THE START OF A NOVEL

THE START OF A NOVEL

I know a man, let’s call him Henry, spoke against September 11th in 2000, who was therefore raped when it still happened. Everything from the same conversation also started to come true… his own idea to invent binaural earphones on which to record his music was “implemented” by another guy. Same for his idea for a book. In 2001 he was in a band, recording on earphones with the rich guy that implemented the idea… they tried to dress Henry up to look like Hitler, pretended the spliff was his bifter, treated him like a living art installation. He didn’t even get to mention that the earphones were his own idea to invent. This is because when the Towers fell down he was therefore raped; and this manifested as a burning feeling in the psyche; and when he suppressed the burning feeling in order to function he lost all memory of the conversation in the barn in 2000 where he had shown prescience. The formative years of his life were spent under these conditions.

When he finally got out of the bad landscape, came home to the Lakes, he was placed under a curse by a maniacal hypnotist. Things didn’t go well for him ever after. He became acutely ill, which some close to him believe dates back to the rich man that implemented the idea to invent the earphones. This rich man, he would never need work a day, and at the end of the band swanned off with all his money to have a happy life whilst Henry was rendered destitute. So as I say Henry went home to the Lakes and was cursed by a hypnotist. He became acutely ill. After becoming ill, there was an attempt at his life in his sleep – or what seemed to be one – which turned out to be an operation to give him a new member! Oh, it worked for ten minutes. Then the fire-dance blamed it on Henry even though he didn’t know it was going on or when he found out participate. Then when his dad died they all made him go for a naked walk when he was in a broken state.

More recently his files were hacked and being read out online… Henry’s brother caught them at it and said, on live streaming, to the hackers, “it all went wrong for Henry with that richman’s mum.” Henry walked past his brother’s room when this was said, thought his brother had meant the rich guy’s literal mother, and that it was the richman’s mother who had made an attempt at his life – for he didn’t know yet it was an operation designed to give him a new member, that one - so he got on to FB and gave the rich man Hell. He wasn’t sure what happened then, on FB, but he lost the plot and was so insulting to the rich man and his mother that their friendship will never recover.

He had left it to brew after hearing his brother for a little while then it was seeing a photo of the richman and the rest of the band that triggered Henry’s reaction off: for the rich man was clasping his jeans in the photo, grinning. He didn’t like the rich man clasping his jeans in the photo, and to be fair hadn’t yet worked out, because nobody had told him, that the old band really had tried to affect his looks. Still: seeing the rich man clasping his jeans as if in mockery triggered an episode of mental illness in Henry which is why he got onto the richman on FB and gave him Hell. Now, after a recent O. D. attempt “Henry” has also lost the ability to ejaculate. He thinks it is the rich man’s influence.

The problem Henry found in pinning the Hitler moustache to his so-called mates was that in the band he had a lyric going “I’m going to get your freshness back, plug my senses in the mains, it’s just a blood-rush to my brains, I’m going to get pretty much fucked up, flee the world on a midnight plane, dance with the aliens and the insane.” Indeed, Henry, made to look ersatz by his band, was in a world without Rights. His psychiatric doctor told him he looked “a blur.”

Throughout it all Henry was going through a personal crisis about not knowing whether or not he was gay. He would break down in tears and say “I think I’m gay.” While it was true that he foresaw September 11th and couldn’t remember, he was at the time never gay. He may have thought he was built like Adonis while actually being a munter, but he wasn’t dim. They may have deemed him to be dim, but when he was in the zone and sober, he had already written the highest-marked A-level exam essay in the nation. That may be part of being a savant. He was actually diagnosed autistic relatively recently and is now stuck with it. If the police ever come for him that’s what we’ll say – “he isn’t here.”

ii

Back to the continuing story of Henry… they even said it all went wrong (his band did) when he didn’t say thank you at the end of it. He came home to the Lakes, exiled from his band, fuming, unaware what had been going on and embarked on a program, quasi-religious, of meditation, dreamwork, detox, reading, exercise and all the self-help techniques he could glean. That was when he was placed under a curse by a hypnotist. It was as if the world was saying “no,” right at the moment Henry was about to score a valid goal. To be fair he didn’t have an evil plan. It was just that he was getting to the age where he might provide a paper, or attempt to score a goal, or start a literary career. He had helped invent the net at seven, been the witness from The Lords and The New Creatures at eight, been marked by a failed experiment into the maths of the new colour in puberty, attained the face of stars, predicted September 11th with exactitude in 2000 and written the highest marked A-level exam essay in the country. He might’ve thought he was on course for a Nobel Prize, but the world had different notions. To be fair Henry didn’t have any plan at all. His Millennial idea for a book was The Scientific Papers: “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.” But back when Henry had got to Warwick University in 2002 he found his tutor David Morley had just brought out the exact thing: a book called The Scientific Papers – classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science writing as a single discussion of perception.” The teacher had the extra word “writing” from Henry’s own ideal. So Henry had tried to recalibrate his goal. He was torn between Einstein’s Unified Field Theory and defaced bank notes. So he didn’t really have much of a plan but when he went home after not finishing University, and afterwards being in the band some more, (for the band were from his gap year haunt of Cambridge) – he embarked on this quasi-religious self-help program. He wanted only to realise his creativity. It wasn’t a bad ambition but the world said no, and I for one find it interesting that the world did say no to him. It could’ve been that he was up against a democratic balancing out mechanism, but if that was the theory, in practice it manifested as his being cursed by a hypnotist. He was just about to go to a second university, his local, Lancaster. When we look into it we may see that if he helped invent the net he may have too much power if he wins, converts it into a paper; that The Lords And The New Creatures experiment bearing attestations would go against hidden parts of government; that the maths of the new colour experiment could offend the Chinese for example; that if he were to start earning money off the face of stars he would be a tyrant; so already with the few things he had done before leaving school there was enough for the world to say no to him and his dream of being a writer.

Since being cursed by a hypnotist and going schizo with it, Henry carried on delivering the goods for instance, he hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, also discovered the sheet where pictures grew (among many other things) but he never won with the book. He thinks it means there is a democratic, balancing out mechanism that stops him winning and I think he is right and has in that capacity seen the light. It might also have been that the world was keeping him waiting until he was sure, for at the time he first became ill, nothing had been confirmed. He wouldn’t have been able to write, say, of helping invent the net, of being the witness, of the maths of the new colour, even if he had wanted to. Still, at the moment he chose to realise his creativity, back then, even if he was just building up to it, he was cursed by a hypnotist, as if the world was saying no to his decision – and as I have said he didn’t have anything evil planned as such, nor any plan at all. He still doesn’t have a plan. He persuades himself the books he brought out are okay but still feels the world is saying no, even more so than before, before his fall into mental illness.

But now I see it differently. I see his fall into illness a result of his not even being able to write about his experiences. Being silenced by circumstance. As I said he wouldn’t even have been able to write of it all if he wanted to, partly because his seven year old web-book had to be locked in the attic, so he wasn’t privy to it, partly because his dad’s business precluded conversation… so in reaching an age where he was to flourish, but not having the tools with which to do so, and thus being forced to remain silent or get it all wrong, that may have triggered mental illness in Henry. It certainly is a fascinating case even to this day. It may be that even if he writes a list of the big, symbolic miracles he has been involved in, it would still be against the law unless it were woven into a fiction, consigned to mythology. That could be where we get slaying the dragon from – consigning a list of miracles to mythology because it’s been such a beast that it would be unfair and undemocratic to preserve it in face value terms.

It strikes me now that the balancing out, democratising “mechanism” that stopped Henry turning the situation to his advantage is the law. It might’ve been against the law for him to sing of what was in his breast, to sound out the sights that have been seen. That must be awful, for a young man, trying to realise his creativity. Meanwhile his contemporaries and brother-poets are making it work. So it is that the best stuff remains underground, that most genius remains obtuse, that the predominant culture is toxic, that English poetry only wears a genteel facade, that Henry isn’t even allowed to write about the wonderful things he does. He may not have come to terms with his own past yet, may have been desperately trying to work things out, and yet that may have been on the wrong side of the law, or at least pertaining to being something illegal at the end of the day. Let’s look into it: a paper on how you helped invent the net. A paper on being the witness from Jim Morrison. A paper on the maths of the new colour. A paper on the face of stars. A paper on the conversation in the barn in 2000 where you spoke against September 11th and more. All achieved in the style of the highest marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the country. But by now the Towers have fallen and you too have recorded an album on binaural earphones, promising to plug your senses in the mains. By now you have left University without a degree despite promising papers on Instant Travel, also Lucy in the Soul W/ Demons. No, that paper was never going to happen, because as I say, Henry hadn’t yet confirmed the boyhood experiences as real. But still to have really done all that and to make a paper that means you win, gain an advantage over someone else, whatever the topic may be, may well be against what the world itself wants. I wish I could be there, in the days preceding the curse of the hypnotist, to warn him, and to fill him in on his life experiences of early boyhood, and to highlight what if anything is positive in his writing and to generally help out.

Iii

Truth be told we don’t know why Henry was cursed by a hypnotist or hypnotised by a wizard or whichever way round it was. We know that every morning we wake up thinking “oh no, not that war again.” It was said that Henry was “done” because someone whom it seems is also too powerful decided Henry was trying to take over the world when he was in his Gap Year in Cambridge at the start of the band. Henry never really had an ambition stretching further than maybe playing an acoustic gig at the local pub. But now he knows. He knows why he was cursed by a hypnotist. Do you remember when I told you about Warwick University? He had gone there in the immediate aftermath of September 11th and also having spoken of an ideal for a text called The Scientific Papers. In the first week he discovered his tutor had just brought out The Scientific Papers. And as Henry was in the middle of looking in the back to see if the tutor had cited him as a reference, the tutor walked into his bedroom and said “I am not TS Eliot. I am not a Conservative poet.” The next mistake that the institution made was when they mistook Henry for being leglessly drunk one evening in the Union, when Henry had drifted off from the crowd to lie on a table in a darkened corner on his own. He had had literally less than one bottle of WKD and was deemed to be leglessly drunk and ushered out of the Union physically by a Security Guard, who confiscated his membership card, which was never returned meaning he was never allowed into the Union again. On an isolated campus this is very disturbing. The next mistake was when someone in loco parentis told them they would turn a blind eye if the students smoked pot in their private rooms. So they did but Security walked in and confiscated paraphernalia bought from around the world which is not illegal to own. We were already starting to see that that Labour Government were one of the most lawless and authoritarian governments we had had and the students involved in that one were never allowed in Halls of Residence again. The next mistake was when some students had a party on the roof, and were found out, and that was when Henry was not only banned from the Union, nor from Halls but from campus altogether. It was around this time that one of his mates suggested they change the letters of Senate House into the anagram O See The Anus. But the curse of the hypnotist came from something else. It was the final straw, when Henry snuck back onto campus to drink with a mate, and walking away at the end thinking he’d got away with it, under armed an empty blue WKD bottle to a bin in empty space, missed, meaning the glass broke and that was when Security were alerted. They were patrolling nearby and as the students walked off to the bus stop Security crept up behind Henry and his mate and tried to physically accost them from behind, restrain their bodies, and after the way he had been treated by that University whose wages he was paying Henry didn’t appreciate it so got physical and threw a few blue bodies over his shoulder. The police were called and they woke each in a cell, Henry and his mate, and when it came to court they were urged to plead guilty even though on a campus with CCTV everywhere there was a bus obscuring the vision of the event. So they got done for affray. Henry was expelled and given community service and his mate was allowed to stay at University but given extra community service by the University on top of what he had to do for the law. Considering it was misplaced loyalty that he got involved in the affray it seems absolutely disgusting. It was also disgusting what happened to Henry, who was effectively stolen from, lied to, persecuted and branded a criminal for it while paying their wages. When Henry went back to Cambridge to play in the band again afterwards he couldn’t even get on the Dole because the University, who said he wasn’t allowed to contact them again, couldn’t therefore provide a bit of paper proving he was no longer a student. So he ate from bins and lived in a shed. And as I say when he got home, to the Lakes, and started trying to meditate, detox, exercise, read and do dreamwork, to realise his creativity, he was cursed by the hypnotist – and his current theory is that it was ordered by his mate whose life was ruined by community service.

The problem we face is that we don’t want to describe the curse because it could disturb the dawn chorus. Henry went off to University a second time, cursed and had a break down, saw a holographic horsecock wheeled in the bedroom, starting hearing voices, and eventually went to hospital for a literal head wound sustained in a scrap and the nurse applied a bandage to the wound, and Henry went to touch it to see if it was paddy and it was and went to touch it a second time and it was gone. The nurse had to put a second bandage on. That was when he was sectioned in the acute ward, not just normal mental hospital, in the middle of his degree. He ran away and made it to Scotland, thinking there would be a different jurisdiction, but the cops were swift on his slow back and caught him and brought him back to the border. He was ticked off but it was seen as a sign of his sanity returning. His dad thought his escape was hilarious but it was actually rather sad because it meant Henry would now be forever in and out of hospital. He went back and finished his degree, got the highest First in the year. Then there followed the riots. By this stage Henry wasn’t into revolt at all. He’d had his spirit broken by the mental health situation, and still harboured academic ambitions. That is, he still wrote at a laptop, and in extremis too. It is believed he has written 1000’s of files, not just 1000’s of poems and songs and branched out into papers and prose and failed novels and still considered himself a failed writer.

It wasn’t until he’d got his degree that he remembered the wood, and was occupied by that for a while. It turned out he really was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures as well as helping invent the net and all those other things too, and was yet to earn a penny himself, for any of the wonderful things he did. It really did get to such a late stage in the day before he had let his brothers in on that one, and it turned out his dad may have had a deal where he was sponsored by some philosophers to provide the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures, but that may not be the whole truth.

Iv

So Henry now thinks he knows why he was cursed by the hypnotist. Back at Warwick University he wasn’t treated very well. I would say that a war broke out between himself and the Security guards (little blue meanies) when he was banned from the Union and kept creeping back in through illicit windows to drink with his friends which was never allowed. Teams of Security guards would be on to him if they sensed he was in the building. The band that won Battle of the Bands did it by singing “fuck the Union, fuck the Union, I shall free Henry, he’s the coolest guy for me.” Or something like that. He was being persecuted ever after that erroneous decision on his drunken-ness and to think that all along he was sitting on something like The Scientific Papers – he could’ve been the best student they had ever had. So what I am saying is the seed consciousness of the fire-dance may have existed in the way Henry was being treated by Warwick University. People cornered at the fire-dance blamed it on him, even though he didn’t seem to participate or have any interest in it by the time it came around. At least the teacher that seemed to have stolen The Scientific Papers from the student – or independently arrived at the same thing – didn’t have an affair with Henry’s undergraduate gf at the same time, eh? Anyhow all of this is worth forgetting.

By now his voices tell him he would’ve actually won a Nobel Prize for one of his books called The Field of Rock N Roll Science had it not been for the wood. It was too mad. The book was good but made him look odd. He had got to that late stage of life and still didn’t know anything about why he was the witness. It would probably be instructive right now to run you through the full list of things he had going for him. He helped invent the net at seven: when someone needed to store the idea of the net in writing in the attic at the foot of the fell to give it a chance to grow around the world it was Henry that wrote it. At eight he was the witness from The Lords And The New You Know Who, twice making weird observations. By then he had already gone wrong with the maths of the new colour and in puberty it left a mark on his body, but as I say wasn’t the new colour. At fifteen he attained the island of penguins and proved it in the first verse of the first song of his first gig. The problem was the lines he used possibly belong to the house so should be Anon – but at the same time if you take them away from him you make attaining the island of penguins a regrettable event. Then in 2000 when was 18 he forewarned of September 11th, predicted the hunt for the God Particle from looking at dust in a late ray of light angling in, prophesied also the alignment for a rhythm change in the White House and wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation. That was the year he also spoke of The Scientific Papers and recording on earphones and a whole bunch of other things that would also start to happen.

So after school he started recording on earphones, had an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, got a First despite the onset of mental illness, spotted a sensory overlay of his name on Piper, worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding screen, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel and was the one to discover the sheet where pictures seemingly depicting his own song lyric grew. The sheet belonged and still belongs to his brother, who designed it and laid it down and Henry was very good in surrendering possession of it to his younger brother. Then it was time to bring out books. So it was that trajectory from the age of seven up to finding the sheet that was his subject matter – and in fact could’ve been considered as “a weird science.” He was not a scientist by training so his dad always used to say it was a good job The Scientific Papers didn’t really land with Henry and that it did land with David Morley who was a scientist by training. Still, his ideal was never replaced. He went to University with an ideal and left with less than he arrived with. He left Warwick with the new ideal of presenting defaced bank notes because his tutor said “poetry is the opposite of money.” He went back to Cambridge as I have said and continued playing in the band, climbing up on the binaural earphone album to say he was going to plug his senses in the mains.

V

One evening, way back when he was still in the band, he had a fit, on E, skunk and White Russians galore and started wriggling round on the floor talking in a new language nobody could understand. So his band called his mum to tell her he was ill, and she came down, and sent Henry out to the shop while she had a private word. It is believed she told them of his role in helping invent the net, which Henry at the time was not privy to. Whatever the case she brought him home to the Lakes and he embarked on this program of meditation, dreamwork, detox, reading and exercise, and was cursed by the hypnotist. He went on to do his dissertation on David Morley without mentioning the embrocation, the uncanny overlap.

The point is Henry still doesn’t know whether he’s on the right or the left and should by now. His dad said he personally had no allegiance to any particular political party and that seems admirable and noble enough, for the civil war that goes on between the monolithic binaries of right and left and every day is soul-destroying and people rarely have their own opinion, tend instead to inherit it, to upkeep a family tradition in the genes, to rearrange prejudice as opposed to think for themselves or change their ways. Though his dad had no allegiance to a party, he did say he was allergic to Labour governments, though this is none of anyone else’s business. His dad was a socialist when younger, when at the LSE studying philosophy under Karl Popper in the 1960’s but must’ve just grown out of it. He used to say the left line their own pockets as much as anyone, reward their own voters by promoting them to bureaucratic positions, thus expanding the State into a situation of Big State Worship – and that essentially the less government the better.

Henry meanwhile was the first member of his family to require Benefits and also benefitted from the NHS being free in his mental illness, so wasn’t sure which way he tended. If it was true that bigots, racists, homophobes and the like all flocked to the Right, he didn’t want anything to do with it. But his dad, who died of cancer, was learning him about politics before he died and opined that the military themselves have no faith in the Left because they always bankrupt the economy. Still, Henry had good memories of dancing on E under the last Labour Government and was possibly part of that generation that were mysteriously swayed to the Left by the events of the immediate post-Millennium. He didn’t want to rule it out, and had good friends on the Left who seemed to believe in freedom of speech, even that freedom of speech was the gift and property of the left. It may be true but still they wouldn’t let him speak freely about Syracuse.

Henry came to think of the Left as a beautiful, compassionate emotion worth exploring, and as an elongation of the moment of the end of Fascism, which he wanted to devote his soul to but the difficulties he had with intellectual property were something else. Who really wants all their own work to go down as Anon? It wasn’t necessarily left-wing to make it like that, and in fact John Stuart Mill was on the left, and he said a progressive country can quickly become backwards if there is a decrease in Individuality. Henry liked On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, where said opinion was expressed. Sometimes Henry got frustrated and it was like he came from a Conservative background and couldn’t make the leap due to events that had happened such as being made to be the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. At least, when some looked at his CV as delimited herein, they said “we think you’re on the Right,” as if he didn’t even have any choice. His background was upper middle class, and he deemed it that like his dad he didn’t have any allegiance to a political party. Commentators also said that if he had been on the left he would’ve been paid for some of the wonderful things he did, like help invent the net or attain the island of penguins. The left was very tempting and the right was not. I think he was on the right to start with in life and made a journey against all odds and obstacles in his way towards the left. The problem was that as a youth he couldn’t be on the Left like his friends were and honour his father at the same time, but by now, he focussed on policies such as the fact that he wasn’t in a position to agree with cutting Benefits or cutting the tax to the rich, both of which posit him on the left, or would if he gave a shit about politics at all. He disengaged from socio-political reality like a Romantic practising idle escapism in the Lake District.

Vi

So it was that Henry came into partial resolution, seeing some of the reason for his being cursed by the hypnotist and seeing it didn’t necessarily originate with the hypnotist. He would say now if it was his old mate from Warwick that organised it, that it was due to the University in the wake of September 11th as we have heard. We would deem it that the lives of two good young men were ruined and that the University owes them an apology.

Whomsoever the rude voices on the intercom are, they are threatening his mother with death if he doesn’t play ball with their own politics, and we don’t know what that means, except that maybe they want to see the Oedipus Wrecks lyrics as Anon, which I can do, but I am not allowed to show the sheet where pictures grew and they haven’t told me why they threaten my mother’s life. It could date back in this instance to the rich man who “implemented” Henry’s idea for inventing earphones, rendered him destitute and swanned off with all his money at the end. “Now put that on your blog or we’ll kill your ma,” they say. It’s difficult for him to know what to do against such a backlash, but he isn’t sure the document belongs on his blog. His ma got back home from Finland only tonight and her voice had gone, and she was feverish as she had been throughout her holiday. He remembers, funnily enough, one of the voices saying while she was away that they would deprive her of breath if he didn’t do such and such or so and so. It was a writing task, and probably involved Henry renouncing ownership of something he had himself written. It isn’t clear who these people are or if there are in fact several bodies of people all trying to communicate with him.

And what does it mean when you start to hear children among the voices? And what are the children of my friends growing up to be like? I mean, do they seem to be leaning towards the “new language” approach of <BEE> or are they traditionalists? Are these words I speak like Chaucer unto them? Ah, I should forget the children. I am never going to have any myself. As for voices Henry’s CBT therapist recommends being more assertive, saying “please can I be at peace in my own home now,” and when they continue, to imagine a protector like the footballer John Barnes saying “please can I be at peace in my own home now?”

Henry supposes that liberty is the oxygen of the soul, and he needs to put this on his blog because of that reason, because it means oxygen for someone’s soul. He doesn’t know who and it might all change, but he might just leave it now. He has done 15 books and they have amounted to nothing, all self and vanity-press publications, and it might be time to be satisfied with what he has done.

Vii

Henry woke up the next day, late into the afternoon, because he was soooooooooooo drugged up to the eyeballs on medication, and had nothing going on in his life. By half six he’d had a microwave curry, and now thought about getting a beer too. Before he did, he had some chocolate mousse (Tesco finest) for pudding. His mum had just got back from a holiday in Finland – as I said – and was ill. His brother was asleep, rarely if ever left his room at the best of times, especially not when sleeping! Henry was starting to see that he’d been “done” by the left, dating back years. Still, he considered himself realigned with the New Red Army. He started to consider, more importantly than politics or prejudice, that his writing was making his mother ill. He didn’t know this for a fact and was prepared to do anything, to write anything, to prevent it. His mother was not on the left but was very, very left-handed. Henry downed a pint of lager and lime, listened to the footsteps above his head, thought of his working class friends in the pub, how the farmers he knew were blue. “We can’t go on spending forever,” one of them said. But Henry’s mother is ill and we need to heal her with some kind of excoriation by energy.

There was a friendly voice at hand to say “to put the Anon one on the net when you’ve been treated like that by the left would be gross.” Henry had a second beer and dreamed himself back to days of being a musician. They used to record on binaural earphones in the dead of night in a place called The Lock Up which was on an industrial estate described as “a giant brain” by Henry when they were high, which was always. Now when he is in quietude in the night-time, his mind becomes an abandoned warehouse through which there may float a residual melody made for recording on earphones. There is when this happens only a slim demarcation between the math rock sensibility and neo-Classicial music, for the refrain, the melody, could go either way and either way it seems “monastic,” the music of the abandoned warehouse. Traditionally, according to Gap Year rules, and band rules in general, Nightfall is a time for waking up, and smoking skunk. Vampiric hours were upkept. They were interested in the switch thrown. Now Henry bathes in glory that never was. And his brother says whomsoever it was that made Henry look like Adolf Hitler should be being read his Rights. It’s the bit of shadow under his nose that has been turned into a Hitler moustache. It’s not the way he used to look. As I say only recently he was said to look “a blur” unto the doctor. So it was that just about everybody had been treating Henry like a sack of shit. He wasn’t treated, even unto the government, in a way that was liveable.

Viii

Now it was later, and time does not pass but evaporate. Henry was stuck in the sticks still, foot of the oldest fell. He wanted to put the war he had been through behind him. He was dealing with people trying to make him Anon. He didn’t believe in it himself and knew it to be illegal to make another go Anon, but was being dispossessed of his intellectual property. He was being screwed. He imagined people leaving bits of his oeuvre, his body of work, in public bins. The war in Ukraine and the war in Iran were also leaking in his brain from far away. There may be a fuel crisis coming up. He still didn’t know why he was cursed only what voices had whispered. The Strait of Hormuz was still closed. The house at the foot of the fell needed work, and didn’t bring in an income, in fact was very expensive to run. The kettle was boiling. The emotive charge at the end of The New Creatures came into play.

TBC