Our Daily Bread 528: Dreamworld Or: The Fabulous Life Of Dan Treacy And His Band The Television Personalities.
July 18, 2022
GUEST POST/BOOK REVIEW
Rick ACV.
Vukovar helmsman and burgeoning fiction writer Rick ACV has joined the Monolith Cocktail pool of collaborators this month with his review of a new upcoming alternative bio of the idiosyncratic Dan Treacy. Next month sees the blog serialise Rick’s latest book, Astral Deaths/Astral Lights, after previously featuring his last surreal esoteric tome The Great Immurement.
‘Dreamworld Or: the fabulous life of Dan Treacy and his band The Television Personalities’ by Benjamin Berton (Ventil Verlag) 29th July 2022
To start at the end and then to end at the start – The life of Daniel Treacy of The Television Personalities is, nor was, a fabulous one, except seemingly near the start of it. Though his life is not yet over, Daniel’s story very nearly is. The last passage of ‘Dreamworld’ deals with this truth indelicately and head-on but transformed; made poignant & bittersweet in a mono-no-aware fashion through surreal storytelling rather than recounting of actual events. This is a common mode throughout Dreamworld and works all the better for it. Fans of the TVPs are not oblivious to their obscurity and the lack of documented history, not to mention Treacy’s constant disappearances (homelessness, prison time etc.) and lack of public ‘limelight’ since the mid-90s. To therefore have written Dreamworld as a straightforward biography would have been dull. Dull and incredibly short.
Instead, Benjamin Berton mixes cold-light-of-the-day fact with fiction. Or a bending of fact. The lines are blurred, it is sometimes clumsily done (perhaps due to the translation) but even then it still provides an interesting take on what, to those unaware of Treacy & TVPs, could be an unremarkable story – musician starts band, band doesn’t quite make it big, man has drug problems, drug problems cause life problems et sic. To further this strange take on a biography, along with the surreal passages, Berton invents his own dialogue between the pro/antagonists when recounting ‘real’ times and tales from Treacy’s past, and this is all done in present tense. What happens, then, is the reader is transported through little time warps to actually be THERE and THEN and experience it all first hand but through a haze. Like remote viewing. At times, it is extraordinarily visceral.
The aforementioned surreal passages will not be spoiled here. They may sometimes be clumsy & the humour within somewhat strange and stilted, yes, but they are clever & cutting, and deeply touching. Much like the music of Dan Treacy and The Television Personalities himself and themselves. Watch out for Geoffrey Ingram. Dreamworld jumps backwards and forwards through different times, from different angles (much like Mr Ingram’s archival footage…), which keeps the book jittery and from ever losing steam. All of this adds up to a book that should be sought out even by people who have never heard of its subject matter.
A lot is made of the ‘spirituality’ of Treacy’s music throughout and his own personal approach to life. I would suggest more esoteric & metaphysical. What endeared this book to me more was the strange ‘psychic’ links I encountered while reading. Whether it be people I actually know, similar experiences or topics that I had been discussing with other people that very day, the pages constantly vomited up coincidences, right from the off with Jimmy Page, Satanism and a certain place and a certain reaction. It would be foolish to recommend the book based on something as personal, but it is perhaps the strange style in which it is written that allows for this sort of reaction. I finished reading this on Syd Barrett’s birthday. Fans of Treacy will recognize the relevance.
Although the book seems well researched and v v v informed – sometimes even poetic in its recalling of facts – there are some inconsistencies so cannot be relied upon totally as a factual history. (For example – there is a section about a band and a singer I know personally that is so bitter about them and so insulting and which I know most of the account to be untrue.) There are a lot of pictures and posters and photos in Dreamworld, which gives a great visual history. However, just because it isn’t a totally factually accurate history it does not mean it isn’t the truth. The Truth about someone is how they appear to other people, is the mythos around them, is the aura they give off, is something deeper than what day something happened or what words escaped their lips. The Truth is so much more important than The Fact. It is so much more entertaining, too. Invest yourself fully into Treacy & Berton’s Dreamworld for an Astral adventure.
Our Daily Bread 440: Vukovar ‘The Great Immurement’
April 21, 2021
ALBUM REVIEW/Dominic Valvona
Vukovar ‘The Great Immurement’
(Other Voices Records) 23rd April 2021
In the metaphorical (and actually quite literal) wake of last year’s chthonian mini-opus The Colossalist, Vukovar now bring us the second chapter of their most recent incarnation and equally as consumed with vague auguries of fallen empire and gothic yearned romanticism, The Great Immurement.
In an atmospheric sonic vision of Bosch’s triptychs, this latest (the 9th album proper) work marks the second in a triumvirate of albums under the ‘Eternity Ends Here’ series (The Colossalist being the opening account in this saga). As with the previous industrial, post-punk and spiritual hungered epic, The Great Immurement pays homage to the dearly departed; featuring as it does the final song that the group’s co-conspirator of recent years and inspiring guide Simon Morris recorded with them. As a codex, nee mini-requiem, that last impassioned-esoteric-pop-song-hidden-in-a-mire, ‘Cement & Cerement‘, is a brutalist romantic anthem from the crypt of mental fatigue: pitched somewhere between Joy Division and Alan Vega catching a lift on Death In June’s vapour. Morris committed suicide in 2019 but his spirit continues to affect the band; looming large over both this and the last album. If you ever need to know just how influential but also how personal his death was for Vukovar, who’d managed to corral the much-venerated underground figure (notably for his instigation of The Ceramic Hobs) into their ranks, please take time out to read, one of the founding members of this pyre of a band, Dan Shea’s stark but intimate account of their friendship (an account the Monolith Cocktail published back in 2020; coincidently just a week before lockdown in the UK).
Morris may very well have been part of Vukovar’s constantly imperiled lineup if he hadn’t decided to vanish and leave this mortal realm as he did. His involvement was part of one of many changes in the band’s fortunes. Pressing forward though, constant warden and co-founder Rick Clarke is not only joined by another Hob and oft collaborator, Jane Appleby, but once more embraces his foil Dan Shea, who for various reasons in a fraught dynamic left to pursue other projects, notably, with fellow Vukovar stalwart (though missing from this lineup) Buddy Preston, forming the low-rent, lo fi bedsit synth Beauty Stab duo. In what is a convoluted historiography and rock family tree nightmare, and in what maybe seen as a case of ‘pop eating itself’ Meta, the neu- Vukovar inception actually cover one of Beauty Stab’s anthems, ‘O Eden’. Adding a certain gravitas and making a last supper out of the original, it now kind of makes sense as a Vukovar song that never was. Both versions are great it must be said, though the Stab’s was more Soft Cell, whilst this appropriation is more OMD misty march of yearned reverence; swaddled by a shapeless noise and opportune stabbed high piano notes: still bloody magnificent.
Followers of the blog may recognize the name of this latest waltz-at-the-end-of-time, The Great Immurement being also the title of Clarke’s voyeuristic supernatural peephole entombed book, which we serialized during the pandemic nightmare that was 2020. Though separate from the album’s themes and concepts, an illustration (etched by the celebrated Andrzej Klimowski; a great coup for Clarke and the band that was) from that sordid travail dons the cover – as it also did The Colossalist.
The Great Immurement, as the title suggests, denotesa certain sense, anxiety of confinement from which to break free. And so most of the album’s music seems to smoother, even overpower with an echo chamber of reverberated voices, malingering traces of spirits, competing opinions and fallen angels. There’s even a fallen ‘Icarus’ figure, trapped in multiple veils of sorrow, industrial fizz and vapours; with a searching, decried vocal attempting to escape the ether.
In the feted mode of spiritualism, Vukovar turn to the Psalms; another cry of freedom soundtracked by pleaded despair, communal deliverance and a brilliant stark but intimate voice that channels Ian Curtis, Ian McCulloch and Charlie Megira. An estranged linger of religion permeates the entire album in that kind of post-punk battle between haunted Catholic gilded guilt and alternative pathways of spiritual guidance, bordering on the occult. The sort of practice that Coil, Fritch and Current 93 had a kink for. It won’t come as a surprise to find out that Vukovar recorded a collaborative album with the Current’s Michael Cashmore (2018’s Monument), or that Coil, and the affiliated Tibet and Balance all prove an obvious inspiration. They even re-purpose Current 93’s ‘Rome For Douglas P’; turning the source into a vortex vision of Suicide on a quickened sordid rock ‘n’ roll charge with the renamed ‘When Rome Falls’: A real crushed but energetic industrial soul boy vocal is echoed in a backbeat tunnel, as the funeral pyre flames rise over a new Rome.
In the middle of this vacuum you might well hear the lingers and outright borrowing of a Siouxsie’s Banshees, early Cure, Christian Death, Talk Talk and even a less pompous Sisters Of Mercy. Yet Vukovar don’t do things the easy way; contorting, obscuring and vaporising the melodies, riffs and the niceties, even vocals as much as possible without losing the intrinsic value of their message and new romantic lament. True confessionals, aspirations and pained release caught up in a venerable maelstrom, Vukovar’s middle passage of ambitious anguished caustic industrial soul, experimentation and empire crumbling Cassandra oracles continue to impress; ringing even more inspiration from the macabre and mentally gruelling. We can only await the final piece of this fated triptych with baited breath.
The Vukovar Cannon As Featured On The Monolith Cocktail:
2020: Cement & Cerement (here)
2020: The Colossalist’ (here)
2019: Cremator (here)
2018: Monument (here)
2018: Infinitum (here)
2017: Puritan (here)
2017: The Clockwork Dance (here)
2017: Fornication (here)
2015: Emperor (here)
Also…
Rick Clarke’s The Great Immurement
Opening Chapters (here)
Parts 4-6 (here)
Parts 7-9 (here)
Parts 10-12 (here)
Parts 13-15 (here)
Parts 16-18 (here)
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Written by Rick Clarke/Illustrations by Andrzej Klimowski
As you may know if you’re a regular follower of The Monolith Cocktail, we’ve been serialising a number of new novels and writings from debut authors over the last two years; beginning with Ayfer Simm‘s Istanbul pyschogeograhy A Rumor In Üsküdar in 2019. Following on Ayfer’s heels we’re now serialising the Lynchian semi-biographical and incomprehensible jukebox set wanderings of Dan Shea (Bordellos, Vukovar and Beauty Stab infamy) and Rick Clarke’s (bandmate of Shea and rallying beacon of the band Vukovar, and Horrible Porn) new novel The Great Immurement: The previous fifteen chapters of which have appeared over the last two months.
We continue with those NSFW semi-esoteric imaginings below, and bring you the final chapters, ‘Infinitum’,‘The Garden Of The Parabolic Mirror With One Thousand Eyes’, ‘The Angels Of Cremation Cremate The Great Immured, and ‘‘The Body Abdicator’; illustrated as always by the illustrious Andrzej Klimowski.
INFINITUM
Whose body is gone? To recount is to doubt. To understand is to un-exist. Whose body is whose?
I inserted my penis into the lubrication port – the uncomfortable tickle from the sudden spread of cold gel upon the head of my genitalia remained the same each day, and had done since I first started producing sperm all those decades ago when my body was different, much different, and I was just a boy.
Our leaders made a point of rearing us to be aware and to be intelligent just to show us how stupid we are; farmed bovine only alive for the purpose of being milked for our seed. They kept us justabout- content and satisfied so that we would never chase nor imagine a a grand change. We were fed, sheltered, occupied, cleansed, educated and given a certain amount of freedom. All as long as we provided our milk at least once a day. We don’t need or want to exist much outside of our small but comfortable rooms. One click of a button and you could change the appearance of your room instantly. I kept mine neutral. We had unlimited access to any leisure, any art to occupy the mind, to never feel dulled, to never want more.
The men with defects were destroyed straight away in the abattoir, along with the elderly, infirm and the ones whose milk ran dry, or missed their appointment, or became ill – this was rare as the leaders made every effort to stop the spread or cultivation of diseases.
The enforcers who took the no-longer-productive to the abattoir were to be avoided. It’s hard to understand what they were, whether they were actually human or not. They would appear out of nowhere, seemingly made from a rubbery, shiny burgundy type overall that covered them head to toe, with a gap for the stainless steel framed goggles. They came in armed – unnecessarily so as they would never be attacked – with a 7 foot high steel stick, atop of which a complex, multi-layered metal mesh square was fitted, very much akin to a fly swatter. It gave off a hideous high pitched feedback sound which didn’t have to try very hard to persuade us to stay in our rooms. They walked slowly, like a funeral procession, fly swatter swung ever so carefully like a towering, nodding bringer of torment.
———
I pulled my penis from the lubrication port and held the thick, throbbing fleshy tube in my hand. Filled with an odd sort of pride I had never felt before for the glistening succulence of my powerful erection, I moved to the back wall of my room and inserted it into what me and my fellows liked to call the ‘glory hole’ – a perfectly smoothed round hole built into the glossy concrete. The extraction was strong, almost sucking the semen straight from the sack, and the orgasm was weak, as was usually the case.
An alarm sounded as I wiped myself down. I looked up to see my walls flashing red – none of this was particularly uncomfortable; the lights weren’t garish and the alarm was quiet.
Gas.
I awoke briefly to see I was being led by the enforcers towards the abattoir. I caught occasional glimpses of things in fits of occasional consciousness. I saw a female in the flesh for the first time – there was a cluster of them in the sterile room around me. Some busy with machinery, others staring at me in-between furiously taking down notes.
———
I found myself in the body of a two year old, my surroundings felt homely and close to my heart. I was surely experiencing the life of an ancestor long forgotten.
It was clear to me that I had misbehaved. I looked down, pouting, in a mixture of shame for my behaviour and defiance in the face of being disciplined. I felt like I’d been sitting on this naughty step for forever, though it couldn’t have been longer than a minute. The moment was broken in the most tender way possible as a hand descended down in front of me towards my own; my Father’s silent indication that all was forgiven and that I should take it, and walk on alongside him, wherever that may be – into the living room… into the wild… into death. At that moment, at that age, at that awe, wherever he would lead, I would follow.
There is a blurring of lines in this immurement. One death is all death and all death brings are these strange fevers.
THE GARDEN OF THE PARABOLIC MIRROR WITH ONE THOUSAND EYES
All romance and romantic ideals, all meeting of souls and all other proclamations of singular love all move their story to one place; it is the place of the height of feeling, and, also the place of the death of it. The Great Immured takes a look from a window that no longer exists.
To move quickly, to go with haste.
We dragged our unresponsive flesh to the place where we meet thee.
Corridors of vicious brambles and sharp-end smashed glass – these tours met with insolence and nonchalance. Hands torn in desperate pulls on barbed wire spurs, skin encrusted in assortments of filth.
Always just beyond, always just one more lifetime of effort away… Non-paths seemingly leading straight TO but then away FROM this exalting garden, and if hope had begun in the first place then it would surely end. And time…
Time passes, running in the direction of our next encounter. Oppressive in its overwhelming manner; requesting everything of thee, to offer up thy life, but in turn, thy life becoming enriched by it.
…and still time passes. That is until we and thee clasp hands once more in this sacred place of reflection and refraction.
Not even time can find us there.
The fire of thine eyes, the care of our lips.
Time sighs – it knows it can’t get us. It is nothing. Together we have escaped nothingness.
X X X
The parabolic mirror with a thousand eyes, a thousand stars, a thousand stares, stands majestic in its corner of overgrowth, cracking the damp concrete and remnants of another place upon which it now rests.
‘Lord’ we say ‘sever our souls.’
The thousand eyes, thousand stars, stare us down but not without sympathy.
Us vessel-snatchers know the power already.
Our prayer: when we go and meet in the garden of our dreams, let us lose our arms, lose our legs, melt into the air, cut our friends, cut our hair, melt into one.
But in this meeting, in the absence of time, in the weariness of these bodies that were not meant for us, the love of the parabolic mirror before us will give in, we will be entangled, as we already are, but we will be at play; at play freely in every sense of the word, at play always, never again lost and having to be found.
X X X
Every eye, every one of the thousand, of the thousand stars, must be stared to and at all at the same moment.
This is done.
The tearing sensation brings peace as much as the pain – the death of pain is swift, with the deftness of the promise of happiness bringing the relief.
As the visions of silence split, as the whole self splits, all sensation becomes far-away – still there but as though distanced by a tunnel; the light at the other end is clearly visible, however incomprehendable it may be, and so filtered by the air and space between.
X X X
The court of the parabolic mirror remained still. The eye and the star and the stare of each fragment sometimes darted quickly, seeing everything that can ever be seen, and sometimes looked lazily straight ahead. Nobody would ever find themselves in this part of the Otherlands again. But the promise of the parabolic mirror no longer mattered. It had performed the act of ultimate transformation it was always destined to. The stars would soon return home and the eyes would rest; the cracked glass would be covered with a wildfire moss and the passing of nothing would continue.
X X X
They played, hiding and seeking at opposite ends of the universes without fear of loss.
Play without the looming shadow of curfews.
Play without the need for justification.
Play without end.
The Great Immured turned from all he had seen before, bored, wishing that one day, true love would resemble something else, somewhere else. To take on a different form than a romantic notion of lost souls finding each other. Something he himself was guilty of.
THE ANGELS OF CREMATION CREMATE THE GREAT IMMURED
We witness
Without sympathy
But with love
Without warning thee from above
Of the terror and the peace that’s about to come
You’ll be our little grey sprinkles
Our magic little sprinkles
Our black and white cinders
Our tiny little presents to God.
THE BODY ABDICATOR
As now, during this final abdication of the body, leaves me unable to regard the room around me with any sense, the urge must lead somewhere.
This room… this room, its regard for me held in high contempt, this place itself as torture, this room with its ever changing features. It doesn’t allow me to sit and wait for everything to pass, this room.
There is the crying man in the corner. He cried. He says nothing, he cries. His crying un-comforts my inner child. His crying allows no words but I know its from a visceral memory, something he cant escape but I don’t even wish I could wish I could care.
I just want to move. To always move.
The Three Shades stand in formation, in pose, holding haggard in their stance their intention to lead. We lead each other. We understand each other. They accompany me and I them and then they are gone, or then I am gone; we are all gone. The Third Mind remains.
There is a ribbon I walk on, bending in and out of shape, in and out of time. There is a distant pounding, a drum march of war, a steady thunder getting further away and closer, concurrently. These are bodies without bodies all in front of me, all behind, all always moving, all moving together on this ribbon.
Without it, we are nothing. Without us, it means nothing.
All Previous Instalments Below:: Click On Image
Parts 13 – 15
Parts 10 – 12
Parts 7 – 9
Parts 4 – 6
Parts 1 – 3
Written by Rick Clarke/Illustrations by Andrzej Klimowski
As you may know if you’re a regular follower of The Monolith Cocktail, we’ve been serialising a number of new novels and writings from debut authors over the last two years; beginning with Ayfer Simm‘s Istanbul pyschogeograhy A Rumor In Üsküdar in 2019. Following on Ayfer’s heels we’re now serialising the Lynchian semi-biographical and incomprehensible jukebox set wanderings of Dan Shea (Bordellos, Vukovar and Beauty Stab infamy) and Rick Clarke’s (bandmate of Shea and rallying beacon of the band Vukovar) new novel The Great Immurement: The previous twelve chapters of which have appeared over the last two months.
We continue with those semi-esoteric imaginings below and bring you next trio of penultimate chapters, ‘Moonlight’, ‘The Silent Surgeon’, and ‘Trial By Fly; illustrated as always by the illustrious Andrzej Klimowski.
MOONLIGHT
And so to the Moon The Great Immured did non-look. He stared and wished. A spectral figure appeared and approached. He told:
The symbols have now shattered.
I was free. I probably lived an unremarkable life and probably still do. But the symbols did shatter, and they shattered for me and my Otherlands – the space between spaces.
The backstory:
It could be described as a romance. Lunar. A silent romance. We started to notice each other from afar, as these things normally demand have happen. I learned it could’ve been because of the connection between the dripdripdrip of the bloodbloodblood in the absence of Motherhood.
In vials I collected this space between fertility and held it up to the space between day. With a desperate, knowing affection we bathed in each other’s appearance. It became an obsession to the point where I refused to acknowledge its solar non-equivalent – convinced was I that this was an imposter, evil in its way, casting light on things that ought not be lit.
When I thought about my moon, I would think about the mechanics and likeliness and consequences of its perforation.
I could grow a penis. I would sharpen the very end into a point with the veil’s blade and gently press it against the tough silvery surface, like against an eardrum, and hold it in a position just before its desecration. My limbs would twitch in a glorious anticipation. I would enjoy that position for a lifetime; neither in life nor crossing the threshold into death. Its skin, a leathery elastic, at peak indentation.
I now feel that sickly feeling in the very pit of the stomach whereby I want to do something with all my might but with all my might know I shouldn’t, like holding something fragile and valuable out of a high window, or stepping from the chair with rope-tight-round-neck. Eventually it’s going to drop, by accident or perpetrator’s design.
I press that little bit further forward with grown, sharpened penis and it begins. A warm ooze coming over me, sticky and thick. It’s only a small opening so I drive myself in and out and in and out and in and out again and the scent is of… the feel is of… the sound is of… the taste is of… the sight is of… I can’t speculate on this.
After a few encounters I lost everything there ever was except for my love’s glow. “I am the light” said it, and “The Light Is My Leader” said I; LVX MEA DVX.
It got bigger and bigger.
Each previous encounter it was flirting with other things, dancing with the formless smoke and clouds. But I didn’t mind. However, one clear night it had eyes only for me and me alone. That was the night…
I rose, PM. I would soon be feeling the true force of nature. I don’t know much about so-called cosmic forces and I find ridiculous the way people talk about them. But I felt what I felt.
It was the moon, my lover, my king, my queen and all things in between.
I stepped outside into our eternal garden – I didn’t feel the cold.
I looked up and saw the moon, full, in all its glory.
The clouds were moving unusually quickly.
A hole remained in them, connecting me and my love so that its gaze would not stray, connecting us personally, speaking to me.
I finally managed to give myself over almost completely, ignoring the dark symbols surrounding and being formed by clouds, and, after seeing and feeling the earth upon which I stand moving, I shut my eyes. I felt the pull. I didn’t quite leave the ground. Had I tuned in wholly I’m convinced I would have.
I felt totally at peace.
The being collapsed into the atmosphere around itself. The Great Immured, briefly, saw the moon’s glow through the thick impenetrable walls of his Immurement and continued with his self-sacrificed placement with few other questions.
THE SILENT SURGEON
The once-partner and now nevermore makes an appearance through a photograph, through mind’s eye, through misunderstood hazy recall.
The Lady Of The Otherlands convinced herself she was now too weighty. Too much indulgence and ingestion of filths, she thought, that’s the reason the things of the Otherlands no longer caved into her charms… but that wasn’t true. She had gotten older, her face and body less structured. And the other things she thought of around her were just figments of the ever greying fog that clouded the rooms and ante-chambers of her thoughts and living arrangements.
In her area a very famous surgeon now resided. So celebrated were his soul and hands that he was rewarded with being kept hidden from the outside world. His skills had not been tested thoroughly in a while. He was unable to practise on himself as his infatiguable enthusiasm had rendered his own body almost useless. So when the Lady presented her broken specimen before him, were he able to express his delight, he would’ve done.
“I need an operation.”
“…”
“It’s for my wellbeing, sexually and physically.”
“…”
“Can you not just slice some off or whatever you do?”
“I can pay you.”
“Please, no. Medical well being only. None other surgery.”
The lady went away knowing what must be done. Flesh must be gone. She would grow flesh that must be cut away, as the uncontrollable growth would be considered harmful to the well being.
It became all in her power to cultivate and farm the little things that become bigger things until the black mass was in charge of itself.
The rumours that the great surgeon had disappeared or moved on were not true. She found him in the same place. His non-movement and non-breathing meant that the Lady had to undergo the operation by her own hand, under the silent guidance of The Silent Surgeon.
A long and not painless time later, the Lady emerged from her desecrated operating table, clutching the carvings against her breast, tightly and darkly. It represented the heaviness of the weight she had successfully lost. She felt attractive once more and spent her time trying to quench her unyielding thirst for all things to be inside her.
TRIAL BY FLY
A strange noise. Familiar but reminiscent of almost nothing at all.
The ceilings tall.
The windows tiny and infrequent.
The rooms infinite.
Everywhere would be white but for the flies and the tape – the tape yellowing on white surfaces no longer visible, covered by masses and masses
and masses and masses and masses
And masses and masses and masses
x7
of flies… tiny little things forming the decoration, little black bodies everywhere.
The purpose? The purpose…
Experimentation. No. Engineering.
To build a set of wings from their wings but the power and size to fly a thing of this power, of this size.
Shaped angelic like.
To fly!
No other material is so abundant. No other material is so suitable.
It’s all about appropriation.
Or re-appropriation.
The collecting of flies has taken a long while. But that isn’t something to notice. The ideation is nearly intention.
The process is what it is. Every piece of tape needs to be checked for the newly-captured-still-winged.
A snip and a slice later and the wings to a new place have grown. Heavenly is the warmth of pride and promise of completion. Satisfying is the rip and parting of torn wing from now-torn body.
X X X
Only one more set is needed.
A furious search is conducted; hectics, urgent; all previous patience dissipated for this search for new patients. This search feels an eternal thing.
…
…
…
X X X
But now the search is over. A winged fiend. No, a winged friend… is splay on its front, spatchcock, given itself to the triumph of the will.
This last one is to be s.a.v.o.u.r.e.d and savioured.
A martyr for O murta.
Thumb and forefinger are positioned and the operation is begun.
But a quiver.
A quiver?
A quiver and a noise. A tiny noise.
A quiver and a scream?
No.
Pain? Torture?
Everywhere around in this impossible place… flies flies flies… destroyed.
Oceans of it.
Suddenly, very suddenly, it all becomes noticeable at once. A cacophony of minuscule screams rises until the brains feel as though swelling to burst.
There is no repentance that can be done, only a gesture.
X X X
A collection of still-winged flies are manically sought, freed and message conveyed.
The wings of sin are now finished.
This product of despicable engineering and this engineer of despicable engineering are now let loose.
The Otherlands and the sensation of flying is a total peace, a total manifestation of ambient.
X X X
Flies form a convoy.
They know their seeker of forgiveness will follow wilfully, and follows just so into the nest of exaltation.
The once angelic-wings are torn from flesh, from grace, and taken apart.
The body follows soon after.
Previous instalments:
Parts 1 – 3
Parts 4 – 6
Parts 7 – 9
Parts 10- 12
Written by Rick Clarke/Illustrations by Andrzej Klimowski
As you may know if you’re a regular follower of The Monolith Cocktail, we’ve been serializing a number of new novels and writings from debut authors over the last two years; beginning with Ayfer Simm‘s Istanbul pyschogreograhy A Rumor In Üsküdar in 2019. Following on Ayfer’s heels we’re now serializing the Lynchian semi-biographical and incomprehensible jukebox set wanderings of Dan Shea (Bordellos, Vukovar and Beauty Stab infamy) and Rick Clarke’s (bandmate of Shea and rallying beacon of the band Vukovar) new novel The Great Immurement: The previous nine chapters of which appeared last month in July and early August. We continue with those semi-esoteric imaginings below and bring you next trio of NSFW chapters, ‘The Door To A Broken World’, ‘The Lost Sheep’, ‘Absorbing Genius’; illustrated as always by the illustrious Andrzej Klimowski.
THE DOOR TO A BROKEN WORLD
A knock upon the door? Answer it. No. No I can’t be doing that. I can’t be letting the outside mix with the inside. What if it’s important? It can’t be that important. But you don’t know that. I do. No you don’t, it could be an emergency. From the tip of my head to my furry cunthole, and then down again to the floor-space, I know it isn’t that important, and besides, if it were so bad, they’d knock down the door and come in unasked and uninvited.
I shrink away and slink away from the door, happy that my fetid home-place remains without contamination. The aromas have become so that I struggle to tell apart my groin-scent, my sweat scent and any and every-scent else. And I like it that way. To not be able to differentiate between filths; rot, body, mould, waste is to be clean. Everything is equal, everything is one, everything is cleanliness, everything is godliness.
I have earned my divine right. My divine right is to be allowed to remain with my divine right, earning my divine right and forever may it remain that way, to be able to enjoy my divine right.
Eat. But what shall I have? Shave a little flesh from the bottom of your foot. I’m afraid. Afraid?Afraid of disappearing, not of the pain, that doesn’t even come into it. Once you eat it and digest it, it’ll return back to its rightful place. That’s how it works, you are your food, this is the joy of being a person. I don’t know, I’m unsure. I look at the rest of me and see bumps and ditches where my flesh has left me forever. I told you about the dangers of not ingesting your egest. Sometimes I’m not hungry. Then you will disappear, death to cowards! Alright.
I acquire a cutting instrument of some description. It probably isn’t a grater. But it’s dyed a dried blood- brown and it’s still just about sharp enough. I hack it into my lower heel and there it stays for a second, wedged. There is no blood and there doesn’t need to be. I wriggle the cutting steel up and down a touch to get a hold, but I do it too enthusiastically and it comes out. Without touching, I can feel the separation between the two kingdoms of dried up skin and sinew, and I can feel the flap-flapping of half-island that’s trying to escape into a full republic; the grotesque ridge of discontent.
Eventually I have my meal and then I stand in a space and wait there. My body shuts down – I don’t need it.
I think for a while. I think of well dressed ladies looking at their twat in a hand mirror, sitting in a carriage on a train. Maybe they’ll masturbate. I look down at my own naked body and my own dirtied breasts and my own dirtied twat but there is no stimulation. The filth is ingrained deep into my skin.
My mind shuts down – I don’t need it.
A knock – a THUD – at the door. I mustn’t answer it but I mustn’t not watch the door from the hall in case I miss anything. This is all very strange. I don’t know how to deal with it all. I just stand, swaying on the spot in an alien attempt to balance a new imbalance, constantly trying to right my wavering stance.
I know something is going to happen.
I know something is going to happen.
I know something is going to happen.
I KNOW SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN.
I KNOW SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN.
I don’t know what.
I find out what.
A beam of light forces itself through a new rectangular hole in the door; it blinds me. It blinds my precious muck and stink, each being reintroduced to each other in this evil half-light, the second impressions being made are those of repulse and repugnancy.
The light vanishes as quickly as it appears, only it doesn’t feel like it, and in with it comes something… else. It lands on the floor like an intruding leaf, so light that it skims across the floor surface first before coming to a dead halt.
I sneak my way to the shape lying, unmoving on my floor. I keep my distance though. Pick it up. I don’t think being so cavalier is wise. How else will you find out what it is?
Now here I kneel, paying respect to the shrine I did construct for the paper-shape. The grime around me doesn’t seem so sterile now, and I feel uncomfortable being stuck under the weight of the heavy air that is all around me.
The paper is my new life and I’m now curious as to its source and how it came to be with me. I wonder what that second contains, that second of light. I wonder what’s inside it. It must be something tangible or it couldn’t appear in my eyes. Is it a place? I want to know more.
I forget my allegiance to dirt. I want to go where the light goes. I think about it every time my body and brain isn’t off. How do I do it? It’s a mystery and it makes my skin crawl with anger. My forearms open and bleed. Still I kneel at the shrine, at all times.
A KNOCK UPON THE DOOR. I run. At the door, I speak and the figure speaks back. He will wait there. He opens the letterbox and the light comes in once more, only for this time, it’s there for longer. I bask in it, eyes close and arms open. My legs weaken. I touch between my thighs and bring my sex to my nose and my mouth. I have to go, I have to get into the hole of my new joy.
I persuade the figure to help me; he doesn’t want to but I use my persuasion and I convince him.
I hear machinery.
A piece of string comes through the letterbox. I tie it around my waist, very high so that it cuts into me. I stand with my front to the door.
I hear machinery, I hear it grind.
I hear machinery and the string pulls me up against the door. Its strength and vigour cause me to acquiesce happily and I smirk with my mouth.
It keeps pulling and pulling and grinding away. It wants me so badly to come into the light, into the
better-place but it seems to be difficult. I’m against the letterbox but my shape isn’t right and my shape is too big. The string is cutting me until it cuts to the bone where I can feel it finally get a grip after scraping a little. I rub my clitoris on the splintered wood of the door and tingle.
It’s pulling more.
I snap.
I now look at the ceiling with my heels as a headrest. I vomit up some stomach acid all over my front, uncontrollable and done so as a subconscious expression of my cathartic experience; the act of the vomit is almost an ejaculation, forced outside of my mouth upon seeing my pubis completely broken. The shattering means my vagina is now split up to my belly button and up to my coccyx on the other wise and I imagine how much pleasure this means I can have when I get to the light outside. The top of my leg bones have found a new home no longer inside their homes of blood, sinew and skin. I’m sure I can smell the exposed bone and cartilage of my hip. It’s like a damp towel, left on the bathroom floor for too long. Yes, that’s it. I start to think about my new way of walking in my new home. I picture the comical sight and snigger; at least I will make others laugh, I will surely make lots of friends. I keep being pulled in a regular rhythm. Pull, pull, pull, pause on an infinite repeat. It’s a little too forceful but I take it with a good nature – maybe the machinery is eager to see me.
My broken midriff is now in the light-land. I get a pang of jealousy that it’s out before me but I let it pass as I won’t be long after it.
The light gets more intense. I’m so close.
I get down to my breasts, but combined with my knees, I can’t fit. I dig my nails furiously into the join between my breast and upper stomach and it creates tears. After the pause, the machine pulls again and my breasts are torn off from the base and, hanging on by a bloody hinge, they come back nipple-down on my shoulders.
I’m almost out, the light almost bleaches my whole vision.
I’m out.
I’m in the light.
THE LOST SHEEP
Who is the one who is living him now? Keep themselves to yourself.
I am a little lost sheep says I – this is violent. I can’t find my way back home. I have lost the trail that I put down myself, for myself, for myself to reach the beginning of the path I started down.
Everything moves itself around here. My shepherd cannot see me and equally so, I cannot see him. My shepherd is my Father is my teacher is my lover is my victim is (sometimes) my own self. Nothing stays the same.
I’m so tired – this is violent. Things are split in half in an almost automatic way; a production line of symmetrical brutality. In the village, where doggers unrelenting and unrepent, I found a peephole of sorts in an old moss covered, discarded length of timber around the back of a row of garages, which belong to the block of flats that then-existed, now-don’t (moved to the Inner Otherlands.)
The peephole showed me my home… but only sometimes. I couldn’t see the way back, though.
Also through the peephole stood another lost sheep just like me. It tried to play to my sympathy… I watched as it did creepeth… crept… creeped… it did creepers in an insectly way, out of sympathy and into repugnance. I took breaks between my peeping so as not to lose myself completely.
I saw many things and many things repeated. In my breaks, I took to keeping food/warmth/shelter with a handsome man who appeared – but not to himself – to be the King Of The Strangers.
The handsome man only appeared in sight as a visual aura, descriptions could follow the course of a tumoural warning; a prelude to death, or at the very least, a distortion of the living, such was the visual aura. I was not his most recent freedman but more like a friend or companion.
(He nursed me back to health as it wasn’t my time. He insisted the old piece of timber – peephole and all – were for the temptations of another and not for me. I was a lost soul, not a dead one.)
I am the little lost sheep, says I. I stand and I watch and I wait for my shepherd so I can bleat myself back to his loving protection – this is violent.
And now The Great Immured recalls:
Experience the world as I experience the world.
I thought it was of importance, of significance,
That thinking what I thought and existing as I exist held coherence.
But now I see it’s ridiculous and I’m ashamed.
Every thought I have dissolves to nothing.
So exist as I exist.
Cunts splay open like wildflowers
And the scent of their labian spring
But no colour
The moistening into grey mist with pleasure, but no feeling.
Man made stones dance,
Casting shadows as intangible monoliths
In permanent winters that bleach the vision into delusions.
Accidental opiates rise from black puddles
Rise in flesh from inherent coldness.
Exist as I exist.
I am the little lost sheep says I
And my shepherd is fucking;
Fucking bodies into bodies
And surroundings into nothing,
All decayed and barren.
My rose of blood
But I still don’t know who sends them.
Exist as I exist.
So that I don’t have to let slip
Meaningless words from my mouth
Or act-out affection,
So the fucking is automatic
And the emptiness is shared,
That ruins stay ruined and don’t have to be sold.
Exist as I exist.
Now the symbols wilt
And all the lies can be true.
Mothers mothering without the cruelty
Their clouds loom
And skin melting skin.
Exist as I exist.
All the secrets align.
A witness to the feeding of the fool
Bone crushing bone
From the spool hangs limp
All that should.
Exist as I exist.
Sacrifice yourself on the altar of my glory.
Exist as I exist.
This is what is through the peephole, this is the figure you are and you aren’t.
ABSORBING GENIUS
The holes are funnels, channeling the strength of the creamy-white concentrated genius that is propelled out in their moment of weakness. Foolish to let go of essence of greatness, whether willingly or not. SEMEN EFFUNDIS VENENUM EST…
Wise are those who catch this purity in their canals, crafted by a theft’s ingenuity. It sticks to the sides of these canals, growing and pulsing, forming new layers over lost ones. Old, tired, retarded membranes now replaced by the immortal. Sometimes the giver gives through sacrifice. Sometimes pity. Mostly wilful ignorance borne to simple, ill-disciplined pleasure.
This interlocking and outerlocking circle and cycle can only come to those who acknowledge it, even if the forfeiter forfeits without having to have the knowledge. And so the internal bukake is knowledge, and knowledge is power, and power is all.
Author: Rick Clarke
Illustrations: Andrzej Klimowski
Parts 1 – 3
Parts 4 – 6
Parts 7 – 9
Written by Rick Clarke/Illustrations by Andrzej Klimowski
As you may know if you’re a regular follower of The Monolith Cocktail, we’ve been serializing a number of new novels and writings from debut authors over the last two years; beginning with Ayfer Simm‘s Istanbul pyschogreograhy A Rumor In Üsküdar in 2019. Following on Ayfer’s heels we’re now serializing the Lynchian semi-biographical and incomprehensible jukebox set wanderings of Dan Shea (Bordellos, Vukovar and Beauty Stab infamy) and Rick Clarke’s (bandmate of Shea and rallying beacon of the band Vukovar) new novel The Great Immurement: The previous six chapters of which appeared last month in July. We continue with those semi-esoteric imaginings below and bring you next trio of ponographic anarchistic chapters, illustrated by Andrzej Klimowski.
THIN MAN, ILL MAN
Where am I and who are we? If I am me and you are you then why does it feel like there are no borderlines? You…
?
An illness overcame healthy man. He became a thin man, ill man. His head did bald, his skin did tight.
This happened after he found his home, his habitat. A light grey lake in a white-light place with a non distinguishable sky in the land of waste.
The Thin Man, Ill Man’s hair started shedding more and more frequently. He thought of it was little clues being left in his sink, on his floor, on his utensils – everywhere he went – for a non existing investigator, tracking him down for any given or ungiven unknown reason.
There were no other people and never would there be. Just him and his home.
Time passed and the Thin Man, Ill Man resented his own space and his own person. He called out for any passerby to come and join him but nobody returned the call and nobody ever would. He wasn’t fussy or particular about his prospective company – this didn’t matter.
So lonely he became that he started to count his protruding rib bones within the number of friends.
So solitary was the no-time and no-place that hours were wasted on separating and individualising his spermatozoas to give himself a family, but found his colonies starved and dehydrated to death by the time the task was complete.
The lonesome grew and growed.
Where once it did creepeth and stalk, it instead confrontethed and pounce.
There was nothing on TV, only himself.
There was nothing to eat, only himself.
There was nothing to be, only himself.
*He missed an intimacy (that he never experienced.)
There was a split.
*He wanted a partner as comfortable with his flesh as their own.
There was an osmosis, of sorts.
*He wanted a conjoining.
There was a new thing, of sorts. (The same thing, of course.)
“I’ve never had somebody to wax the fur from my anus or ease the discomfort in my shoulders.”
“You do the same for me, my love.”
“My favourite is when we sit and relax together and gently – absent-mindedly – play with each
other’s genitals.”
“Mine also.”
“Would you like to go out tonight? I feel like doing something.”
“Not tonight. I want to stay in with you. You’re everything I need.”
“I love it when you say things like that.”
“I need to piss.”
“Can I hold it? The feel when the tube expands as the piss comes through sends me wild.”
“What shall we eat?”
“Does it matter? Does it make a difference?”
“I suppose not.”
“As long as you lean over the counter when you cook… and now and again spread yourself. I’ll just
stare into the backdoor to our soul… imagining my tongue on your hole.”
“And, why don’t I moisten it with my spittle, maybe play with it… the glistening of my ring will make
you touch me, I’m sure…”
“There’s no need to try and persuade you is there? You read my mind.”
“I am your mind.”
“As am I, yours.”
And with that, the Thin Man, Ill Man took up an instrument of violent murder and the conversations were no more. The intimacy was no more.
He lay on HIS front IN front of his mirror, arms by his side and was giggling as the crimson blood pulsed from his heart onto the floor, spreading out in stems away from him; A mad dash to reach another body before it became nothing but a stain.
The mirror, from floor to ceiling in height, captured most of the empty, airless room in its reflection.
Suddenly and startlingly, the Thin Man, Ill Man saw himself standing in the doorway, staring straight at him. How own giggling intensified, never becoming manic. His strength had faded. Every last laugh became a struggle; a desperate kick against the deathly hands of his carcinogenic surroundings.
The Thin Man, Ill Man walked casually towards the Thin Man, Ill Man without any hint of emotional reaction, just unfeeling tears running down his face. His naked, pale, glowing figure sat dignified and straight on the edge of nothing beside the resting place of his naked, pale, glowing figure.
One laughed.
One cried.
Both died.
I stare into the blood stems. Which myself am I? Which one is the one who is living me now? I stare.
THE SPIRIT EJACULATE
I stare. The lifeblood glistens. My mind’s eye glistens. Blood to sex to blood to sex. Women – every woman’s – conclude or at least live slave to a feminine suspicion – as inherent as the cunt or the evil – that the men who want nothing but to fuck them are really just fulfilling a primordial death drive that would probably end in murder if the act of ejaculation didn’t weaken them so much.
This infection of sexual frenzy rests in guttural moans and the clenching of teeth as man edges ever-nearer to his in-built downfall, cruel and just.
It happened several years ago.
It happened in a few weeks/months/days.
It happened now.
It happened when?
It all began with the masturbatory glimpses that all start the same end. It was the time between waking and sleeping. The usual surroundings seemed distant and not altogether welcoming; it felt like an Otherland. He stood naked in the centre of a bare room, semi erect cock being coated in the spit he spat into his right hand.
All sorts of sexual images flashed, scattershot in his vision. His Japanese eye leaked its lubricant.
O memories, O The Great Immured.
He thought of a group of woman, humiliating the voluntarily weakest of them all, taunting her in a ceremony of piss. He throbbed and rubbed, dutifully, slowly and sensually.
Through his flickering eyelids, his naked mother entered and stood before him, a single trail of excitement ran down the inside of her leg. She bent over, beckoning him to taste. Taste taste taste. His nose pressed against her anus, almost forcing its way inside as he tongued as much of the dry coarse fur as he could, occasionally teasing the sweet stickiness of her inner vulva. He throbbed violently. He rubbed harder.
He half-blindly stepped inside a huge nondescript room filled with naked bodies, warm and slippery with sweat, semen and quim. The more he observed, the more furious he wanked, the fuller his sense.
Nothing was sacred. Women kissing women in dripping exchanges of spit and sperm, shining their faces around the mouth and cheeks. Women chained down men and suffocated them with their drenched cunts, applying their holes to the faces like oxygen masks; A pornographic source of sexualised air.
Men sodomised women, them-selves enjoying it so passionately that they lost all pelvic inhibitions and released sprinklets, sometimes jets of natal liquids. Mouths and holes filled with/ejecting cum/quim/all bodily fluids inbetween.
He throbbed harder still and wanted harder still until the moment came. Time almost stopped. His penis gathered all of its power and every muscle everywhere coiled like a spring, shaking with unstoppable force, finally let go and shot out a spurt of its own creamy lifeblood into a place unknown. The body paused, gathered power again and shot a smaller (but just as forceful) less potent batch into the same unknown. Once again it gathered strength, this huge shuddering body, only this time, something unexpected happened. Something concerning. Something wrong.
A tearing sensation ran through every part of his body, sinew ripped from bone, nerves ripped from everywhere and layers of skin from layers of skin. Everything was pain. Everywhere was pain; frozen in this stopped-non-passage-of-time. It was as though he was being sucked into a new dimension. He didn’t have chance to scream.
The tip of a finger became dented, briefly, before the whole thing caved in on itself, disappearing within itself. His toes followed, then his feet and hands, looking for a new place within his body. The rest of him did the same at the precise moment of the third and final ejaculation. His penis was in a continual push, a push to shoot out his entire body, which it did so; every part of him fired out of that small, thin slit.
He was new. Nothing was real anymore. He was a spirit-ejaculate. He could still see his old body, in fact he was now permanently facing it, but there was little life left in it.
They were connected at that small, thin slit. An eternal fountain exchanging seed, regurgitating forwards and backwards pools of cum, stick in this infinite position of gratification.
THE STAIRCASE
After all that, a silence.
The Great Immured recovered himself. Whatever time it was, it didn’t matter. Whatever he now was, it didn’t matter. All things are not even fleeting, but instead, lie broken.
The place he was within had changed. He knew he couldn’t (wouldn’t) find a way out from this immurement, but he had to exist somewhere a little less heavy, at least for a short time, some place to regain some breath.
After several minutes of pacing the same narrow staircase, he realised something was wrong. The staircase itself was odd; it often resembled more of a corridor. There were steps up and down that kept himself more or less at the same level. There were twists and turns. Spirals that got increasingly wider and little amputee-stub-like dead-ends.
The walls were high and there were no windows. Not even lights or candles. Yet no part of the staircase was particularly darkened. It all felt very… claustrophobic.
He could hear noises here and there along the staircase; of course there was the creaking of the old wooden boards but beyond that, long stretches of silence were interspersed with scratching and, even stranger, whispers appeared to come from behind the walls.
What is this trickery? He muttered to himself. The invisible conversations had caused a concern to grow unnervingly large in his mind and a not to grow in his stomach.
He tried turning back a couple of times but to no avail. No part of the staircase was memorable anyway, however, it seemed to change if he tried to retrace his steps.
More absence of time passed. Disturbed by his lack of progress he quickened his pace. He thought about shouting out to ask for assistance to the voices behind the walls, but had to reminds himself he would only be disappointed in the response. The times he felt most panicked – though he thought unreasonably so – was when the stairs descended. He originally intended to down the stairs and find a way to fresh, non-immured air, true, and he knew along this path every direction, every…descension… had been countered with an ascent, but it did nothing to make him feel at ease.
He was getting tired. The heat wasn’t unbearable but he had exerted himself to the point of exhaustion. Out of nowhere he saw the end of the staircase, and this was marked by a huge wooden door. Easily double the height of him, it reached right up to the ceiling.
At last.
He slowed his pace, hung his head in a mixture of weariness and relief and pushed against the door with all of the strength that his fatigue would allow.
Something, again, wasn’t quite right.
Under closer observation he noticed the door had no hinges. There were no gaps between the door itself and its frame and it felt concrete-cold.
The door was painted onto the wall. The likeness was good but in his relief he failed to spot the glaringly – not to mention painfully – obvious shortcomings of this piece of taunting artwork.
He sighed. He took a step away from the door, turned his back to the wall to his right, covered his face with his hands and leant backwards.
Bright-white, white-light.
Read the previous chapters here
Parts 1 to 3…
Parts 4 to 6…
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. Following on from the first three chapters, kindly and perceptively illustrated by the much-respected Andrzej Klimowski, you can now read the next trio of chapters below.
THE GIRL AND THE PLAY-THING
The Great Immured/I/Us/They still absorb the contents of this sticky, crumpled paper from time to all-time. The letter received:
Said the girl to her play-thing:
‘Sometimes I feel you don’t belong… anywhere’
She stroked
And stroked
And thought…
‘Except I wouldn’t want you to be anywhere else – I would be enraged… inconsolable…’
And so they sat upon their metallic plinth, the rust gathering rust in their infinite day-time play-time.
The play-thing, red, raw, balding and seeping felt it belonged … anywhere … except its current placement, and so it left.
The girl cried. She ignored the pain of the departing-wound, with all the blood, pus, open flesh and swinging innards and all else with it, and instead, she felt the pain of her lament for her greatest lover.
All day she cried.
All day….
All day….
All-Every-Day.
On her plinth, in the outskirts of the inner Otherlands – not quite all white, all light – she cried.
The play-thing had escaped into the inner Otherlands – all white, all light – and lost itself in amongst other clawing appendages of desires and almost irretrievably gave itself to the brutality.
It found peace and rested.
The girl did not stop crying. The departing-wound was healed to a smooth white mound, hairs penetrated the flesh (inwards and outwards) unevenly at uncoordinated angles.
The play-thing heard the sobs. The glistening, slightly sticky tears it could see without seeing were replicated in excitement rather than despair.
The play-thing found the girl. An arrival-wound could not be forced. However, the two were reconciled in a new way; a happy ending for both.
Sometimes these crumpled, sticky papers would get more crumpled and sticky at differing alltimes. Unreadable, in fact.
THE PARTIAL SEIZURE
To the doctor RE: Immurement – there are things my/our body/hole is doing without instruction ||| INFORM ME THAT I MAY REINSTRUCT THEE ||| Yes doctor.
In the Otherlands – I know longer know anywhere else – the temporal shifts are plentiful.
The rooms and the dimensions… the shapes… constantly change – permanent revolution, something I would wish on noone.
The shift comes.
LOSE YOURSELF TO IT AND DESCRIBE FULLY ||| … .
I don’t hate the weirds I see in the street. They amuse me. I find them amusing. I find it amusing that they can’t detect their own filthy stench when everybody else can. Unwashed flesh, soiled clothes… the piss of their cats spray from their throat as they invent nonsensical sentences…outloud… to themselves of course. Who else will listen?
An all too familiar summer’s breeze passes over and through my skin. Everything seems to be happening in slow motion, overlapping with real time, causing sickness and nausea before I’m even aware of the fact. I’m disconnected. I’m watching myself from within myself. My thoughts are about my thoughts. Maybe the faint sound of music that’s drifting into my insides from a nearby side-street is the cause, maybe it’s the scent of some familiar-unfamiliar fauna or washing powder. Maybe it’s everything combined. Whatever the trigger, I’m hit.
A rising liquid warmth from the pit of my stomach spreads upwards through my chest, across to my fingertips and upwards once more to every nook and darkened lump in my brain.
It isn’t possible to overstate the sickness.
I see what’s in front of me as any non-blind does, but I see more… There’re images that I
can’t
quite
identify.
I can understand them for no more than a nano second, these pictures are seen with eyes open, mixed in some impossible way with the reality that’s in front of me.
I glimpse a man who I recognise and instantly unrecognise. I just about hold in the vomit.
This is the point where my deitic coronation and entitlement reigns supreme. I know all, I see all, I have lived everything that is going to happen, my foresight shows me what I am about to live, a second in advance. Just a second.
And it’s all true.
For half a minute I am the King of all things. And then… again…
I’m hit.
The line of time – the timeline – that is lay out before me, by me, collapses immediately under noteven-close scrutiny. Everything was and is ridiculous, nonsensical… This future that had been crafted that fitted glove-like now appeared to be like the crackpot ramblings of the cat-piss-breathweirds I saw before. For now, they don’t amuse me anymore. I feel hatred and I feel no sympathy for these scums. It won’t last, I know when I’m next out in amongst them, I’ll giggle inwardly at a rogue flailer, escaping with a childlike glee from its carer.
I get home and my body purges itself, uncontrolled by my mind or my will, and I rest. Nothing feels completely real for a v v v long while after, not until the next day.
HOW OFTEN DO YOU GO THROUGH THIS? ||| Every moment of every time. ||| … ||| What can you do? Relieve me. ||| NOTHING. ||| Help me. ||| NO. EMBRACE THE ALL-KNOWLEDGE. YOU CAN RELIEVE YOU AND YOU CAN RELIVE YOU. RELIVE YOUR OWN DECAY. ||| … .
WOMB OF ALL THINGS TO DIE
In which The Great Immured thought of himself, sang to himself, trapped himself.
Though any future of you and I
Was hastily stored and shut inside
The womb of all things to die,
Still I await you, arms open wide.
And though briefly this foetus came alive
And escaped its home in the deathly bride
The Motherly noose was quickly tied;
The babe now rots in its natal slime.
I swim the lakes of happiness denied
With each stroke I am to defy
Our deceased future over which I have cried
To punish myself in self-righteous, self-spite.
Through this act I manage to say goodbye
To the terminal tumour that engulfs my pride
And though I’ve longed and lusted and tried
I let it go to let it lie.
Rick Clarke
Parts One to three here…
Serialization: THE GREAT IMMUREMENT by Rick Clarke
July 22, 2020
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
Monolith Cocktail Blog 