Scene 1
It is a sunny week towards the end of Spring, in Cambridge, England, a cul-de-sac town for privilege, and calibre, and brooding royalty of all races but especially the rat and fish people.
We seem to see a man with a guppie for a head. The fish flutters away: we are looking through a fishtank at a man (named PREGNANT), brooding on a chair. But he does actually have a guppie for a head. The guppie gasps and the man dies, his crown clatters out of shot.
The shot pans away . . . out the window . . . a street scene . . . an observant viewer may spot CORNTROUGH wheeling his bicycle through the crowds . . . title, “Francis Crot’s Scrum in the Cum” and opening credits . . . as a suicide jumper lands on a mattress . . . several children shouting whee! come onto it after him . . . pans farther . . . another window . . . into another apartment.
A man apparently with a goldfish for a head. The fish flutters away: we are looking through a fishtank at a young man (named LEMON), brooding on a chair. He has a normal head – frankly, perhaps a shade more pensive than normal.
Lemon arises and approaches the tank.
Showing posts with label Lemon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lemon. Show all posts
Contagion at our Gates
BY FRANCIS CROT
Lemon is listening or "listening" to Xzibit's "E Lucean la Stelle."
LEMON: You don’t like think.
We see the fish eat a piece of food.
We see Lemon watching the fish.
LEMON: Don’t . . . actually . . . like, experience fish flakes, do you. Do you?
We see the fish.
LEMON: Your eyes detect it and your mouth swallows it. Isn’t that right? Like my heart . . . beats.
The man’s face suddenly comes into shot, pressed up against the glass. The fish darts. The man accuses.
LEMON: You aren’t really afraid! There’s no, there’s uh nothing . . . nothing to fear . . .
The shot changes. Lemon puts another piece of food in the water. The fish eats it. Lemon ponders.
LEMON: Little device.
Another piece.
LEMON: I’ve heard you have a memory of two seconds. What have you heard about me?
Another piece. Lemon keeps putting pieces of food in the tank, with increasing anger/excitement, as the scene wraps up.
LEMON: Is that memory like people have memories, or like my Mac has a memory? Could I see through your weird eyes? Would it thus be a pensioners’ bus tour of the Highlands, a baffling Hellish blur – relieved somewhat – continual – interesting – castle apparitions – ? – You uh see like food, you like swallow it – ? – nut in your automaton brain nothing more special than your automaton gut like you see food and you eat it and digest it and you see food and you eat
LEMON: You don’t like think.
We see the fish eat a piece of food.
We see Lemon watching the fish.
LEMON: Don’t . . . actually . . . like, experience fish flakes, do you. Do you?
We see the fish.
LEMON: Your eyes detect it and your mouth swallows it. Isn’t that right? Like my heart . . . beats.
The man’s face suddenly comes into shot, pressed up against the glass. The fish darts. The man accuses.
LEMON: You aren’t really afraid! There’s no, there’s uh nothing . . . nothing to fear . . .
The shot changes. Lemon puts another piece of food in the water. The fish eats it. Lemon ponders.
LEMON: Little device.
Another piece.
LEMON: I’ve heard you have a memory of two seconds. What have you heard about me?
Another piece. Lemon keeps putting pieces of food in the tank, with increasing anger/excitement, as the scene wraps up.
LEMON: Is that memory like people have memories, or like my Mac has a memory? Could I see through your weird eyes? Would it thus be a pensioners’ bus tour of the Highlands, a baffling Hellish blur – relieved somewhat – continual – interesting – castle apparitions – ? – You uh see like food, you like swallow it – ? – nut in your automaton brain nothing more special than your automaton gut like you see food and you eat it and digest it and you see food and you eat
Scene 9
A pub. Late afternoon. Lemon and Joe are playing pool. In the background are a table football table and VANESSA. CHRIS enters, “fresh” from football. Joe pauses his shot.
LEMON: Well?
CHRIS: Nine!
JOE: Nine’s all right.
CHRIS: Nine’s our season best.
JOE: Nice one.
Joe bends to sink something simple.
CHRIS: All right, Vanessa!
She waves.
LEMON: You still using the old ‘six-four-zero’?
CHRIS: Had Ben hanging back, didn’t we. Just the three goals in the second half.
Lemon is artificial and discomfited.
LEMON: Now you’ve [sic] in single figures, could it be time to start thinking offensively?
CHRIS: Maybe. And I'm not saying we're disappointed with the wretched result. If anything, we're ecstatic. But as the clock ran down, we faced a team increasingly less convinced of the strength of challenge we represented.
LEMON: Turned down the volume, did they.
CHRIS: Of the final five goals, three were accomplished by aerial scissor-kicks, one can be traced to a quite unnecessary hack-down by Ben, and one was an own goal.
LEMON: Deflection, or . . .
CHRIS: Yeah, deflection. To be honest, Ben kicking it in off Batesy’s elbow, so. Both. Ben played well actually.
Perhaps some soundtrack music begins now, or perhaps it has begun earlier. A pool shot, a real mega-hit, splays pseudo-chaos across the table-top. The camera shot lingers until this pool shot’s very last wobble. Meanwhile, floating away . . .
VANESSA: Did you win then?
CHRIS: Christ, Vanessa!
She’s laughing.
CHRIS: Have you not been listening? You must've never’ve been listening for a month to be asking me a question like that . . .
A pub. Late afternoon. Lemon and Joe are playing pool. In the background are a table football table and VANESSA. CHRIS enters, “fresh” from football. Joe pauses his shot.
LEMON: Well?
CHRIS: Nine!
JOE: Nine’s all right.
CHRIS: Nine’s our season best.
JOE: Nice one.
Joe bends to sink something simple.
CHRIS: All right, Vanessa!
She waves.
LEMON: You still using the old ‘six-four-zero’?
CHRIS: Had Ben hanging back, didn’t we. Just the three goals in the second half.
Lemon is artificial and discomfited.
LEMON: Now you’ve [sic] in single figures, could it be time to start thinking offensively?
CHRIS: Maybe. And I'm not saying we're disappointed with the wretched result. If anything, we're ecstatic. But as the clock ran down, we faced a team increasingly less convinced of the strength of challenge we represented.
LEMON: Turned down the volume, did they.
CHRIS: Of the final five goals, three were accomplished by aerial scissor-kicks, one can be traced to a quite unnecessary hack-down by Ben, and one was an own goal.
LEMON: Deflection, or . . .
CHRIS: Yeah, deflection. To be honest, Ben kicking it in off Batesy’s elbow, so. Both. Ben played well actually.
Perhaps some soundtrack music begins now, or perhaps it has begun earlier. A pool shot, a real mega-hit, splays pseudo-chaos across the table-top. The camera shot lingers until this pool shot’s very last wobble. Meanwhile, floating away . . .
VANESSA: Did you win then?
CHRIS: Christ, Vanessa!
She’s laughing.
CHRIS: Have you not been listening? You must've never’ve been listening for a month to be asking me a question like that . . .
Scene 11
The man and the woman lie naked together. The first part of the scene is shot from Lottie’s POV. In other words, we can’t yet see her face.
LEMON: I don’t have inner experience.
LOTTIE: Hmm?
Beat.
LEMON: It’s very hard to describe.
Beat.
LOTTIE: What is?
LEMON: Like. There is nobody “looking out of me.” I exhibit all the outer manner of human behaviour, including language and social interaction and so forth, but there is no consciousness to match. Inside me, all the lights are out.
Beat.
LOTTIE: All right.
Beat.
They kiss.
LEMON (within the kisses): Is it? I mean is it all right?
LOTTIE (within the kisses): Well I don’t quite know what you mean.
Lemon thinks or “thinks,” We could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also “act” in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to “enter our consciousness” (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible, seeing itself only in a mirror. Even now, by far the greatest portion of our life takes place in a mirror.
LEMON: You know how you infer what it’s like to be other people? By combining what it’s like to be you with what you see other people do? Well there’s nothing that it’s like to be me! There are no, uh . . . subjective facts about me.
LOTTIE: You’re nuts!
LEMON: Imagine . . . imagine a sophisticated, sort of, robot that you could make love to. It even groans and moans as if it were enjoying it. And it’s not thinking “God, when will this be over” – it isn’t thinking, or feeling, anything! Except as a kind of, well the way it’s programmed to behave, a particular set of subroutines to change the way it behaves it response to certain stimuli . . .
LEMON (within kisses): . . . like some of the things you do . . . like when your little mouth . . . goes around me . . . and your little hands . . .
Lottie laughs. But there is something in his manner. She moves away, turning her back on him.
We switch to some ordinary shot. There is a trail of still and smudged sperm on her cheek and her neck below the ear. He kisses her spine. He looks at her. He moves his head to speak into her ear.
LEMON: You’ll understand. Anyway I prefer someone looking out for me than someone looking out of me.
Beat.
LEMON: I’m sorry. We’ll talk about it later.
LOTTIE: It’s just a bit boring.
This goes towards establishing a mood.
The man and the woman lie naked together. The first part of the scene is shot from Lottie’s POV. In other words, we can’t yet see her face.
LEMON: I don’t have inner experience.
LOTTIE: Hmm?
Beat.
LEMON: It’s very hard to describe.
Beat.
LOTTIE: What is?
LEMON: Like. There is nobody “looking out of me.” I exhibit all the outer manner of human behaviour, including language and social interaction and so forth, but there is no consciousness to match. Inside me, all the lights are out.
Beat.
LOTTIE: All right.
Beat.
They kiss.
LEMON (within the kisses): Is it? I mean is it all right?
LOTTIE (within the kisses): Well I don’t quite know what you mean.
Lemon thinks or “thinks,” We could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also “act” in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to “enter our consciousness” (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible, seeing itself only in a mirror. Even now, by far the greatest portion of our life takes place in a mirror.
LEMON: You know how you infer what it’s like to be other people? By combining what it’s like to be you with what you see other people do? Well there’s nothing that it’s like to be me! There are no, uh . . . subjective facts about me.
LOTTIE: You’re nuts!
LEMON: Imagine . . . imagine a sophisticated, sort of, robot that you could make love to. It even groans and moans as if it were enjoying it. And it’s not thinking “God, when will this be over” – it isn’t thinking, or feeling, anything! Except as a kind of, well the way it’s programmed to behave, a particular set of subroutines to change the way it behaves it response to certain stimuli . . .
LEMON (within kisses): . . . like some of the things you do . . . like when your little mouth . . . goes around me . . . and your little hands . . .
Lottie laughs. But there is something in his manner. She moves away, turning her back on him.
We switch to some ordinary shot. There is a trail of still and smudged sperm on her cheek and her neck below the ear. He kisses her spine. He looks at her. He moves his head to speak into her ear.
LEMON: You’ll understand. Anyway I prefer someone looking out for me than someone looking out of me.
Beat.
LEMON: I’m sorry. We’ll talk about it later.
LOTTIE: It’s just a bit boring.
This goes towards establishing a mood.
Scene 13
Lemon is watching television and reading a book. Lottie lies with her head in his lap doing neither.
Without looking up from his book, Lemon changes the channel. Terminator II is showing, or perhaps Robocop.
Lottie turns her head and watches. In a moment, he watches too. We see a “Plot Trajectory” subtitle flash up – what the robot sees.
LEMON: When I was a little boy, I had trouble understanding the uh first-person camera shots. I watched on episode of McGyver with my mother and she knew that McGyver was being watched because the shot was low and through some tall grass, and the music had made a sinister switch, but I didn’t know that. I thought the program was just showing me what McGyver and his friend were doing.
LOTTIE: McGyver had duck tape.
ROBOCOP: We can't have that.
LEMON: It’s very difficult to speak properly about what I am. I seem just the same. My brain’s made of the same stuff, nervous cells, memory. Language evolved to serve the needs of people who experience things. Duct tape.
LOTTIE: You're as smooth as a moose on the loose. Have a crisp.
A shot from Lottie’s perspective. His face, up-side-down. He thinks. He smiles. He is inspired.
Lemon is watching television and reading a book. Lottie lies with her head in his lap doing neither.
Without looking up from his book, Lemon changes the channel. Terminator II is showing, or perhaps Robocop.
Lottie turns her head and watches. In a moment, he watches too. We see a “Plot Trajectory” subtitle flash up – what the robot sees.
LEMON: When I was a little boy, I had trouble understanding the uh first-person camera shots. I watched on episode of McGyver with my mother and she knew that McGyver was being watched because the shot was low and through some tall grass, and the music had made a sinister switch, but I didn’t know that. I thought the program was just showing me what McGyver and his friend were doing.
LOTTIE: McGyver had duck tape.
ROBOCOP: We can't have that.
LEMON: It’s very difficult to speak properly about what I am. I seem just the same. My brain’s made of the same stuff, nervous cells, memory. Language evolved to serve the needs of people who experience things. Duct tape.
LOTTIE: You're as smooth as a moose on the loose. Have a crisp.
A shot from Lottie’s perspective. His face, up-side-down. He thinks. He smiles. He is inspired.
The Scornful Ensemble
BY FRANCIS CROT
Lottie moisturised. Lottie toned. Lemon watched from his side. Tomorrow he would take his life. The notion was in him. He’d had difficulty making himself understood. If he’d known of the philosophical concept “zombie,” he might not have felt or “felt” the frustration which would intensify during that sleepless night and sublimate climactically in his suicide in the field the next day. He could have referred Lottie to the literature. In fact not knowing that particular philosophical term is probably what killed him. They had the downstairs of a sunny and pretty semi-detatched, very clean save for many sudden ladybirds, and a single virtuous-looking little mouse towards whom no policy had ever been quite agreed.
Lemon’s suicide would be its own elaborate suicide note: a linguistic treat which he hoped or “hoped” might – through its unorthodox emotional and legal significance – break into ordinarily inaccessible realms of propositional significance. The message was: lacking all subjectivity, Lemon’s life could be justly made the instrument of any value-generating discourse . . . his death could be used to win a five-a-side football game, or an anecdote game, and everyone should flock cheerily to pubs as if nothing had happened because nearly nothing had. His corpse lifted into a skip. That was the shifty and subtle point he would try to put across by trying to kill himself in that way. Lemon adjusted his pillow long-ways, the way he liked or “liked” it. On Lottie’s Facebook profile, he thought with regret or “thought with regret” it said: “About me: people like me cuz I’m cool as the other side of the pillow...”
Lottie moisturised. Lottie toned. Lemon watched from his side. Tomorrow he would take his life. The notion was in him. He’d had difficulty making himself understood. If he’d known of the philosophical concept “zombie,” he might not have felt or “felt” the frustration which would intensify during that sleepless night and sublimate climactically in his suicide in the field the next day. He could have referred Lottie to the literature. In fact not knowing that particular philosophical term is probably what killed him. They had the downstairs of a sunny and pretty semi-detatched, very clean save for many sudden ladybirds, and a single virtuous-looking little mouse towards whom no policy had ever been quite agreed.
Lemon’s suicide would be its own elaborate suicide note: a linguistic treat which he hoped or “hoped” might – through its unorthodox emotional and legal significance – break into ordinarily inaccessible realms of propositional significance. The message was: lacking all subjectivity, Lemon’s life could be justly made the instrument of any value-generating discourse . . . his death could be used to win a five-a-side football game, or an anecdote game, and everyone should flock cheerily to pubs as if nothing had happened because nearly nothing had. His corpse lifted into a skip. That was the shifty and subtle point he would try to put across by trying to kill himself in that way. Lemon adjusted his pillow long-ways, the way he liked or “liked” it. On Lottie’s Facebook profile, he thought with regret or “thought with regret” it said: “About me: people like me cuz I’m cool as the other side of the pillow...”
The Lying Voiceover
BY FRANCIS CROT
Sunday. Parker’s Piece, which Lisa till lately had thought “Parker’s Peace.” The sky sweeping with chewy emblems of luminance. A charnel stack of bicycles, and the usual heap of Nike and Adidas “picnic baskets.” The game hadn’t begun. Hallucinatorily cheerful panorama. The boys stood in two groups about twenty yards apart, scuffing a few footballs among them. They didn’t wear bibs – they knew who was who.
Lemon jogged over to Chris. They spoke, Chris shrugged, Lemon shrugged, Chris laughed and patted him on the shoulder.
“What was that about?”
“Got something up my sleeve. Something to add to the secret weapon. He don’t know the half of it.”
The lads took kick-off by ignoring the ball and running around with their arms held firmly at their sides. Gradually they formed four lines traversing the pitch. They were not elegant or even in synch or even, let’s be honest, doing back-flips. Skipping. Aborted toast pops. Gaz was about sixteen stone, he was doing forward rolls. Gut Heathrow for Gaz’s personal dojo, I dare you, he’d hardly learn a grace. I want you to step forward and bear part of the responsibility for this brutal chaos.
Balls are peculiar signs of courage – the only pebbles which buckle. Guts by contrast, when you appreciate how elastic they are and how they pump, gasp with duty, even in the open air . . .
Sunday. Parker’s Piece, which Lisa till lately had thought “Parker’s Peace.” The sky sweeping with chewy emblems of luminance. A charnel stack of bicycles, and the usual heap of Nike and Adidas “picnic baskets.” The game hadn’t begun. Hallucinatorily cheerful panorama. The boys stood in two groups about twenty yards apart, scuffing a few footballs among them. They didn’t wear bibs – they knew who was who.
Lemon jogged over to Chris. They spoke, Chris shrugged, Lemon shrugged, Chris laughed and patted him on the shoulder.
“What was that about?”
“Got something up my sleeve. Something to add to the secret weapon. He don’t know the half of it.”
The lads took kick-off by ignoring the ball and running around with their arms held firmly at their sides. Gradually they formed four lines traversing the pitch. They were not elegant or even in synch or even, let’s be honest, doing back-flips. Skipping. Aborted toast pops. Gaz was about sixteen stone, he was doing forward rolls. Gut Heathrow for Gaz’s personal dojo, I dare you, he’d hardly learn a grace. I want you to step forward and bear part of the responsibility for this brutal chaos.
Balls are peculiar signs of courage – the only pebbles which buckle. Guts by contrast, when you appreciate how elastic they are and how they pump, gasp with duty, even in the open air . . .
Contempt Festival
BY FRANCIS CROT
. . . at that moment Lemon ran into the playing area, took a knife from his joggers and opened his throat. The blood leapt out all at once, like something waiting to be free, and he folded up. To put this into perspective, it was not as surprising as a sudden latticework of mellifluous dogs, a structure some fifty feet high, or anything like that. All players but one crowded around the corpse – the “injury” paradigm was what they had to deal with this. Chris, riven with hysterical panic, yet deft enough to braid a kettle, deft enough to snatch from you your iPod, but not its song from your ear, dribbled around the bloodshed. He faced an open goalmouth and tapped it in there.
. . . at that moment Lemon ran into the playing area, took a knife from his joggers and opened his throat. The blood leapt out all at once, like something waiting to be free, and he folded up. To put this into perspective, it was not as surprising as a sudden latticework of mellifluous dogs, a structure some fifty feet high, or anything like that. All players but one crowded around the corpse – the “injury” paradigm was what they had to deal with this. Chris, riven with hysterical panic, yet deft enough to braid a kettle, deft enough to snatch from you your iPod, but not its song from your ear, dribbled around the bloodshed. He faced an open goalmouth and tapped it in there.
All That Meat
BY FRANCIS CROT
And away in Malton Julian unpeeled the stock cube like it was his special nut.
And on Parker's Piece, Lottie’s woe was a little assauged when her love began to nibble her cheek.
And one of the kids, Seth, recognising what was happening, raced home to put his ninja costume on.
And in the chapel, the tide of flesh was herding Mrs. Williamson towards the exit. As the shadow of sunlight fell across her, her frail, uncertain feet encountered a streak of blood and she slipped violently. For a moment Brenda thought the stone floor would crack open her head but the flesh caught that and nestled it and kept seeping, with Mrs. Williamson as its figurehead, lifting up her shoulders, a bad mixture of ship and sea, peeling back her dress against the floor, despite her little fretting and patting and smoothing hands, and feeding her feet-first to a pack of dead doormen. As the blood began to whiz the floral sneer flipped up past her swollen thighs to reveal an adult nappy, an unexpectedly stark canvas, quickly painted with the red of Mrs. Williamson’s varicose sewers amid Mrs. Williamson’s dying whimpers.
The revolting anomaly winnowed their ranks by driving them into the undead killers at the door, by colliding them into stone so that their heads smacked hard against it, and if they survived those attentions, by flowing meanderingly into their heads and chests and by compressing and popping all their structure, closing fistlike about their bodies and rousing them like puppets then crunching them and deforming them like living Paintshop pixels and disseminating them into the flow.
Eight of them however survived by running past the fell guards whose carious and baneful gaze did not find them through the enormous floods of crimson juice they beckoned from the melting bodies of others, into the little church lawn.
Here they saw one who might have been Mrs. Williamson’s gentler elder sister who had perhaps had the good fortune to arrive late to the ceremony and thus never to have set foot inside the chapel spongebathed with a manhole cover by a revenant. The idea that the inwardly brittle formation of bone was a definitely limited union had taken the eight escapees with surprising force. Did the dead, come sprightly from their beds beside the chapel, motion to one another, as if with positive judgement? Surely they bade, one to the other, to carouse and prosecute the banquet.
A tithe of your leg. Different dead people waited at the entrance to the little lawn to eat them. Damned in concentric traps. Yet between frying pan and fire, a world of difference – for all that they each pitilessly asserted the priority of tactics. Curiously difficult and unsatisfactory was the bloody and grass green lawn, of funereal trenches, and sprinting and young in a sense worshippers. Inside there the meat had the upper hand and wouldn’t let you forget it.
Stained glass shattered. Now bodies within were pushed through the rafters. Out their bones came, crinkle-crankle, through the stained glass and the brickwork. The flesh posies from the chapel’s surface soon began to wave in no wind. These chaoses of human bodies, enormous, blood-woozy ganglia, soft tissue and bone sprouting somewhat like gore-soaked and filled clusters of ultra-thin flourescent tubes, were also possessed by the dark reanimating morphological field, but did not threaten the escapees.
The chapel was clogged, sealed off. A wall of invisible force marked the boundary and the evil meat flowed to exactly that line. The rotting gents slit blue sacks and whirling red rope from your warm screaming friends.
"You can't reap me," Brenda trilled, "I used to draw you!"
"Everyone's just running away," Corntrough called to her, "especially me!"
"Do you have a better idea? You suck at this!"
"Hallelujah!" called Father Jeremy archly.
The relation between aesthetics and ethics is both overtheorised and undertheorised. The key question is, alot of sentences are bad, but are any equally as bad as the holocaust? It is problematic because according to most people the question itself is in the same neighbourhood. The whole struggle is to go beyond satire and just be plain rude, like the chapel, 100% full of meat, did. Were the meat to tense, it could launch a spire like a rocket. That was so not revealing Himself through the beauty of His creation.
And away in Malton Julian unpeeled the stock cube like it was his special nut.
And on Parker's Piece, Lottie’s woe was a little assauged when her love began to nibble her cheek.
And one of the kids, Seth, recognising what was happening, raced home to put his ninja costume on.
And in the chapel, the tide of flesh was herding Mrs. Williamson towards the exit. As the shadow of sunlight fell across her, her frail, uncertain feet encountered a streak of blood and she slipped violently. For a moment Brenda thought the stone floor would crack open her head but the flesh caught that and nestled it and kept seeping, with Mrs. Williamson as its figurehead, lifting up her shoulders, a bad mixture of ship and sea, peeling back her dress against the floor, despite her little fretting and patting and smoothing hands, and feeding her feet-first to a pack of dead doormen. As the blood began to whiz the floral sneer flipped up past her swollen thighs to reveal an adult nappy, an unexpectedly stark canvas, quickly painted with the red of Mrs. Williamson’s varicose sewers amid Mrs. Williamson’s dying whimpers.
The revolting anomaly winnowed their ranks by driving them into the undead killers at the door, by colliding them into stone so that their heads smacked hard against it, and if they survived those attentions, by flowing meanderingly into their heads and chests and by compressing and popping all their structure, closing fistlike about their bodies and rousing them like puppets then crunching them and deforming them like living Paintshop pixels and disseminating them into the flow.
Eight of them however survived by running past the fell guards whose carious and baneful gaze did not find them through the enormous floods of crimson juice they beckoned from the melting bodies of others, into the little church lawn.
Here they saw one who might have been Mrs. Williamson’s gentler elder sister who had perhaps had the good fortune to arrive late to the ceremony and thus never to have set foot inside the chapel spongebathed with a manhole cover by a revenant. The idea that the inwardly brittle formation of bone was a definitely limited union had taken the eight escapees with surprising force. Did the dead, come sprightly from their beds beside the chapel, motion to one another, as if with positive judgement? Surely they bade, one to the other, to carouse and prosecute the banquet.
A tithe of your leg. Different dead people waited at the entrance to the little lawn to eat them. Damned in concentric traps. Yet between frying pan and fire, a world of difference – for all that they each pitilessly asserted the priority of tactics. Curiously difficult and unsatisfactory was the bloody and grass green lawn, of funereal trenches, and sprinting and young in a sense worshippers. Inside there the meat had the upper hand and wouldn’t let you forget it.
Stained glass shattered. Now bodies within were pushed through the rafters. Out their bones came, crinkle-crankle, through the stained glass and the brickwork. The flesh posies from the chapel’s surface soon began to wave in no wind. These chaoses of human bodies, enormous, blood-woozy ganglia, soft tissue and bone sprouting somewhat like gore-soaked and filled clusters of ultra-thin flourescent tubes, were also possessed by the dark reanimating morphological field, but did not threaten the escapees.
The chapel was clogged, sealed off. A wall of invisible force marked the boundary and the evil meat flowed to exactly that line. The rotting gents slit blue sacks and whirling red rope from your warm screaming friends.
"You can't reap me," Brenda trilled, "I used to draw you!"
"Everyone's just running away," Corntrough called to her, "especially me!"
"Do you have a better idea? You suck at this!"
"Hallelujah!" called Father Jeremy archly.
The relation between aesthetics and ethics is both overtheorised and undertheorised. The key question is, alot of sentences are bad, but are any equally as bad as the holocaust? It is problematic because according to most people the question itself is in the same neighbourhood. The whole struggle is to go beyond satire and just be plain rude, like the chapel, 100% full of meat, did. Were the meat to tense, it could launch a spire like a rocket. That was so not revealing Himself through the beauty of His creation.
Book II: The "Can't-Be-Buried!" Tales
BY THOMAS HARDY
Notes on contagion
I literally cannot say whether Lemon was mistaken about his “emptiness.” As for doom – enough doom for everybody – I don’t want to say. Given:
Then a soul in the “incarnation foyer” should expect to be born nearer to the end of a race than its beginning – there are more places available. Put it that way (the “Doomsday Argument”).
The focus of my essay is a contagion which spread over the world, altering landscapes, but in the case of its Cantabrigian epicentre, not gravely so.
Lemon is comprehended in that focus because a component of the contagion originated with him, at any rate it settled its form in him. This component or “meme” might be described as the strong inclination to move from ontological facts to bodily praxis. Several weeks before Lemon died he passed this “meme” to a woman called Vanessa Curtis, who took it with her to the City Church on St. Albert’s Road. In that faith-clogged environs it bred catastrophically with a “meme” that could be described as the ressurection of the flesh. The bloated and deadly progeny possessed characteristics belonging to neither parent. After Lemon's suicide, incidentally, he was also infected by this hybrid strain.
Chinwag is comprehended in my focus because of his influential role in containing the breakout. He is the one case I am looking at in detail. I had him, Samantha, and the enraged taxonomer to chose from. Angels are reptiles? He would have totally spacked out. Were it not for the latent violence of these three . . . well. It doesn’t bear speaking about.
"[...] I rose at night, and visited
The Cave of the Unborn:
And crowding shapes surrounded me
For tidings of the life to be,
Who long had prayed the silent Head
To haste its advent morn.
Their eyes were lit with artless trust,
hope thrilled their every tone;
"A scene the loveliest, is it not?
A pure delight, a beauty-spot?
Where all is gentle, true and just,
And darkness is unknown? [...]"
Notes on contagion
I literally cannot say whether Lemon was mistaken about his “emptiness.” As for doom – enough doom for everybody – I don’t want to say. Given:
Then a soul in the “incarnation foyer” should expect to be born nearer to the end of a race than its beginning – there are more places available. Put it that way (the “Doomsday Argument”).
The focus of my essay is a contagion which spread over the world, altering landscapes, but in the case of its Cantabrigian epicentre, not gravely so.
Lemon is comprehended in that focus because a component of the contagion originated with him, at any rate it settled its form in him. This component or “meme” might be described as the strong inclination to move from ontological facts to bodily praxis. Several weeks before Lemon died he passed this “meme” to a woman called Vanessa Curtis, who took it with her to the City Church on St. Albert’s Road. In that faith-clogged environs it bred catastrophically with a “meme” that could be described as the ressurection of the flesh. The bloated and deadly progeny possessed characteristics belonging to neither parent. After Lemon's suicide, incidentally, he was also infected by this hybrid strain.
Chinwag is comprehended in my focus because of his influential role in containing the breakout. He is the one case I am looking at in detail. I had him, Samantha, and the enraged taxonomer to chose from. Angels are reptiles? He would have totally spacked out. Were it not for the latent violence of these three . . . well. It doesn’t bear speaking about.
"[...] I rose at night, and visited
The Cave of the Unborn:
And crowding shapes surrounded me
For tidings of the life to be,
Who long had prayed the silent Head
To haste its advent morn.
Their eyes were lit with artless trust,
hope thrilled their every tone;
"A scene the loveliest, is it not?
A pure delight, a beauty-spot?
Where all is gentle, true and just,
And darkness is unknown? [...]"
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