun was shining, lathering flowers nurtured by a maiden’s creator. Overnight, metal never ran away. Painted ships and painted faces were joined with a magnificence alive to most men very fond of oil.

Quickening of the cells was always confirmation of activity at the gates. The anchor was wise, a new paradigm ascending with no frills to the core, precipitated by an amalgam of fossilised arches. Little by little, cold air came into the boardroom. There was another new cataclysm. The sediment layers of ashes crowning the obstructors were animate as neck ornaments. The resuscitated peaks only appeared as attestation to precious stone. The intermediate bronze, absent from the simultaneity of the totem, moved forth as a pillar within a cube submerged. Paintings levitated then crashed to the ground. The opalescence of the buried foundations was surrounded by rays or combs divided into infinite numbers extended over the shores and spread over all that lived and moved, striking the earth. The magnetic recording device, the Nebula, was retracting like a vertical domino set. On chalkboard veiled by human hands, transubstantiated and more invisible, a trident emblematic of its own accord, was at one with the matrix. Feint, monstrous and auspicious plagiarisms, theoretic permutations in proximity to a stifling of the figurative choral interlacing of triangular morsels, were authentic derivatives conforming with the surrogate plasm.

At the first circle, the hybrids, until negative, enclosed alternately to denote a head rising out of a lotus. In the plurality of the exterior, a volcano was consulting a bible. Any faithful visitor was told to reveal the odyssey containing information on the black soil art. And there it was, the curfew of the paradigm, recuperated and anchored, a witness to torch-bearing wax dummies, staggering a scheme for that part of enjoyment which is the lifting the burden of care. The portal magnifier descended at the twelfth hour of the twelfth day. The loop was squandered to avoid a meddlesome forgiving truce with queue skippers. Casinos were crowded out by relevant tidings from the guild of evidence.

Sophia Reich’s incisive demeanour was such that it would defend with respect disrule. She meant it. Everybody was a one-way street in her freedom and pleasure galaxy. She gave them all up for the acquisition of a crystal skull with no authority. The accompanying music was sampled from an infomercial. Sent to fight for democracy, stuffed with feathers, we watched a rocking chair prettify our daughter’s wedding. Most of the children would be people with an appreciation for an investment in the future. In an old cottage in Finland there in the 14th Century, children were rocking in chairs. The new models had some remarkable features not available on the old models. There was nothing to waste on luxuries. Coins replaced pills in the tea, good and kind. We had lazy thoughts on a nice evening about the uniqueness of youth, in a mahogany vessel, flying our compasses over the pale horizon. Shock transpired once more. We had more answers for those we kissed. We were simulations designed in the speed of the softening of the morning. The syndicate pronounced our liberated presence in the city as outlawed. For linden leaf and Valkyrie tale, I remember how the ciphers transmogrified elderberry and clematis at Earl’s Court.

With so much freedom, Sophia Reich was back in harness in the service industries. Her pet project, serenity, was a secret agent, a woman who raced dogs and trafficked in drugs and firearms. Trafficking was the opposite of conscience which is beside the point. The scientists’ porters waited courteously at the café. Susperial declaration of a most dilatory arraignment was their flagrant whisper. Skirting the dawn, the wolfhound at the mass observation site was at the pinnacle of worthy achievements, recuperating a passage in Tamburlaine in Winter textuality. The imagery at this time was deliberately forsaken by the assumptions scientific monikers lapse into, which entailed prophecy.

We were now on factual belief rotation which in the past and up ’til now had never been anything but grafted on. We couldn’t afford significance, at least that which you have chosen to apply. We could not remain separate from childhood and angelic order, and began to identify the abundant ones, whether or not you choose to regard the properties their names suggest. The age of which I talk about how we lived was a time of fruitfulness, prosperity, gladness and joy. Perhaps it was all fated. It was ultimately an inevitability.

Our contemporaries had succumbed to the same futility as our peers. Yet our peers resolved the domestic crises. The modern contempt which is to subjugate visions of prophecy and seership can only satisfy the appetite for them.

You will have the sensation of being drawn to recall, imagine, presume, on account of a reference to a distance from an object of familiarity or strangeness, a view before you which you cannot premeditate.

In the laboratory, José mentioned that he’d suddenly fallen on his knees at the hooded tributary – flickering whirlwind of the nocturne – that he’d never had dead children. Remembering to sharpen the schizophrenic encyclopædia with the garrote for permanent demonology – a stimulus to anguish – I was amnesiac to have destroyed the life which didn’t emigrate. The sadomasochist pigment, a monocycle of corned beef, vanished. Spontaneously, the patio tiles turned opaque. In the heady fumes of melancholia, in tandem then, we were at the perimeters of documentary paranoia, like pure fiction reconciled with mystery, like silhouettes.

There was true admonishment, for I, Don Antonioni, found out: the people asking for formaldehyde, don’t. I had foreseen where the shepherd lay slain. Associative behaviour fashioned another supper time. Then we devoured ourselves with fuel for arguments, proposals and relegation. However we nurtured them, these freed us by their capacity to inspire and invigorate the promise and splendour of the season, which was a false assumption. Although it was founded on the meting out of an act we committed which was not unnatural after all. Perhaps an act of vengeance, say, against our rival in love, the changing of the seasons?

Most of my theories were built on the horn section which fed a silent thing into my hairy ears while soaring above the captive unpredictability of the drums, so as never to leave. I was pacing the corridors after supper, swallowed up by the city’s assumptions. I heard a spine snap somewhere. There was a slight loss of breathing. So many stars were just asking for it. They had to be fucked into oblivion. The lights of civilisation would have to go out, once and for all.

Spinning at the oscillation of dialogue was the affirmed negation of the Western world transposed into an image of a person who subverted ritual commercial attitudes by means of a procedure devised contrary to the sheer anonymity of Nirvanic corporations. Beautiful and priceless bronze deities were explained away as the succession of all cultures. Their phenomenal configurations were concatenations of a media scam. Græco-Roman archetypes were translated into stockbroker stereotypes. Laughing and groaning, so-called dislocations of naturalism, or rather realism, were spawned by gorgeous animated cartoons, crackling and humming like refrigerators. A polished series of manufactured emotions, and the display of a particular emotion, was not pure feeling. Harmonic and random, redoubling the pitch and unlocking the gates, horns and pipes were regaining the place of peace and seeking the rest of a great drumming. The ventilator, a rarity, blew a kiss to all of you again.

To think! – the Summer was over. Our country had tried to forget history, in hysteria spun in chains nerved to up force chains. We grew elated by terms, with lives saturated with the juice of our lips to succumb to, or leave ourselves at, with passionate overtures of nuances erotic as the prime constituent. Naturally driving the prow of free radical supposition, having opened the aperture onto these mysterious ciphers, the open road was looming in the distance like a lucky charm.

The Core of the Machine | text & images © A. A. Walker