Monolith Cocktail Blog

Written by Rick Clarke/Illustrations by Andrzej Klimowski

Expanding the Monolith Cocktail’s remit to include more in the way of new literature and poetic musings of a kind, we are pleased to announce the serialization of burgeoning author and rallying beacon of the band Vukovar Rick Clarke’s new novel The Great Immurement. The first three chapters, kindly and perceptively illustrated by the much-respected Andrzej Klimowski, can be found below with an introduction from Monolith Cocktail contributor, budding author in his own right and Vukovar bandmate, Dan Shea.



INTRODUCTION UNDER NO DURESS

It’s not about our friendship or his influence on my own writing – not at all. What you are about to read is the process of years of reduction. It’s easy to vomit a stream of consciousness onto a blank page; far harder to chip the block away into something meaningful.

Rick has written something that, in my view, is beautifully emotive without ever being obvious. I feel he’s a great talent and I’m privileged to call him a friend and have the invitation to write this. Under no duress whatsoever. (Dan Shea)



THE GREAT IMMUREMENT

This is the first and last time there will be grounding in real-life, real-earth. All that flows forth from now is descension, are fever dreams; are misremembered and dismembered recollections of the disordered mind; are actual encounters of the im/possible death of The Great Immured. The six year span of this entrance into the Otherlands is where eternity ends, where the Abdication Of The Body begins.

Let me then create you.

This is the end. This is the start.

Let me then begin this eternal six years. Today is the oldest I will ever be again. I lock ourselves away, I construct no exit and I instruct a way out to those outside, those negligible energies. My name means first and last.

The walls are concrete, the doors are concrete, the windows are concrete. There was a concrete fantasy. I stare straight into the greyness.

There is no-thing here, no descriptions. All that is needed is no-thing; there should never be a need.

When we are immured, when we see it from the inside, we see that all light is absent and all light is present; this retinal pessimism dictates that there is nothing to see, but it’s all that we can see. And then all times are in the mind’s eye.



THE CONCRETE FANTASY




There’s a town. The town in which we lived, actually. At the moment it sickens this irrelevant little God with the halfway devotions to our own aesthetic ideals. It wants/wanted to be a brutalist wasteland, but is as yet, as is now, uncommitted. A place as a partial seizure.

The people are inbred (which is fine) and offer nothing except hedonism (which is fine) which we can get anywhere. We want something less, we want less than nothing.

Of this town, I am thine only saint; the Patron Saint Of The Archaic, and I need my own continuous monument.

We keep looking into the every-greying grey, my stare travels through eight interlocking circles. We decide it can’t be broken, and so, for now, it can’t.

I dream of razing the town in a similar circles, a radius of 13 miles in fact. And I want the garden to be perfectly flat concrete. A Concretopia. A blinding greyness.

In the V V V centre is a building. It’s an imposing concrete cube. There are no windows except one tiny one on each of the four faces. Every one of the four is near the top, right in the middle, so that I can look upon my Winter, my own purgatory. But we never will. There are mirrors in the windows, designed in a miracle way to only have a view as though I were looking from the outside. We only want to look upon my creation.

We hear us think of the inside, but we cut this from our mind. Some of us prefer an illusion, some of us prefer the mystery. Once the unknown becomes known, it can be the Death of Desire. I’d rather suffer from my love of all this because at least this malady has a melody, rather than the emptiness of content. Or maybe all these things all other ways around.

Dim the vision and stop the tape – and now it didn’t happen. The secrets of the secrets are still hidden.



THE VISIBLE MAN




Knock knock? You are all the guest we need.

Knock knock. Okay.

An invisible fist upon my invisible door.

I reach up and out of my invisible chair, turn to the invisible lamp and reluctantly switch it on.

The invisible rays strike my eyes, strike my face and light up my invisible room. It’s unforgivingly vast.

Nothing is real, we offhandedly tell myself. It’s easily forgotten.

My invisible window allows me to peer into the invisible unknown.

I can see the invisible man, flooded by his invisible coat and holding in his invisible hand, an invisible letter.

I take the invisible envelope which contains an invisible message, which should enthral me or at least catch my attention, but I find that it doesnt.

Not much does, not least invisible objects of invisible non-desire.

I sink back into my invisible chair.

In silence, I take up my invisible pen and so begin to scrawl across invisible paper a lackluster response.

Not quite invisible, but not far off. I smile – somewhat – into my invisible mirror and thank an invisible God that I may still see myself.


Author Rick Clarke/Illustrations by Andrzej Klimowski