I fuck'n love you and the table more than I can say. I hope you like this:
In a story called Breath, the night navigator appears from time to time, always at the helm of the SS Pluto, which right now is running the confluence of three powerful ocean streams. The streams are vigorous, strangely familiar, reassuring, disturbing, challenging. The navigator steers the craft among them, catching each swell as it emerges. What a relief after the confusing waters of the dark rift. Sometimes the streams in the ocean reflect in the sails, requiring all sorts of readjustments. Catch it right and the rigging hums with deep satisfaction.
The streams tell their stories; hour after hour, on into silence. Recognizing the call of mission, they blend and merge strangely with the navigator's 1987 story.
The old salt's feet (to which descend sensations of everything heard), bristle with contrasting, harmonising vibrations that travel the deep silver stream, up through the inquisitive genitals, up the spine, digesting, digesting, through the swelling chest, into the places where Aldeberan and Regulus burn (on this present course), igniting recognition in the seat of Isis. Its signature reminiscent of the trident which advises extreme attention to that which turns you on. Sense, sex, sensibility. Remember the destination.
There is nothing like standing barefoot on a thrumming wood song, hair like antlers, like lightning.
At night the beat-up ship cleaves the luminescent fleece at a rate of knots, adding in its wake another shade to the skein emerging from the wyrd sisters' dedicated work in this most interesting of all oceans. Which may just be to keep us mad, though in the most good and true and beautiful way.
So, the first character to arrive in the old salt's night whispered story is of the Far Wind arriving on dry land, miles from Neptune's realm, laden with fishy, spicy, exotic smells of The Far (Fa, Katie!!!). The old salt thinks affectionately of this great breath of a wind as Zeph.
This wind, the omniscient and intimately intrusive Main Actor sweeps in on a parched landscape at great altitude. Here the wind turns round and round, like a great hound looking for a settling spot, dragging newspapers, plastic bags, leaves and dust, twisting them in the cloudless sky above an insignificant town in the middle of nowhere with an oil refinery nearby. (On the ground the air is still, like a bated breath holding the pent-up chaos of archaic rural, modern farming and petro-chemical consumer fest.)
The wind carries a vast treasure of fragrances and frequencies from far-away. It mulls over the qualia of breathed interactions held in the organic library of subtlety. Recently, to “whale spume, bull roarer, panther, chrism, jism, cries, whispers, industry, song” new frequencies find their way into the imagined soundtrack. And a Voice that has an uncanny resemblance to the second actor in the story.
This second character to enter the arena is Lukas, tall, gangly, long blond hair. He is perched high in a lightning scorched tree, scanning the wind's high level display. With his flappy dark overcoat, he is a hungry crow intent on the sky while the landscape around him slumbers in sand and brush, gritty and hot.
Lukas is one of the local liminally mad persons living in degrees of isolation, doing obscure things, going on inexplicable missions into town and up mountains where elders live.
Lukas used to be a somebody in town, with a good job at the refinery in marketing, a juicy wife and two children. Then he was fired for leaked information that created problems for the refinery in the PR department. There aren't too many jobs available outside of the refinery, so his comfortable life rumbled. It was a long, painful disintegration of former respectability. He went off the rails a few times. First too much drink, then a hippie stage brought about by a visiting friend. He started to look, dress and sound different. He went off the rails so much that his wife Rosa left him. For his ex-boss of all people. And took the children with her. The situation clearly burns his ass.
Lukas lives halfway up the only bit of mountain in the landscape in a house where Sarah used to live. (She regularly checks that the trees around the house are healthy and not being damaged by the 'scallywag's' mobile contraptions.) The trees are Thorn, Willow, Laurel, Oak, Bluegum, Gingko Biloba, Yellowwood, Elder. There are no pylons anywhere near. Cunningly contrived instruments for the wind create a theatre of soft aeolian sounds. An enormous rock rests against one side of the house.
Lukas makes a bit of cash selling his beautifully crafted mobiles and extraordinary kites. He also makes a pittance and tips from delivering Sarah's freshly baked bread.
But that's it. He lives frugally, small; in the eyes of his family, former friends and acquaintances, without dignity and balls and talking shit nobody wants to hear.
To make the humiliating fall of Lukas more poignant, he can be seen from around 10 every morning riding a meandering path through town on an antique bicycle with a large wicker basket on the front, in which Sarah's breads tremor in brown paper bags. Every day he pedals to at least six regular customers and then the odd extra. He is seen often and by many. His family, especially his teenage son and daughter, suffer great shame because of this bicycle. It makes being around Lukas awkward.
So what is he doing up a tree in the middle of a fierce day, no shade and a blistering winter sun, watching a high wind playing with dirt? Does he even notice the small red car in the very far distance kicking up dust devils on the farm road to town? He looks pissed, hair sticking to the sweat on his cheek. He dismounts the tree and meanders off, away from the tree, towards his place in the far distance.
For actor three we go to the sportscar to meet the girl with a voice of note and melodies in her blood. She also looks pissed. Especially after a dust devil pours a whole bunch of crap into her ear and her car. Thalia, as she was born, aka Lia, Desi and Juno. Pissed in three different chords of being, she has a dissonant look about her. Lonely gifted music fairy, brash bar singer, minor record company-created pop star. You see part of why she is pissed off. A musician who has never released one of her own songs and must instead sing and dance awful lascivious crap because that's what the market wants. Or else she's plain just not talented enough. A failure wound that certain people like scratching at again and again.
She's on her way to a town where a few people remember her as Lia, Maddy's daughter. Maddy lives abroad, but still keeps her house in town, which is where Lia is going. Because her career's a mess and her producer boyfriend is an asshole and she just has to get away to get herself together. She's also been doing far too much partying.
The wind slows down, but keeps meandering high above the town and district the whole afternoon, into evening. Then it creeps down towards the trees on the hill. A breath so soft, it hardly moves a leaf. It finds its way into the house where Lukas lives. It crawls along the walls where kites hang, along the work table, tools, string, glue, bamboo, paper, grass, feathers, gossamer. It examines everything in the room, books, pictures, instruments crafted for wind. Behind a curtain it finds a bed and a computer work station.
The wind creeps up to Lukas, who is bent over intently painting the wings of a splendid swan vane. The wind stirs a strand of hair covering his left ear. Lukas freezes. His eyes widen and he falls over backwards, chair and all, out cold on the floor with his legs still hooked over the chair. And from this moment, the wind gathers all its power, races down the hill and blasts the town with roof-rattling gusts, breaking windows, smashing, ripping, tearing washing off washing lines, scattering cats and chickens.
Later that evening Lukas makes his way down the wind decorated landscape. A pair of bloomers sticks to a bush, challenging Lukas to collect it, guess its owner and then making an embarrassing exchange. He leaves the bloomers to enjoy the evening breeze on the thorn. Lukas turns into The Amber Light - a local drinking hole. A beery crowd talking wind damage, work, watching rugby on TV. On the other side of the noise, off a short corridor, entrance to the Blue Smog, an outside area where smoking takes place. And talk that doesn't involve sport. Godwin is the barman here – elderly, dark of skin, subtle of humour. There is something conspiratorial in their interaction. “Is this it? You think it's here? ... and someone interesting blew in just before...”
In the corner, close to his favourite table, Lukas sees Thalia for the first time. Godwin winks at Lukas, nods towards Thalia and puts a CD on. A minor pop hit. Thalia cringes and gives Godwin a look. Later, paying for her meal, she says to Godwin. “So you do remember me...”
“I see your mother in you. Welcome home.”
Leaving his drink untouched, Lukas follows Thalia into the night. They both head uphill, out of town, taking a short cut through the church yard. “That was one of the crappest songs ever. How do you tolerate the cheapness of it all?”
Thalia is gobsmacked. “Oh! Ooooooh! Well, fuck you, guru of sound, whoever you think you are...”
“Just that phrase in your virgin voice, that's a song, much better than any you've recorded. I know what you should be singing...”
“I don't give a flying fuck what you think I should be doing with my voice.” Thalia huffs and stalks off in silence, walking fast until she turns into her gate. Lukas trails behind, stands still in the distance to see her going into the house, a light coming on. He walks on, hands in pockets, deep in thought.
The wind pushes him from behind, driving uphill, past his house, to where the ravine begins. “A harp, a great big gorgeous harp played by the wind in the secret depths of the ravine, with a certain voice, a certain tone...”
And so the story begins. If you like I will tell you more, but only if you really, really want to hear it.
In love
geni