Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Neurotic Stick

(Here's one of the 'Wee Man' stories I wrote about 20 years ago and forgot about. The resurrection of this one is occasioned by this report in The Guardian about talking benches.)

The wee man felt somewhat baffled by beauty. Not by his own good looks or lack of them, but because of something he had incidentally observed. It seemed to him that the expression on the faces of beautiful people was no happier than that upon the faces of less attractive folk. Exacerbating this perception was the fact that he had no idea what expression played across his own face. This was due to an unusual accident in his childhood.

He had been taken by an aunt to a variety show during the course of which he, along with several other children, had been hypnotised by a conjurer. Some of the children found themselves impersonating chickens when the conjuror said a certain word, others found certain vegetables to be too hot to touch. He had found himself unable to see his own reflection in a mirror. A sudden disturbance caused by a boy pecking out the conjuror’s left eye meant that some children were never deprogrammed. Of course the adults who had taken them to the show in the first place did not believe in hypnosis, and so these traits were allowed to remain.

So it was he had no idea how attractive or ugly he was.

This gave him an unusual perspective on people’s beauty problems. He was therefore able to discover the First Principle of General Beauty. This is when people conform absolutely to a social ideal, so they come to resemble marble covered in skin, or bones with magazine covers stretched across them. Such people were often thought dumb or heartless, but, he discovered, it was merely that they felt lost in a meaningless sink of beauty, in the great approximation to a standard. It was not that they failed to reach an ideal, but that, having reached it, they recoiled, baffled by simplicity.

His intuition that such people were as miserable as those who had failed in some detail to be beautiful, led him on to formulate the Second Principle of General Beauty. This was basically the revelation that the language of beauty has not been deciphered. It is possible to talk about beauty, but you cannot be sure of anything you say in it. Those who looked on a beautiful face as a sentence composed of eyebrows and lips were bound to be deluded. They were like those children who were forever doomed to impersonate a chicken on the pronunciation of one innocent word.

When he saw the intolerable suffering on the faces he passed in the street, the wee man resolved to do something to help humanity. Both men and women, he reasoned, were rendered powerless by their own appearance, and many of their difficulties seemed compounded by looking at members of the opposite sex. He remembered the fairy tale of Snow White and the mirror which spoke to the Evil Queen. Because of his own post-hypnotic problem, he was only able to conceive of the mirror as a piece of talking wood. Nonetheless, he found the notion of a therapeutic explicator, a kind of translator from Beautyese into normal speech, to be immensely helpful.

He began experimenting with tape recorders cunningly embedded in pieces of wood. These would be activated by pressure on their handles, and would then inform the person who had picked them up about the two principles of general beauty. However, because he had not understood the purpose of a mirror, he found that few if any individuals actually picked these devices up. He took to leaving them in public places, leaning against park benches and jutting from restaurant tables.

This brought him marginal success, but, again because of his failure to understand the nature of mirrors, he found people complained about the apparent irrelevance of messages thus received. Park attendants and waiters, though naturally concerned with questions of personal beauty, did not find they had much time to consider the issues raised by the pieces of wood during a normal working day.

He realised that the intellectual gap between seeing a piece of wood and thinking about beauty was too large. Obviously the principle behind the fairy tale would have to be updated for the modern sensibility. It was at this point that he conceived of the neurotic stick.

Theorizing that people might prefer to empathize with the piece of wood for its own sake, rather than be lectured to, he tried giving the stick a short monologue of complaints about its own personal beauty. Then he stood it in its own space, like a tree or lamppost. The voice was activated by pressure pads beneath the surrounding paving stones. Soon large groups of people could be found clustered around his sticks, listening sympathetically to their complaints about being too long, too thin, about having a coarse grain or too dark a varnish.

These neurotic sticks became so popular that the wee man devised a hand held version, based on his original design. People simply held on to it when they felt any anxiety about their appearance; tapes could be personalised to suit the individual’s particular beauty problems (translated, of course, into the stick’s terms). Within five years the concept of the neurotic stick had become such a commonplace that he was able to dispense with the tapes: people had begun to identify with their own sticks.

Paradoxically, this brought about an enormous focus on the appearance of the sticks themselves, which became the subject of an aesthetic cult, complete with magazines announcing seasonal choices and articles from tree surgeons about rare timbers. People’s attitudes towards their own appearances became lackadaisical, whilst aspects of traditional festivals like the Maypole, the Yule log, and, most importantly, the Christmas tree, took on an entirely new significance. Christians became obsessed with obtaining sticks fashioned from the Original Cross, and the use of wood for anything but neurotic sticks was frowned upon. Extremists would descend upon items of furniture, tear them limb from limb, then declare them “liberated”.

The printed word became an endangered concept.

All of these developments deeply saddened the wee man, who had hoped to free people from their sufferings. Now it looked as though as though large proportions of poor people might be dehoused in the massive reforestation programmes set up by private industries producing pirate sticks. It was at this point he remembered the conjuror’s trick from his childhood.

He began to secretly reintroduce tapes into his neurotic sticks. Instead of discussing anxieties these tapes broadcast subliminal messages about temperature, along the lines of “I’m such a hot tomato!” or “I’m a courgette that will burn your fingers!” He hoped this would cause people to drop the sticks, like the poor children who were still afraid of certain vegetables. But he had made one miscalculation.

People by now so identified with their neurotic sticks that they received these statements as messages about their personal identities. At the same time their image of themselves had so atrophied that they no longer knew whether they were beautiful or not, they just accepted the word of their sticks. So these announcements, because they contained a level of innuendo of which the wee man had been entirely unaware, in fact led to a massive increase in sexual behaviour of all kinds. The streets were filled with drab gray couplings and the apparently excited mutterings of countless neurotic sticks.

At this point the massive risk of disease finally caused governments to act. The wee man was hauled before commission after commission, and put on trial for his invention. The neurotic sticks were banned, which gave black marketeers total control of the industry, and the wee man was declared criminally insane and imprisoned. He ended up in a cell with an older man who had one eye and who seemed strangely familiar. This man, who had been imprisoned for many years and couldn’t understand all this fuss about pieces of wood, found the wee man so attractive that he fell deeply in love with him.

The wee man felt that there was some small detail he had overlooked in his life that if he could just recapture he would be able to solve the mess he had gotten everyone into. His admirer suggested he allowed himself to be hypnotised, to see if such a detail could be recovered. Whilst he was in a trance the incident of the botched hypnotism came out and the conjurer (for it was he) was able to finish his ancient act.

The wee man was now able to contemplate his image in the mirror for the first time with a sense that it related to himself. He found the experience intensely disturbing. His features seemed average, neither conventionally beautiful, nor conventionally ugly. But whilst he had never had any sensation of expression whatever, and had therefore supposed his face to be immobile, he found that it was actually extremely fluid, registering every nuance of emotion with painful intensity. He felt naked and ashamed. It was (he thought) only too clear why the judges had found him insane.

As he stared into the mirror, aghast, his companion gave him a supportive hug, and instantly the Third Principle of General Beauty came to him. This is the message that he smuggled out to his supporters in the forests, the message inserted into thousands of neurotic sticks, and infiltrated through the hundreds of thousands of illegal sticks. This is the message that finally brought nations to their senses, and made people everywhere look on the world around them with new vision and new hope, as though awakened from an ugly nightmare by a single phrase.

Recently there have been detractors who have claimed that the subterfuge necessary to get the message out resulted in it being accidentally edited. These sceptics claim that the Third Principle is actually nothing more than an old cliché. But until the wee man and his companion are released, the world will continue to engrave this message on its neurotic stick and in its heart:

“BEAUTY IS IN THE HOLDER”.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Kong of the Picts

(Another story from Virtual Scotland: just as 'Horse Island' should have concluded the collection, this somewhat lewd fable was intended as its opening piece.)

Insemination had been spectacular enough: Fay McWray bobbing on an unending spurt of giant gorilla semen like a ball at a fair, clutching her outflung ankles and screaming “WHEEEE!”

But pregnancy was the real nightmare; Fay literally ballooned, her belly expanding to a pink sphere twenty feet in circumference, her head and limbs dangling from it like the fingers of a rubber glove. She was only comfortable floating in the Tay, and a great plastic sac had to be created to contain her, so that the water could be heated. Meanwhile Kong amused himself hopping from multistory to multistory and squatting on the Law Hill, playing with bits of broken jets. (He’d been more sensible this time round, stomping on Leuchars before he arrived in Dundee, taking the RAF totally by surprise. The government had been sensible too, treating the whole incident as a money-saving exercise.)

When Fay’s breasts suddenly started growing too, rivalling her enormous belly, teams of divers had to be organised, to keep her now submerged head supplied with oxygen and sandwiches. She had a terrible craving for grilled banana and gouda cheese.

Delivery was a logistical nightmare, as it was by this time impossible to move her. Ultrasound had established there were at least forty children to be accounted for, and as the birth took place at night, the scene was a chaos of small boats equipped with searchlights and midwives in wetsuits. “Eh felt like the wreck o the bloody Braer,” as Fay commented later.

When her waters broke, so too did the protective sac, and the river level rose by six inches, slapping the Discovery Quay with a false tide that was greeted by a crowd of well-wishers with cheers and applause. By this time Kong, having imbibed freely in most of Dundee’s pubs, lay on his back, filling the Murraygate, while teams of male friends scrambled up ladders to empty can after can of export down his gaping throat.

“Eh wis that pished Eh trehd tae pit oan twa buses fur the Ferry, thinkin they werr meh baffies,” as he bemoaned the following afternoon (after a year in Dundee, his command of his first language was impeccable).

When the babies started appearing no-one quite knew what was happening; suddenly the waves were full of seals and black shapes like large dogfish sacs. It transpired the seals were catching the birth-pouches as they appeared, and nudging them towards the nearest boats. Fifty one in all were recovered by this method, but reports were received by Broughty Ferry police that crying voices had been heard floating past the Castle Rock. “Ye canna mak an omelette withoot braakin eggs, as ma mammy yaised tae sey,” Fay commented stoically. Kong had to be restrained from attempting to dredge the Firth after drunkenly putting a foot through the Earl Grey Hotel.

By the time the birth-pouches were brought ashore the rubbery material had already started to split at the restless kickings and scratchings of its contents, and doctors quickly removed the babies from their purse-like prisons. There were thirty two males and nineteen females. The children were humanoid, if slightly large, and the only abnormality appeared to be that they already had a full head of curling blue-black hair and, in the case of the boys, the beginnings of a stubble. Their eyes were extremely large, and a pale watery blue: “Jist like thir da!” exclaimed the proud mother, after being hoisted from the water.

In the next few months all was busy industry, as Kong set about repairing the various buildings damaged or obliterated by his sozzled perambulations. “See if Eh’d been wan o you wee fellas,” he commented philosophically, “Eh’d be makin thae model boats and sailin them oan the Swannie Ponds wi the best o ye!” Fay’s body began the extraordinary process of reabsorbing the extra lengths of skin generated by her pregnancy. Her breasts remained something of a burden, and together with her offspring she took up two wards at the DRI.

“But,” as she triumphantly announced, “Eh fed every wan o thae bairns wi ma ain twa breists: Eh felt like Christ wi the fehv thoosand, ken, him wi a pan loaf and a tin o pilchards.”

The children themselves grew at an incredible rate, as befitted the gene carriers of the mighty Kong. After six months they had gained the size and appearance of adolescents. As their first birthday approached they were complete, if speechless, adults. Their average height was seven feet, and it had become apparent that their eyes were twice the normal human size, with a corresponding variation in the proportions of their skulls. This made them especially sensitive to light. “Cost us a bloody fortune in designer sunglessis,” Fay complained, not without a touch of pride. The oversized sunglasses became, briefly, a fashion item amongst Dundee youth.

From an early age the children of Fay and Kong displayed a remarkable capacity for creativity: plasticene was seized upon, paints and pencils eagerly manipulated, and their manual dexterity more than made up for their continued silence. “See, they’re tellin me and thir daddy things wi thir haunds that ye widnae expect a bairn tae be able tae sey wi its mooth,” Fay said, staunchly defending her offspring as the psychiatrists’ diagnosis of autism became more and more likely.

It was from about this time, as school age approached, and it seemed increasingly unlikely that the McWray children would fit in, that public opinion began to turn against Fay and Kong.

“See when they’re aa oot waulkin through the toon in a big lang line,” said one woman, who declined to be named, “Eh dinna ken whaur tae pit masel. Thae bairns arena natural, starin at aabody wi een the sehz o ashets.”

“It is an affront to Christian families everywhere,” commented a minister anonymously, “that this couple should continue to get state support, even whilst flaunting their marriageless condition. Not that a gorilla can get married in the Church of Scotland anyway,” he added, off the record. “Especially if he can’t get through the bluidy door.”

The police received complaints from mothers fearing for their infants’ safety, and it could not be denied that the fifty one children were an intimidating sight; all with waist-length curling black hair and massive black shades, the boys bearded and almost Hassidic, and everyone clad in dark blue jellabas donated by a childless Arab emir.

Not even the discovery of their exceptional facility as sculptors improved the light in which the McWray children were viewed. Kong had apprenticed the boys to a monumental sculptor in a desperate attempt to make ends meet. (A earlier plan to enrol the girls as nurses, in honour of the support given to the family by Dundee’s hospitals, had ended in ignominious failure when they refused to perform the simplest tasks of cleaning or cooking.) Unable to inscribe lettering, the boys had instead produced a phantasmagoria of animal and symbolic imagery which threatened to dissolve the stone beneath their chisels. When reunited with their sisters this frenzy ordered itself under the girls’ mute directives into a repetitive series of motifs that had both archaeologists and art critics reeling in disbelief.

“While it is impossible to establish a direct route of influence,” commented Dr Granolithic of Dundee University, “there is a strong link between the McWray Family’s work and that of Pictish stonemasons from the eighth and ninth centuries.”

Collectors gathered the ceaseless outpourings from the studio of the mystified but gratified monumental sculptor, who later made a lucrative career for himself producing copies of his erstwhile apprentices’ work. Kong and Fay’s financial security was assured. But, if anything, this new-found wealth only heightened the tension between them and the ordinary community.

“Eh’ve hud shite through meh letter box, ma waashin stole, and fowk huv pennted “Picts Out” oan ma waas,” Fay said tearfully. “Eh’m at the end o ma bluidy tether.”

“If Eh catch them Eh’m goanae pit them atween the crack o meh erse and squeeze,” growled Kong, in what his lawyer attempted to dismiss as a stress-related outburst.

But when a perfectly-flattened fifty one year old man with a aerosol in the remains of his pocket was found not a hundred yards from Fay’s block of flats the idyll was over. Kong was arrested and held in Dens Park, whilst Fay and the children vanished to relatives “up north”.

Blood samples recovered from the sole of Kong’s foot matched that of the two-dimensional victim, and, separated from his loved ones, the giant gorilla broke down and confessed, asking for eighty seven incidents of wilful damage to jet fighters to be taken into consideration. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on a small island in the Pacific already playing host to the notorious serial Tokyo-crusher and dinosaur impersonator, Godzilla.

Fay and her now six year old brood had quite literally disappeared from the public eye. The art market demanded yet more McWray Family sculptures, and agents and dealers descended on Scotland in droves, but were unable to uncover the least trace. Relatives maintained a wall of silence almost as formidable as that of the children themselves, and the commotion gradually died down.

Fay aged gracefully in a tiny port on the North-East coast. Her breasts, once the size of pilot whales, now had to be rolled and contained within an ingenious bra devised for her by Kong, far away on Monster Island. The children, still mute, confined themselves to reworking the sandstone cliffs and caves around their safe haven. The locals accepted them with a disdain for the world’s opinions entirely typical of the area, and a number of marriages were consummated, wordlessly and underagedly on one side at least. Fay’s grandchildren, to her immense relief, could speak. “When I hear them yammerin awa in thir mammies’ airms, Eh think Eh’m hearin aa the words Eh waanted ma ain bairns tae sey,” she confided to relatives. Then came the news of Kong’s escape, and, such was the focus of media attention that Fay’s location was soon discovered.

Confined to their homes while news-teams and arts programme-makers swarmed the streets and cliffs of their small town, the McWray family stolidly endured the ceaseless media speculation. Where was Kong? Would he come for his lover and their children, now a considerable tribe of over a hundred souls? The navy patrolled the entire coastline nervously. Fay was photographed again and again, seated at the window of her small shorefront cottage, staring wordlessly out to sea, ignoring the window-tapping of the journalists, and their endless questions, mouthed or scribbled in felt pen on sheets of paper and held up to the glass.

Then, one morning, shortly after dawn (she had not slept in her bed for weeks) she saw the longed-for, fondly-remembered sight. Breaching the chill waters of the bay like a great hump-back whale, Kong’s erect penis jutted abruptly from the waves and hung there for a moment, signalling to her in their old secret code. Grey-haired as she was, she rose like a young girl, her shawl falling from her shoulders as she left the house, unbuttoning her blouse and stepping out of her old tweed skirt, rolling off her pantihose on the shingle as the film-crews slept on in the cosy if over-crowded guest houses and hotel. Wading out towards the point where Kong’s member had appeared, she undid her bra and let her breasts unfold, trailing behind her in the swell as the enormous penis broke the surface once more, showering her in droplets of foam.
Onshore, behind the windows of their quiet houses, the offspring of the giant ape and the woman, together with their wives and husbands and children, watched as Fay McWray clambered back onto the genital organ of her beloved and, employing a lazy backstroke, their father swam out of sight.