After David Markson

(follows absolutely no logical order but kinda fun to play with)

In the beginning, maybe, I took a spherical ball of ink and stretched it out into your name, for your name was the world for a short time, and sometimes still is.

Your name is a word given to you and it amazes me as to why you stick to the rules and insist on keeping it until you die,whereupon you then proceed to have it engrained on stone as if stone could make you permanent.

I, on the other hand, have many different names, belong to many different worlds, and have lived many different lives. For this reason, if you did so wish to lay flowers on my grave you would find no grave to set them upon. This is because I am in the pollen that scatters in the wind from pine trees, ragweed and oaks. It is because I am in the pomegranate seeds that fall from your lips when you gobble them in greedy gulps of juice and crunch. That's right: I am the dust scattered light that blankets your room, the petrichor in the morning and the wisps of cloud in the sky.

Perhaps because I don’t have a singular name and cannot set myself in stone, I turn to the pronoun ‘you’ to make meaning and when I use the pronoun ‘you’, I mean you who is reading this sentence.

I start with you because when I was called Robert and Sarah at the same time in different worlds, I wrote a note to myself saying that every good writer understands their story starts with the one who reads it. I was forty-four and twelve at the time so its unsurprising I was capable of such thinking. Of course, I am hoping that you have made a similar note in one of the margins of one of the books you have read in one of your lives and I am hoping it will read as follows: every good reader understands that they are born anew with each story that they read.

So, I suppose, we are tied together now, which is sweet until I kill the narrative and make us start ourselves all over again.

As I have said, there’s no stone here, only ink that runs and pages that tear. The downfall of this is that nothing seems real but the beauty of this is that nothing seems real. You see, something can be both unreal and real depending on how we define reality but if reality is subjective then there’s no reality to begin with, only creativity.

Isn’t that a marvellous place to start then - with what is constant and unending - creativity!

I believe in God on Mondays, Thursdays and Sundays but am atheist on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On Saturdays I am either too hungover or too drunk to care at all, so let’s call that agnostic.

It must have then been on the first day that I made light of your ignorance, to make your veil into brightness so finally you could know what blindness meant by learning how to see.

My darling oxymoron, I now remember you by the extinguished candle that I put out with my palm each night, and which leaves on my skin, a burn the size of your left eye.

That burn remembers how I always liked making love to you in the dark.

Darkness lets us know light; light makes darkness visible. We work in dialectics, you must understand this; where there is order there is chaos, where there is love there is war and yet most the time love and war are not as oppositional as we may think. But that is a cliché, and we must be careful of the cliches, of those phrases made to patronise, to simplify, to cancel out.

***

If I was ever the one writing the story, which I doubt sometimes, then, I, on the second day made the sky and then abandoned it like He who was never in it to begin with because he’s elsewhere or maybe nowhere, or maybe somewhere.

It is tricky to place the unplaceable and much harder to speak the unspeakable, but I am trying in this place, this book, to place myself near you but far enough away that you cannot know me yet. Maybe place and language are the same in this regard.

When I made the sky, you asked me why I prayed upwards. I had said because hope felt like it should be something that floated. You, naked, next to me, held my body and told me hope was right in front of me. Hope was stripped bare and destroying me, but I was hopelessly in love with hope because I was hopefully in love with you and could barely see the fault in that. Your name was also Hope, so I speak in simple terms when I say Hope was in front of me but make it as poetic as you’d like.

There is much debate as to how I made light before the sky,but details don’t really matter anymore and if they do, we have been taught well enough by our politicians that you can lie about the details and still have power.

So, on the third day I am telling you I made the land, the sand, the seas, the plants, the trees, the birds and the bees, and thought, ‘isn’t it convenient that land rhymes with sand and seas with trees and bees’ as if the world would be in harmony. Little did I know how they would ruin all that rhythm because ‘borders’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘peace’.

I had once liked the shoreline for how it reminded me of you and I, the way the water stroked the sand but now the beaches are covered with the bodies of the drowned and the sand is stained with blood. Those who aren’t dead on the beach have just buried their heads in the sand, and this is not what I had planned for the sand when I made it, I think, on the third day.

It’s unoriginal to begin at the beginning but where else to begin other than with genesis or genocide. Of course, I mix the words up from time to time, but you should forgive me for that because the genesis of something often comes with destruction.

They tell me I cannot write about genocide, madness or suicide because it is unsavoury and maybe they think they save me when they tell me this, but it drives me mad. Then again, I think I was mad already, but I cannot quite recall if I was mad before I made you in the beginning or if I went mad on the third, fourth or six day.

I rested on the seventh but found it dull.

**