They Look Down on Me Read online

They Look Down on Me

  Copyright 2012

  EGON YES

  as

  EGON NO

  presents

  They Look Down on Me

  some kind of weirdo,

  foraging for some kind of release,

  from a sense of deep failure city life embellishes

  the inability to fit the identity to the psyche

  Deep tenebrous failure and the darkness

  repetition of failure moment

  misjudgement

  miscalculation

  How I killed myself,

  The Vacuum Cleaner and Other Lusts

  & Other Stories

  Nothing was pellucid anymore

  about all our peripheral complicities

  Ever the actor,

  Ever the farceur,

  ever the day to fudge resolutions

  to do ablutions

  to confront the problem of environmental pollutions

  so much to write

  so little time to be read

  ever the everer,

  too many evers can become never

  Such things as madness are peripheral consequences

  One person said

  I left the scene

  I was a misfit anyway

  squares and circles:

  to the juggler her juggling balls,

  to the burglar his burglings,

  to the musketeer muskets,

  to the warrior wars

  In a tragedy no one can behold themselves or others; no one can grasp the situation, they can not even see it in the faces of other peoples, nor can they see it in their own faces or listen to it in their own speech, or the speech of others coming from distant rooms. Only actions have the force of meaning in such hours; but meanings are subject to misinterpretation, and change.

  I could no longer behold myself,

  no one could behold me—

  as a castle metaphor, I felt

  under siege

  After a while, when conquerors had practiced tunnelling under the city walls and appearing unexpectedly on the inside of the city, those who did not wish to be conquered learnt and insisted on building their fortresses on stone.

  I was the lazy grasshopper who made fun of the ants who were working hard in the summer;

  I was profligate with the fruits of the earth,

  and also its herbs;

  I was a castle dwarfed by sky-scrapers;

  I was a troubadour

  but I was never true, bad, or

  anything else.

  I was a drum without a skin,

  a cigarette without a smoker;

  I was a repetition of my own histories.

  I fitted in once

  but even there,

  that habitat, perhaps the airs

  or the baths or the waters

  or the languages

  trapped me in a cartoon world of my own making.

  It’s no shame to pun on the fact that I could be animated. It’s no shame to make light of things. But psychological warfare.

  The labyrinth fills the human with fear: the human builds a maze, then he puts rats in it in order to observe them.

  I get older as I get older. No one can ever be young except the young. That is the truth about life.

  Money can make one excited enough to feel young because children always have lots of things to do but poverty can make one feel old since repetition is less of a choice for the poor

  Everybody yearns for childhood but no one knows how to achieve it and it becomes more complex when real children enter the equation. No one knows how to bring children up. They are like uncultivated flowers growing in toxic soil, living near defunct nuclear power stations, being shot at and hunted in the streets of Rio, being allowed to starve in the plains and on the hilltops.

  I am a castle that can provide no shelter.

  A line in a song will go:

  The dancefloor turned into a chess board.

  The pawn is the equivalent of a page, a messenger, a footsoldier, a bit of a nobody. The king is the director; is the queen the lead actress?

  I over-enthusiastically demeaned my metaphor. I stopped being a castle and I could not be a rock because that was already taken by St Peter and Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. And John Donne had said No man is an Island and may have inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe. No man is an island but what many a human is forced to live by themself on an island.

  The time has come for a story about a woman who lives by herself on an island.

  Would she use make-up?

  But humans like to observe and if they make the film it will be about a woman stranded on an island but secretly being watched.

  But by whom?

  It would turn into a chiller as she gradually becomes aware of being stalked.

  She has to take steps to protect herself.

  What does she do?

  Is it facile to say that she builds a chessboard and puts cheese out? She builds a trap.

  I am Tarzan

  but where is Jane?

  If Jane could make a pact that if she lost her hair Tarzan wouldn’t have to, would she do it?

  How would Tarzan feel about it?

  I am Tarzan, but where is Jane? The jungle is full of animals and strange hootings. There are also chimpanzees. Some are benevolent, but some of them gang up on me. But when I wrestle with an alligator and make out of it an handbag as a gift for Jane—if she ever turns up, they leave me in peace.

  Tarzan is Adam and Jane is Eve. Tarzan is tempted to the big city and he learns computing.

  Jane gives in to the promptings of Lucifer guised as one of Tarzan’s friends and she gets Adam in on the act. Adam loves the idea of being God, he looks up to Him, they’re buddies, they even have deep conversations in the Garden of Eden but what he hasn’t realised is that in his heart of hearts—a place I seldom look myself—Adam thinks that if he can be like God he can be better than God.

  But hey what’s this? Evil…? Evil? What the hell is it? Evil came before hell.

  What an intellectual prospect evil affords. It is true that it cannot operate in all realms but in the field of matter, truth can be necessarily subverted. It is some distant relation of the tree that falls in a wood without an observer. That is in the ultimate realms of the noumenal nothing can be hidden. Hell is a place of hiding more than a place of banishment. Hatred vomits at Love but can masquerade as Love for a higher Hate. Love can be disguised and is by all sorts of forces, some of which intend no evil.

  Did Cain kill Able or did they cook up the story together?

  It is true though that humans kill each other.

  There are two extra pieces in any game of chess, the players.

  Suddenly there are two Tarzans: Tarzan and Tarzin. They have been reared in different parts of the jungle by different clans of monkeys.

  Tarzin and Tarzan swing through the trees until they meet each other one day. Then Jane turns up and she sings, “Sweet Tarz.” She doesn’t finish the ‘an’ or the ‘in’. She just sings: “Sweet Tarz.”

  They both go ape over her—it is no shame to pun but I feel shame—they both go ape over her and plunder the resources of their eco-system to satisfy her every whim and desire.

  They are able to pay her way through college. She returns with an electric guitar and a synthesiser and tells them that they have ruined the environment.

  Tarzan blames Tarzin, Tarzin blames Tarzan. They go to war. Jane goes back to the city and joins the UN because she has intimate knowledge of the conflict.

  When she left, a truce was called. When she came back war was rejoined. She despairs and they wonder why she hasn’t brought another female bac
k from the city with her. There is a communication problem.

  In another scenario Jane has been unable to decide which of them to take back with her. In the end neither goes because she has to be impartial. But Jane’s stories about the city have triggered such fantastical speculations on the part of the two jungle-mannered gentlemen that their thinking and language has become distorted. Jane, unable to broker peace, decides instead to film the whole conflict and make her name in TV.

  I am no longer a castle but I am still under siege.

  I am a castle then I am a Tarzan then I realise I am not these things.

  I call people to the round table but they decline and show me their own round tables which are bigger than mine. Some even claim that their tables are rounder than mine.

  THEY LOOK DOWN ON ME

  but I do not look up to them.

  Their noses are like slides

  from the heights of which

  They volley the snide looks

  that accompany their asides.

  THEY LOOK DOWN ON ME

  Not as an ant-eater at its staple diet

  But as humans in a class system

  with weaponly glances

  that work in the quiet.

  THEY LOOK DOWN ON ME

  And threaten to bring

  Mirrors into the situation

  To redouble their gazes

  Like barristers and journalists

  Who bring no depth of consolation for those who might slash their wrists.

  They Look Down On Me

  And this appeared as one of many twists.

  They Look Down on Me:

  It’s been years

  But I do not look up to them

  because I wouldn’t dare.

  I

  built a

  castle exclusively

  out of whoopee cushions

  No one could see how like the Tower of Babel it looked. I was hoping they would lay siege. I was looking forward to the outcome.

  But I was a fool not to’ve examined the past in the greater detail.

  The human constantly laments;

  ‘if only…if only…’

  and off he or she goes and votes ‘If’ their favourite poem.

  Too obviously licked an arse its owner upsets. Arselicking that draws attention to itself is not just unwelcome. That kind of arselicker can find themselves in exile, with the shame of having actually been a licker.

  The same lickees who enjoyed and benefited from the licking turn round and mock:

  ‘We would’ve respected you more if you hadn’t been such an arselicker.’

  I cannot belabour the analysis of arselicking, brown-nosing, sycophancy. It is a limitless subject and there is much to be written about it.

  There is much to write

  but little time to write it in.

  There is much to defend oneself against but so few defence mechanisms with which to do it.

  The first thing Robinson Crusoe did was to set up his living abode with surrounding fortifications. He did not have whoopee cushions, he did not have a mobile phone.

  The woman on the island is torn between making herself a radio to get help or a gun to defend herself. In the film, her stalker lives beneath the island with huge banks of electronic equipment.

  You stepped into my World

  but I did not step into yours,

  I told her

  They stepped into your world

  but you did not step into theirs.

  You were weak.

  I was an innocent bystander

  We’re all innocent bystanders,

  I told her

  It’s the TV age,

  she told me

  I loved her

  but she didn’t love me

  a variation on a theme deeply felt

  repeated by human beings endlessly

  I was beside myself

  No one was next to me

  Where was the other,

  the one who walks beside me,

  or is it Jesus Eliot intimates at?

  What are the names

  And who are the namers?

  phrases come and go,

  people talk a lot

  they don’t say much

  but they do talk a lot,

  and they also make buildings,

  they like rooms and chairs

  and try to manage their love affairs.

  THEY LOOK DOWN ON ME

  and I step into an aeroplane.

  In another version of things Tarzan is supported through college by Jane who works herself to the bone for him and he’s off being the hunk and the hero and going on educational weekends with various belles. He becomes a successful eco-architect and has even more high powered affairs while Jane suffers.

  She has a nervous breakdown when he tells her he has to get back to the jungle because he misses Tarzin.

  The woman on the island overcame the stalker. The last hour of the film is a breathtaking roller-coaster of a ride as move and countermove by woman and stalker is played out against the primeval background where the woman’s greater closeness to nature ultimately enables and ensures her triumph against the evil and perverted male stalker.

  THE END

  It is now time to bid you farewell. I have spoken to you over a couple of nights via an ancient medium, the medium of writing and the fine art of reading. I hope you have enjoyed my company to some degree. I have enjoyed yours. I have spoken of some things and left others to your imagination. Castles made of sand melt into the sea,

  but stories only need humans to pass them on.

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