8 Winderby's Last Case - Duncan McGibbon (read book txt) 📗

1. Act: Pleading for Asylum

1. On the Union Blooms. 4
2. Attwater to Winderby I. 6
3. The Housing Estate at Dawn 8
4.Attwater to Winderby II 10
5. Two in the Housing Zone 15
6. Attwater to Winderby III 18
7. The Arrest 24
8.Attwater to Winderby IV 30

2. Chapter: The Storytellers

9. Winderby Haunts the Ashmolean Museum 36
10. The Perils of Tracy
1.The first reality: fixed ratio 38
2. The Second Reality. Continuous Ratio 41
3.The Third Reality :Fixed interval 42
4. The Fourth Reality Variable Ratio 44
5.The 5th Reality: Open Reinforcement: the desire for flight 47
11.Winderby Alone 49
12. The Evasion of the Penalties 55
1.The Evasion of the First Penalty55
2.The Evasion of the Second penalty57
3.Evasion of the Third Penalty 58
4.Evasion of the Fourth Penalty60
5.Evasion of the Fifth Penalty 61
13. Verdict on the Five Physical Penalty Evasions 62
14. Journal, First Entry 64

3.Dance:The Wanderer and The Furnace

15. The Athanor Home Manual 68
16. The Wanderings of Winderby I 69
17. A General Example, 73
18.The Wanderings of Winderby II 76
19.Supporting Document 77
20. The Wanderings of Winderby III 80
21 Police Notice of Disinstallation:84
22. The Wanderings of Winderby IV 85
23. Drawing the Love Lottery 89
24. The Wanderings of Winderby V 90
25. Attachments 94
26. The Wanderings of Winderby VI 95

4. File: Winderby Confounded

27. From Winderby’s Finite Journal 102
28. A Brief History of the Kythera Island 103
1.From The Cycladic Turtle-Shells.103
2.Appendix to Early Greek Shards Of Cycladic Two, A Monograph.103
3. Letters of Legal Dispatch, Containing an Account of the Extinction of the Aselph 104
Georgetown, May 10th 1760105
Georgetown May 11th 1760105
Georgetown, Kythera May 13tth 106
Georgetown, Kythera March 1800106
4. Summary Notes for Overseas Officers107
29.The Palace at 1.61 am 109
30,.The Further Wanderings of Winderby I 12
31. On the Design of the Adversary 118
32.From “The Windows 123
33. The Triumph of Opacity 126
34,. Message to the to the Cythera Ferry Master 130


5.Movement: The Birth of Flight

35..On Authority and Sameness 136
36. The Further Wanderings II 139
37. Second Appeal 143
38.On Futility and Omnipotence 144
39 From the Sempiternal Correspondance to Attwater 147
40. Request for PR Services from Hierophant et Cie 149
41. The Further Wanderings of Winderby III 150
42. Hand-Carried: 153


6. Picture: Winderby Pulls It Off

43.Three Non spatial Studies in Specificity 156
1.Winderby on Epic Consciousness and the Survival of Europe 156
2.Winderby on Deserts 156
3.Winderby On Heathlands 156
44. The Ultimate Determination of the Enemy,157
45 .What Norman Did in Greece.164
46 Timed Exercises in Self-Immolation, 167
47. Dispatch From Cythera, Concerning
the Disappearance of Frederick Attwater , 169
48.Notes On the Twofold Origins of the Self, 171
49. Deeds of Redemption 173
1.Ext. A Housing Estate. Day173
2. Ext. The Housing Estate. Evening 179
3.Int. The City. The Stairway of the House. Night 179
50.Fade-Negative: a paradigm 181
51. Epilogue to his Intended Muse 183 


1. Act: Pleading for Asylum

1. On the Union Blooms

The scene is set on East Street, Washington.
A thirty -year old woman in a long, grey
coat with a curled mass of black hair,
yet austerely made-up ,reads through a letter
she takes out of her bag:

“Two years ago, I wrote to condemn your boys
for hiding the mass graves of state, household flora.
Through my field-glasses, I notice the rebirth.
of the jumbo cheeseplants, plastic with fear.
As I yet I see no vale-plucked marigolds.
You know I saw the landing and H.G.Wells
was with me and I know it was
you sent the woman to spray me, as I
made my way to testify. You’re out
to make my life a fugitive’s.
So what am I
to make of your concern for peace?
I fear it’s no more sincere than
the night-disposal of geranium corpses.
The CIA has used hypnosis, deep suggestion
and clue -phrases on my dog, Warlock.
I attach excerpt, Amended Complaint,
pending in Federal Court that issued
all because I pulled a spike transmitter
from the fixture in my motel.
I know switches of themselves do not stare.
I saw the beam of light
and figures dancing in the New York Library
back alleyway. I heard the Aliens descend.
We’re born to wake and to remember!
I visited my mother's grave, hit by the same lightning.
You’ll find it there by the White House,
with that clinker and crap, what’s left of her house,
still smoking from Their plasma-fire.
I know now since your Marvel cultists came for me
in the crisis women’s centre which I enraged,
because I placed a clampshell on my doorknob
in that haven where rooms are left unlocked
and made them pound and scream at the doorway
from midnight until two o’clock a.m. and push
a paper under the jamb with cult figures
hidden in the numbers of the telephone
to demand I open and remove my lock.

I notice you use too many transitive verbs
in your speeches. You have a mania
for the complex familiar.
Excuse this personal approach,
but the damage to your brain is evident.
This makes you qualify for therapy,
full pardon and forgiveness, given
your tendered resignation and departure,
if not I will depart from the JFK Worldport
three hours after this letter is received.
you won’t know where I’ve gone
as love was born there and might still be found.
Leave the world to gentle peacemakers and to me.”

She closes her eyes and replaces the letter
in its envelope and, as if blind,
puts the letter into a post box and then runs
for the Union Station bus.

2. Attwater to Winderby 1

External shot; pathway leading
to Earmley Station. Attwater’s eyes
painted on his eyelids. Back projection still
of Winderby black and white
in 1950’s pin-stripe suit, listening.

Here in the peace of this English lane,
I have come to meet you, Winderby.
This will be my last case as Ontological
Investigator for the Secret Office.
Though you are dead, we share memories.
Emerging from Empire tetany,
we were born in some
Spencerham, or Jowettstead
from the Romantic position
that conceived us, to be moved
on to disinvested modernity
in Beveridgeworth or Bowlbyham.
We recollect hard streets,
cold playgrounds and waterless houses.
You to exorcize them: I to escape them.
Failure is endemic to your group
too frail for the village, too low for the manor.
The symptoms? An Oxford Second
and British Council wanderings,
the chatter of billiards from Gezira Island,
or the tap of a Player’s Navy Cut
on the plated tin-top in your case.
My symptoms? The rumble
of slow rusted coal-trucks
to steel works, a Trade Union card
and party membership with the
jargon of simple, unmet needs
that died with their poor.
Forgive me if I speak to you
as if you were blind, or stupid,
but the ESP team have let us down.
I find I have no words to say to the dead.
Yet since you proved Fermat’s Last Theorem
in the margin of your tedious Northcote,
all codes are now in theory broken and
we have kept you with us since.

Greet Sophie Germaine, Ernst Kummer,
Pythagoras, Diophantus, Gersonides,
the man himself and many others.
It sounds absurd, but are they
keeping well, and the Bernouille boys too,
abstracted with their famous abstractions?
Your dead memories are useful to us,
as you have complete simplicity
and our enemies cannot believe in you.

I have a problem I cannot solve.
Now that our culture is commoditised,
a run on it could empty the vaults
of Johnson and Arnold’s legacy-debt.
Let me put it in terms you’d grasp.

Assume the precise, implicit acts of decent,
averagely-sensuous people,
too long at war to calculate their loss
in sweetness-and-light-coupons,
before Classic ice re-froze the Keynesian levels
to fix less familial occupations.

Assume we wander now in Ricardan,
poisoned fields, with the Church, Crown Lands
and the Duke of Westminster’s stubborn rents,
too self-obsessed to redistribute wealth.
And labourers absorbed in leisure-centres.

Yet for the Durkheim folk,
equilibrium has become less stable
for prices, which gives the young
a culture of blind groping.

They barter everything except pleasure’s fiat,
for in the market-place, pleasure
is used as the exchange-medium.

Once love was the good
and pleasure the price;
now love is the price.
as a medium of exchange.
Now to love is to make clear examples
of our deities, to re-coin their images
and the young present themselves.

Excuse me, a plane is going overhead,
the Pan-Am Clipper New York Airbus,
if I’m not mistaken, I cannot hear myself…

Empty sky. Long-shot: swipe: aeroplane -left to right.
Winderby sees the descent of electrical paraphernalia
ejected from the Airbus toilet, the yield of a disbanded
set of headphones suspected of being bugged.

3. The Housing Estate at Dawn: Map-Grid A

Camera immobile

-slow motion.

Thin sunlight underlines
the tarmac footpaths,
the red, tessellated brick,
the oblong lawns
and picture windows.
Sunlight primly frames
the glowing Volvo
and the oil-stained driveway.
In the front garden
a feral pigeon picks
out dead seeds from dried offal
with a gnarled red beak.

Next door, with only a minor
variation of the prim sunlight,
the tarmac driveway,
the red, tessellated brick,
the oblong lawns
the Volvo-glow, picture windows
and the feral pigeon, picking
out dead seeds from dried offal.
with a gnarled red beak,
are underlined.
Next door, being the corner,
the tarmac driveway, the oblong lawns,
the picture windows
are being a metre wider.

While the sunlight is underlining
primly, a larger glowy Volvo,
which is standing
on an oil-stained driveway,
while a feral pigeon
that was picking out dead seeds
is lying dead, feather-strewn
by a passing cat.

Soon it is raining
on the housing estate,
driving home a senile,
muttering man.
Every drop of water
can be averaged to the same
description,
with added vectors to allow
for the convergence
of pigeon and dead seed,
or running senior,
dead pigeon and cat.

The house is still,
each buff tile straight.
The copper services are taut,
wiring clipped to painted
timber, deal in this case.
The staircase is
painted pine: the floors
are varnished glass.
A map-grid-
Negative-fade.

4. Attwater to Winderby 2
(As Scene 2)
Are you still with me?
I needed to shelter from
the rain it is your comfort
and your pain not to feel.
Even now, Cedric,
an Arch-couple,
the perfect consumers,
might live in some
new town or city centre,
or a Wates estate
who have been reached
by our enemies,
striking at their
weak rationality,
their class-ridden guilt
and upwardly mobile
cultural enervation.
They could be the average
we held could never be.
They are the audience.
our enemies could already
be moving in on with their machine
to make abstractions of us.
A team of dreamers lined up yet again
to rob us of participation
in the city of making.
Winderby, you are the only abstract entity
on our books I’m still in