I'm just going to put what I write here, in case I need it for some reason later. Some stories might have context attached, others I'm just going to put out there. There's no central theme or premise. It will be erratic.
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Intro
Weygand
Trapped in Baudrillard's Nightmare
- Location
- Whirling-in-Rags
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hello.
I think there are only a few talents more miserable than being literary. But I'm literary. I don't know why. I could regale you with stories about what a dork I was as a kid, the books I liked to read cover to cover, the fact my teachers would watch as I dragged these dense fiction tomes in and calmly read the whole lesson (I still don't know why I wasn't stopped), or I could just give you the recent background and why I made this thread.
I started writing again.
It probably doesn't sound like a big deal. I've done quests, and I write prolifically and joyfully for a lot of GSRPs, but I consider that a kind of destructive pleasure. I enjoy doing it, but the end product is a depiction of a depiction.
I stopped writing fiction when I started at university. I didn't, initially, but exposure to greater and greater theoretical depths and complexities made my love and admiration of my language grow out from a curiosity into a fascination.
And nothing I did was good enough.
Imposter syndrome is a drag, and I was a working-class kid, the first in my family to ever get into a university, studying a subject - literature - that had for all intents and purposes become a cul-de-sac. A part of me knew I was being impossibly selfish, but we don't often get the chance to do that whilst we're young, so I kept it down. The bright future I was blazing was going to lead to a career in something like marketing, which I reluctantly conceded to doing, after delaying and fighting for as long as possible to get my MA.
A pandemic, a parent's messy divorce, and a cost of living crisis later, I've been unhappily employed for close to two years, now.
And I started writing again.
So I'm just going to put what I write here, in case I need it for some reason later. Some stories might have context attached, others I'm just going to put out there. There's no central theme or premise. It will be erratic.
Thanks.
I think there are only a few talents more miserable than being literary. But I'm literary. I don't know why. I could regale you with stories about what a dork I was as a kid, the books I liked to read cover to cover, the fact my teachers would watch as I dragged these dense fiction tomes in and calmly read the whole lesson (I still don't know why I wasn't stopped), or I could just give you the recent background and why I made this thread.
I started writing again.
It probably doesn't sound like a big deal. I've done quests, and I write prolifically and joyfully for a lot of GSRPs, but I consider that a kind of destructive pleasure. I enjoy doing it, but the end product is a depiction of a depiction.
I stopped writing fiction when I started at university. I didn't, initially, but exposure to greater and greater theoretical depths and complexities made my love and admiration of my language grow out from a curiosity into a fascination.
And nothing I did was good enough.
Imposter syndrome is a drag, and I was a working-class kid, the first in my family to ever get into a university, studying a subject - literature - that had for all intents and purposes become a cul-de-sac. A part of me knew I was being impossibly selfish, but we don't often get the chance to do that whilst we're young, so I kept it down. The bright future I was blazing was going to lead to a career in something like marketing, which I reluctantly conceded to doing, after delaying and fighting for as long as possible to get my MA.
A pandemic, a parent's messy divorce, and a cost of living crisis later, I've been unhappily employed for close to two years, now.
And I started writing again.
So I'm just going to put what I write here, in case I need it for some reason later. Some stories might have context attached, others I'm just going to put out there. There's no central theme or premise. It will be erratic.
Thanks.
Antrobus Man
Weygand
Trapped in Baudrillard's Nightmare
- Location
- Whirling-in-Rags
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This was the first thing I wrote for a long time. I'm part a little writing club, but I mostly just sat absently in the back until this sprang into my brain.
Do you remember the Antrobus Man?
I was a hum-drum local reporter in a town on the Mersey for a paper I won't name for reasons of its dignity when I'd first heard. Then I was concerned mostly with traffic and the petty politics of tenfold local councilors, themselves a conveyor belt of burn outs and has-beens content to rule Runcorn like a petty kingdom.
I remember when I was told because in that environment I greeted extraordinary information with carrion hunger. I felt my twenties slipping away into a tedium of the soon-forgotten, and so when my editor popped his head into our office and laughingly said: 'They think they've found God in a hill down Antrobus,' of course I wanted in.
I did my reading before I arrived. The winds had always been harsher toward the coast, but they encroached inland with every melting icecap. Some chance misalignment in a vortex had steadily eroded the dense mud of a hillock that lorded over little Antrobus. And there, apparently, was God. At first I parroted my editor in thinking this was likely a brief sensation.
When I first saddled up my car and prepared my laptop for the excursion I was mostly glad for the break from suburban monotony and industrial decay. The interior of this country is a sea of spiky flat hedgerow green. We built around the edges, like we were eating an apple, and slowly burrowed our way in.
Cheshire is one of those places that remained mercifully unmolested, if only because of the aesthetic tastes of the urban rich and their need for a country retreat. Antrobus is no exception. It is a shock of buildings dotted against this landscape, like a momentary mistake on a canvas that was quickly ignored in favour of a broader picture.
I remember when I first saw God.
It was because he seemed impossibly large. Past the huddle of corner shops and a housing estate, there, like ivory pillars, were the contours of ribs so immense I wondered how anyone had ever thought he had been a hill. He lay spread eagle in the dirt, a skeletal vestige of something - someone - impossibly large. I could only catch hints of the greater picture, as I rattled down a narrow country lane: an immense foot which protruded from a hill, an outstretched arm that by some mercy had spared the lowland slope on which Antrobus proper sat.
The curious thing was how he seemed to grow more manageable as I approached. The leviathan intensity of the thing had passed almost entirely from my view by the time I had driven into the town proper. A rib barely seemed visible, peeking out from the very top of a roof. I'd booked an Airbnb, the property of some couple or another that made Antrobus a second home.
Crawling upstairs, I had a wonderful view of the shriveled gargantuan: he did not seem to grow any smaller, now that I was static, and I began to imagine that perhaps I had simply exaggerated the angle. Still, I tapped away excitedly to my editor that evening: "God is immense," I remember writing, smugly, the first sentence of a long article on what I was sure would be the story which liberated me from mediocrity. I went out the very next day to meet God.
I was told reliably that the cadaver would likely be cordoned off and hidden from the great unwashed that evening, so I only had a little time for unvarnished photography. But he was nowhere, now, the hill a vacant lot as I came to its precipice. I thought at first I had been mistaken, but a confused local simply pointed over at it and said: "There he is," and looked at me like I had gone mad.
So I waded up a muddy bank, sodden from a midwinter rain, and there, in a crater carved out by erosion, I saw not the toppled colossus, but a huddled, hunched thing. It was curled fetal, face turned clear away, its shrunken skeletal immensity at once familiar and alien. I knew precious little about biology, but something felt strange: like this was man viewed from a microscope in the air, or a silhouette in a thick curtain. And it was not news.
It was a strange skeleton.
I felt a sinking realisation that came with the defeat of the thing. I sat there, beside God, dead in his hole, and saw his head turned faintly toward Antrobus, vacant eyes in hollow contemplation. Did he wonder what we had done? Was this suicide, a final act of disgust? Or was it faint resignation, a final sigh? Perhaps the bones were God. He was known and unknowable. An untraceable will, inexpressive yet earnest.
I returned home that next day with my small huddle of pictures and a passable report.
My editor would often invoke that line, 'God is immense', in an ironic quip for a task which was paltry but seemed hard. If tea needed making, God was immense.
In two weeks they had come to know God.
They stripped him from the mountainside, and turned him over to the British Museum, where he was picked and probed and turned over. They said that only a skull was ever found. They called it a fascinating milestone in human evolution. They placed him behind glass and let him shrink beneath the horror of being known.
He was the Antrobus Man.
Do you remember the Antrobus Man?
I was a hum-drum local reporter in a town on the Mersey for a paper I won't name for reasons of its dignity when I'd first heard. Then I was concerned mostly with traffic and the petty politics of tenfold local councilors, themselves a conveyor belt of burn outs and has-beens content to rule Runcorn like a petty kingdom.
I remember when I was told because in that environment I greeted extraordinary information with carrion hunger. I felt my twenties slipping away into a tedium of the soon-forgotten, and so when my editor popped his head into our office and laughingly said: 'They think they've found God in a hill down Antrobus,' of course I wanted in.
I did my reading before I arrived. The winds had always been harsher toward the coast, but they encroached inland with every melting icecap. Some chance misalignment in a vortex had steadily eroded the dense mud of a hillock that lorded over little Antrobus. And there, apparently, was God. At first I parroted my editor in thinking this was likely a brief sensation.
When I first saddled up my car and prepared my laptop for the excursion I was mostly glad for the break from suburban monotony and industrial decay. The interior of this country is a sea of spiky flat hedgerow green. We built around the edges, like we were eating an apple, and slowly burrowed our way in.
Cheshire is one of those places that remained mercifully unmolested, if only because of the aesthetic tastes of the urban rich and their need for a country retreat. Antrobus is no exception. It is a shock of buildings dotted against this landscape, like a momentary mistake on a canvas that was quickly ignored in favour of a broader picture.
I remember when I first saw God.
It was because he seemed impossibly large. Past the huddle of corner shops and a housing estate, there, like ivory pillars, were the contours of ribs so immense I wondered how anyone had ever thought he had been a hill. He lay spread eagle in the dirt, a skeletal vestige of something - someone - impossibly large. I could only catch hints of the greater picture, as I rattled down a narrow country lane: an immense foot which protruded from a hill, an outstretched arm that by some mercy had spared the lowland slope on which Antrobus proper sat.
The curious thing was how he seemed to grow more manageable as I approached. The leviathan intensity of the thing had passed almost entirely from my view by the time I had driven into the town proper. A rib barely seemed visible, peeking out from the very top of a roof. I'd booked an Airbnb, the property of some couple or another that made Antrobus a second home.
Crawling upstairs, I had a wonderful view of the shriveled gargantuan: he did not seem to grow any smaller, now that I was static, and I began to imagine that perhaps I had simply exaggerated the angle. Still, I tapped away excitedly to my editor that evening: "God is immense," I remember writing, smugly, the first sentence of a long article on what I was sure would be the story which liberated me from mediocrity. I went out the very next day to meet God.
I was told reliably that the cadaver would likely be cordoned off and hidden from the great unwashed that evening, so I only had a little time for unvarnished photography. But he was nowhere, now, the hill a vacant lot as I came to its precipice. I thought at first I had been mistaken, but a confused local simply pointed over at it and said: "There he is," and looked at me like I had gone mad.
So I waded up a muddy bank, sodden from a midwinter rain, and there, in a crater carved out by erosion, I saw not the toppled colossus, but a huddled, hunched thing. It was curled fetal, face turned clear away, its shrunken skeletal immensity at once familiar and alien. I knew precious little about biology, but something felt strange: like this was man viewed from a microscope in the air, or a silhouette in a thick curtain. And it was not news.
It was a strange skeleton.
I felt a sinking realisation that came with the defeat of the thing. I sat there, beside God, dead in his hole, and saw his head turned faintly toward Antrobus, vacant eyes in hollow contemplation. Did he wonder what we had done? Was this suicide, a final act of disgust? Or was it faint resignation, a final sigh? Perhaps the bones were God. He was known and unknowable. An untraceable will, inexpressive yet earnest.
I returned home that next day with my small huddle of pictures and a passable report.
My editor would often invoke that line, 'God is immense', in an ironic quip for a task which was paltry but seemed hard. If tea needed making, God was immense.
In two weeks they had come to know God.
They stripped him from the mountainside, and turned him over to the British Museum, where he was picked and probed and turned over. They said that only a skull was ever found. They called it a fascinating milestone in human evolution. They placed him behind glass and let him shrink beneath the horror of being known.
He was the Antrobus Man.
A Hole In The Ground Near Holywell
Weygand
Trapped in Baudrillard's Nightmare
- Location
- Whirling-in-Rags
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This was more recent. I had a bad week. It helped.
Somewhere out southwest there is a hole in the ground that wasn't there ten days ago.
I know it's ten days because a fellow worked his field out there, and he came outside one day, and declared there was a hole.
It's getting bigger, too. I know that because I asked him, and he said it's eaten up toward the fence.
So I came out to have a look at it.
Strange country. You work your way through six different hedgerows and the shibboleth gates that are mostly a kind suggestion. You don't climb them, and it's all grass and hills.
I don't know why nobody has planted anything in Wales. It's a prime and beautiful country, and perhaps there is some vague conviction that the animals should be left to enjoy it.
There's plenty of them. Sheep are strange and docile. You spend a while among them, you come to see why our imagination holds them in contempt: they're just too happy for us. Milling around, chewing, giving out the odd shout. You look one in the eye, maybe there's a slight glint of recognition, but even that's gone after a moment.
They're only half-people. It's the thing that justifies our industrial cruelty.
It's cows that do it for me. There were plenty of cows around where the hole was, and you know when one looks at you.
Wary animals.
They've got big eyes, and they're vivid and alive. A cow can accuse you. A cow can lodge a complaint, an appeal.
These ones looked sorry.
I couldn't ask whether it was for them or me, or whether they'd made this mess in the first place.
Enough about animals.
There was a hole in the ground that wasn't there ten days ago.
Maybe it's unfair to call the thing a hole.
It was a crack, a crevice. The kind of thing that happens when Mother Earth's skin blisters and peels.
And it was so deep down I couldn't see anything sensible to do but stare at it.
I don't know what happens with blackness and eyes.
Perhaps smarter people than me could reckon with it, but in that fathomless space, I saw a hungry, moving black recess.
It wasn't malice. It was just a steady, inevitable thing, bubbling away. I blinked my eyes to make sense of it, and the shadow played, for there was no light I could cast against it.
It was nothing.
There was no end-time, no cyclopean horror, no creature from a bygone age that had the displeasure of Wales for the site of its emergence.
Only me.
And what the shadows meant to me.
Because there was a hole in the ground.
It wasn't there ten days ago.
Somewhere out southwest there is a hole in the ground that wasn't there ten days ago.
I know it's ten days because a fellow worked his field out there, and he came outside one day, and declared there was a hole.
It's getting bigger, too. I know that because I asked him, and he said it's eaten up toward the fence.
So I came out to have a look at it.
Strange country. You work your way through six different hedgerows and the shibboleth gates that are mostly a kind suggestion. You don't climb them, and it's all grass and hills.
I don't know why nobody has planted anything in Wales. It's a prime and beautiful country, and perhaps there is some vague conviction that the animals should be left to enjoy it.
There's plenty of them. Sheep are strange and docile. You spend a while among them, you come to see why our imagination holds them in contempt: they're just too happy for us. Milling around, chewing, giving out the odd shout. You look one in the eye, maybe there's a slight glint of recognition, but even that's gone after a moment.
They're only half-people. It's the thing that justifies our industrial cruelty.
It's cows that do it for me. There were plenty of cows around where the hole was, and you know when one looks at you.
Wary animals.
They've got big eyes, and they're vivid and alive. A cow can accuse you. A cow can lodge a complaint, an appeal.
These ones looked sorry.
I couldn't ask whether it was for them or me, or whether they'd made this mess in the first place.
Enough about animals.
There was a hole in the ground that wasn't there ten days ago.
Maybe it's unfair to call the thing a hole.
It was a crack, a crevice. The kind of thing that happens when Mother Earth's skin blisters and peels.
And it was so deep down I couldn't see anything sensible to do but stare at it.
I don't know what happens with blackness and eyes.
Perhaps smarter people than me could reckon with it, but in that fathomless space, I saw a hungry, moving black recess.
It wasn't malice. It was just a steady, inevitable thing, bubbling away. I blinked my eyes to make sense of it, and the shadow played, for there was no light I could cast against it.
It was nothing.
There was no end-time, no cyclopean horror, no creature from a bygone age that had the displeasure of Wales for the site of its emergence.
Only me.
And what the shadows meant to me.
Because there was a hole in the ground.
It wasn't there ten days ago.
Stepanakert
Weygand
Trapped in Baudrillard's Nightmare
- Location
- Whirling-in-Rags
- Pronouns
- He/Him
hello!
been a while
it has been time spent productively. i think the last few weeks have been some of my most literarily productive in years since i left uni.
unfortunately all of that has been preoccupied with a reading log and research prep for a thesis i am developing and am very nervous about proceeding on.
however,
the news.
the first line of this was stuck in my head whilst i was travelling back on a coach from normandy, having completed a tour of the commonwealth war graves there, and having just received news of what was happening in the caucasus.
over the weeks since, the news has only given me more reason to come back to it.
i finished it today in a format i'm happy with.
Stepanakert
Stood, your shadow behind me
You grew taller with the sun,
Which, bleaching a blood red sky,
Set you at your peak, and yet,
As I then turned to see you,
Saw the nothing they made you.
been a while
it has been time spent productively. i think the last few weeks have been some of my most literarily productive in years since i left uni.
unfortunately all of that has been preoccupied with a reading log and research prep for a thesis i am developing and am very nervous about proceeding on.
however,
the news.
the first line of this was stuck in my head whilst i was travelling back on a coach from normandy, having completed a tour of the commonwealth war graves there, and having just received news of what was happening in the caucasus.
over the weeks since, the news has only given me more reason to come back to it.
i finished it today in a format i'm happy with.
Stepanakert
Stood, your shadow behind me
You grew taller with the sun,
Which, bleaching a blood red sky,
Set you at your peak, and yet,
As I then turned to see you,
Saw the nothing they made you.