Saturday, September 22, 2007

Real Unreal People in Fake Hats

A brown rabbit scurried across the sideways, sideways its ears raised like the hair on a cat’s back. Close behind, in full pursuit, the moorhen, talons flailing, feet skipping across the blacktop, top. The brown rabbit reared to the left, then the right, ears pointing upwards, tail bobbling, teeth bared and at the ready. The moorhen caromed and veered, its tail-feathers crackling, eyes blacker than the blackest death. The man in the hat, who at that very moment was crossing the sideways perpendicular, bound to the left, then the right and sighed, ‘fucking shit-hens!’ Another fine to middling morning in a town made of pasteboard and tacks. This town is like any other town yet different. It’s a town (this town) so maudlin and gloomy that even the rabbits refuse to live top-side up. As towns go it is boorish and meek, a stand-in for a town, not the real thing but the appearance of a real thing, a real town. Everything, each and every person in this town is a stand-in for someone else, someone in another town, a real town. (This is a clown-town, a not-quite a town, town, an almost a town, town, but not quite). There is no man in the hat, no alms man or harridan, but stand-ins, cameo’s of real persons, people with real lives’ and real hats.

‘How odd’, you might say ‘how odd indeed’. How can unreal people be taken for real people? ‘Very odd indeed’, you would say ‘very, very odd indeed’. ‘How strangely odd’, I would say, ‘strangely odd indeed’. Indeed this may seem odd, strangely odd, all this oddity and fakery. Then I might say, I might indeed say, ‘no odder than odd, nor stranger than strange, no indeed, not at all, indeed not. As towns go this town, this clown-town is no odder, no stranger than a real town, a town made of real persons, real people with real hats and real lives’. What you might, may find odd, oddly strange is the fact that nothing, no person, no thing, no supposed thing, is any odder, any stranger than the next thing, even if that means that the thing we think is odd, stranger, is no thing at all, a fakery, a well executed sham. What I find odd, strange indeed, is the real things, the things that are really real, yet somehow unreal, shams and fakes, but real, real in that they are unlike the things we take as unreal, the real things that, on first appearance, seem oddly odd, very strange indeed. What you should be asking, yes, what is the only question worth asking is: why all the bloody Italics, why, why indeed?

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"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
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