Weirdtongue (35)

“A clown’s accoutrements become more effective the bigger or baggier they are … well, after all, if they’re made smaller the audience wouldn’t be able to see them properly. Likewise, I wonder when words are made bigger or baggier whether they take on new dimensions of meaning or effectiveness. In John Cowper Powys House – which the inmates know in its shortened form of JCP House – the JCP Foundation, as you know, being one of those lost conglomerates of state conspiracy currently re-grouping in quarters as yet unclear to people like you who never read between the lines…”

He paused as he gazed at the back of his listener’s head … the latter eventually replying:

“What do you mean? People like you?”

“No offence meant, mate. Simply is that I guess I’m the same as you. Because when I do read between the lines, I infer all the wrong things. Infer is just a shortening of interfere. Get my drift?”

”I’m afraid you’re being too subtle for me. All I know is that JCP House is one of those places suffering its own form of nemoness. A spirit of place – a genius loci – that is wildly out of kilter with its own sense of existence. It then fears it doesn’t exist and therefore needs to build a reputation, a ‘bigness’ (as you put it) far beyond its own reality. And the bigger it gets, the baggier it gets, the more tenuous it gets, and then it implodes or sinks like a burst Zeppelin or collapsed Big Top.”

“Well, yes, that’s true. But, meanwhile, how about we make the house less lugubrious? Take out the dry rot. Put in a few Christmas decorations. There’s no secret that Christmas is put where it is as a defence against the gloom of deep winter.”

“An antipodal angst?” The speaker laughed at his own irony.

“It helps that you can see the Tor from some of the bedroom windows. That sort of fixes it as a place with a real environment which in turn fixes the folk who stay there. ‘Fix’ in the sense of fixing a painting or a bit of pottery. Or poetry. Varnishing the words forever, baking them in the kiln of the writer’s mind.”

“You’re getting carried away. Do you mean fiction as fixion?”

The other speaker could not visualise the words ‘fiction’ or ‘fixion’ without seeing them. He suspected his co-conversationalist was not really speaking those words, because a real speaker would have spelt out the words ‘fiction’ and ‘fixion’ for the benefit of his listener. However, he went on, ignoring the slip-up by his interlocutor:-

“Back to the words. The inmates in JCP House are at this moment inspecting the large swollen words that have been left in all the rooms for them to fathom out as a sort of ‘Big Brother’game. They need to separate the limbs of each letter, unstick them so that the resultant gaps reveal the nature of each letter and eventually each word that those letters constitute. Sticky with some sort of meaningless glue or porridgy substance. Some letters even seep blood. Some need mixing around to correct the spelling. Some words smell of mildew, caked with some gunge even worse than imaginable. A few words are so bloated they hang by a tenuous thread. Tissuey flesh or distended pig-bladder. Other words become inflamed like they are gorged with pus. But they remain as words. Raging toothaches. Yet they are intrinsically words. The housemates merely have to unscrabble them, palliate them*. Before the words are their own words.”

The other nodded, rather distracted. Despite his increasing scrawny state, he was pulling the medicine wagon and currently the terrain was troubling him (taking his mind off the conversation), whilst the other, riding solitary shotgun as he was, towards Glistenberry, lightly tapped his interlocutor on the shoulder with his whip, urging him on. Soon the House itself would appear on the horizon as a counterpoint to the Tor which they could already see. The driver looked back into the depths of his wagon and checked on the state of the glistening coilings of Weirdtongue (now sprouting disease-looking berries) as it, too, underwent the vibration of travel. Perhaps they should have smoked it rather than pickling it. One never really could depend on various forms of preservation. He looked again at his scrawny steed (now fallen silent), as if that was a case in point.

* FOOTNOTE (standard): HERE.
* FOOTNOTE (adult) HERE.

'Weirdtongue' continues HERE.

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