Week 1: Some Results
Dear subscribers,
Many thanks to all who sent us work in response to the Week 1 Assignments. Today’s post contains a couple of those results. If we didn’t include your work in this post, please don’t be discouraged from sending more in future!
Week 2’s assignment, ‘Of Pointing’ will follow later this week.
Number One (anonymous)
The List: 1. Striations, muscle fibres, wires, shuttling voices, death rattles, dust, scintillae, a projector’s beam, cone of vision, Solid Snake, twelve, elements
A Paragraph: The headlight that swung abruptly around the bend in the road brought to my mind, not the only thing it could logically be – the headlight of some speeding vehicle, probably a motorcycle – nor even some more poetic and appropriate association like the wheeling glow of a lighthouse, but rather the static image of a projector’s beam. In one suspended moment, from which all sound had unaccountably been snuffed, I saw the blackness of the mountain night as the void of a darkened theatre, the snow-dust in the headlight as the illuminated motes adrift above an unseen audience’s head. Dandruff, skin cells, the barest scintillae of the flesh. Then, like the train to La Ciotat barging head-on out of the Lumières’ screen, the headlight dilated to a blinding cone of vision focused directly onto me before veering to the right as the rider took a wild evasive manoeuvre. The sound rushed back in: the shriek of brakes, the grinding of rubber on ice, all the canyon’s shuttling voices of wolf and owl converging upon our bend in the road. And a moment later all was still again, the only sound the grumble of the distant elements troubling the downslopes on the other side of the range. The headlight was dead now, crushed it seemed, while my own car’s lights aimed irrelevantly at some trees and a metal sign reading ROUTE TWELVE – DRIVE SAFE. The eerie luminescence of the dashboard showed me the striations of my knuckle bones, traced against taut skin where my hands gripped the wheel. When I finally climbed out of the car, there was nothing I could see except a crazed tangle of tyre tracks already being covered by snow and, at the limit of my headlights’ reach, a twisted exhaust pipe coiling like a solid snake into the darkness. Invisible above me, humming phone wires pulsed and burned. Every muscle fibre in me clenched, fired, hummed like the wires. I thought about the interval, vacuum, between the cut on the final image and the first roll of the credits, when the projector might be the only thing left alive in the world; and, pressing my ear against the total night, I waited for a death rattle.
Number Two (also anonymous)
The List: Catholic, candidate, custard, crabbed, clerical, candy-ass, copperplate, crass, heaven-sent, elemental, transcendental, incremental, accidental.
A Paragraph: Catholics. Candidates for court appointments, far right-wing hustlers! Justices? Custardy old white men. Their crabbed fingers clutching for dusty volumes of legal history (any clerical, candy-ass point will do); eyes scanning copperplate print searching for excuses to set the clock back. Crass assholes! They think, of course, that they are heaven-sent: elemental righters of wrong; transcendental soldiers for Christ. Hardly. Just an incremental train of privileged posers—ignorance anything but accidental.