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

touch with.
Suppose such villains exist:
here are some identities;
this one has a shaven pate,
tobacco eyes, sometimes a moustache
which covers an ironic
mouth, a quizzical nose
but a fastidious, dimpled chin.
He could be a ring leader.
They dress respectably
black glossy patelots
brown trousers, patent leather shoes
according to Inspector Gautier,
a fastidious bishop,
according to Sergeant Mendès.
His accomplices are less well known.
One looks like a wino
in ecstasy, with an ugly, brutal face
and a wide hammer forehead,
long hands, feverish eyes.
He has another in tow
boy-like, fair haired with a snub-nose.
Behind them, obviously a courier
is a school teacher,
a bearded little man
who wears black, tries
to look like a captain
and has short-cropped hair,
but photographs respectable.
And then there’s the woman,
an actress, maybe a secretary,
with black curls,
barefoot children
and the unaccountable sadness
of skilled illusion.

Suppose they exist, then these
are arch-conspirators.
They are sincerely dangerous,
as they exist only on the page.

The forces of nonsense
grip the same handful
of genotypic earth, out of the inheritance
of Eighteenth century houses
under the rain, Victorian, or Empire
pattern- books, pine-boards,
bare as human skin
and cumbrous blue textiles,
close sulphurous brick,
as in your demolished demesne
In my case ,Yorkshire
back to-back-terraces freed from the fear
of transportation, or failed benefit of clergy.

The Anthropoets claim to pay for what they own,
in the short-term, but cannot find a voice for
their deepest dreams, like spiteful children
they remain uninterpreted
to keep their reservoirs bounded.
The Pastoral obsession leads me
to suppose they work
from somewhere like Cythera
where they manage a leisure
and inferiority complex.
The danger always comes from fused rhetoric,
glued to the brain-dead word.
The nine Muse-elements
should be kept from one another,
like warring peoples, combine them
and you allow the Supervenient
Machine to work on each.
Each era, a muse has been expressed,
then never heard again:
epic from the heroic age,
a war insured by the forfeit of Iphigenia
and redeemed by the guarantee of Polyxena.
Mediaeval hymns repaid the guarantee
for her in the Jephthaic mode,
of lamenting pastoral.
The lyric from the Provençal,
de-commissions the hymn to the pursuit
of preyed-on love in Callisto,
who wants justice from
Renaissance tragedy
that is Procris wronged.
Comedy from the Enlightenment,
Penthesilea upstaged
by the mirth of Thersites,
Voltaire and De Sade.
Music stolen after the Romantics,
through abducted Antiope.
Hippolyte had history stolen
as a trophy by Modernist lore
to be filed away in secrecy.
The enemy has sacrificed
every voice of poetry
to abstract fear,
save the stars, dance and silence.
Whatever these body-objects are;
only dance and the stars are still active
for our coming generation.
Somewhere they are still with us.
To rule the age, the enemy,
perhaps unknown to themselves,
must steal our silence,
as it is the last reserve of the poets ,
leaving culture to a last dance
in the ruin of the universe.
and you, senseless and disembodied,
have been asked to prevent them obtaining it.
If you render us this service
we promise our help in the
matter of your excommunication
for Modernism, that old thorn.
I am not just an old man,
talking to his shadow.
I am a power, Winderby
and I can free you from my mind.
Extra close-up

5. Two in the Housing Zone

Shot through mirror-window
from double room.

In the bedroom
a man and woman lie
on cobalt-blue sheets,
by a fallen duvet:
while…
(close-up)
….outside is the faint
muttering of an elderly voice.
Close up, head.

He, straightup,
a lad of peerless mead,
the fiftieth percentile.
Norman Scofield Cley.
His eyes dark, fundi normal
height sixteen sixty metres,
his soft abstracted air
raised to a cervical height
of fifteen hundred
and fifty metres.
Eighth-descendent of
Drummer Hodge,
his figure, spare,
shoulder height
fourteen forty-five,
his chest depth
two hundred and fifty
millimeters, a ploughman’s
rack of ribs.
Build tends to mesomorph,
visceral: Scholar Gypsy to
Shropshire Lad range,
and loathed melancholic,
of love, not much to show,
save the good minute.

Camera; vertical access.

She, Tracy Bulah Cley,
amber-dropping, rosy-headed,
blushful. with thigh-clearance
one hundred and forty
millimeters. Ninth great descendent
of Aurora Leigh. Sitting-eye height,
so soft. so calm,
yet eloquent.
Her elbow-rest height,
the pure snow,
equals her elbow-eye
vertical distance
with goodly vermill stayne
where a youthful hue sits
on her skin like morning dew.
her standing vertical reach
should she rise and heave
her rosie head is
a perfect average.
Head depth, with a pearly bite,
and hair, Celia-yellow, like ripe corn
under the thick-moted sunbeam
is equally an exact average.
The blazon of sweet beauty’s best.
of hand-breadth, eighty,
foot-length, two four five,
of lip, vermeil, of eye, lustrous.
of brow, with neck and breasts,
bright apples to be seen,
all again a perfect average.
Build tends to Corinna ectomorph.
Her type is cerebral:
Blessed Damozel to Mariana range.
Temperament, lethargic,
personality, cherubic contemplation.
(hand held shot)
Both wake to sleepwalk through a mirror
into studio desert.

6. Attwater to Winderby 3

Camera as scene 2

Yes, I hear the cat
clawing the pigeon too,
but I think there could also be
more than a mere
hedge-sparrow or a vole
distracting the quiet warmth
of our summer evening.
You think I underestimate?
That furtive rustling within the hawthorns
reminds me others are watchful.
Once I could have been sure
of your own opinion
in that upward glance of yours,
but disembodied now,
I see no gesture, no glances.
This is why you’ve survived extinction.
None can spy on an invisible man,
save the madman , who thinks he sees you,
or the Lord, who sees you think.
The enemy is abstraction,
a resource that feeds the masses.
There will always be those
willing to obey, to be thralled by
peddlers of fixity.
That each situation
should hold in strict order.
That each entity has
a perfect existence;
a tight interlocking
that requires an exact
accident to allow
for change. Each crack, each loss
holds an absolute space
made for it, shaped out
in advance by senseless
master-calculators.
Each fall has an absolute cadence
made for it, determined
in advance by a Supreme Calculation,
a dice throw that prints all the chances.
God's strategic apex
outweighed by the
techno-structure of his attributes;
as all is calm and cold,
hemmed in this perfect place.
Myths themselves grow mythic.
Barthes’ bad ideologue, the metaphor,
takes cover from Master Mallarmé’s démon.

Close-up. Night. British Library stacks.
open to show dotted eyes in the titles
as glowing eyes.

Past metaphysical double-agents
Mc Taggart, who handled Yeats
Bergson’s Lawrence, Bradley’s Eliot
Boutroux’s Montale and Orwell’s Larkin,
have completed the disinformation of reality
and distributed abstraction into our lives
in a dead chain of perfectly-named objects.
Only our grandparents knew things
and Rilke knew only Nietzsche.
Each agent is immortal, even in death,
for to be named not-to-be
is to be named, and to be
named implies a bearer.
They claim the dead bear the name
of dead-ones as perfect objects
and live conceptually,
for not to be so, they must be so
and we have lost them.
You shimmer on in your world
of relativity, as once
disembodied, we are cocooned
in the world we thought ourselves into.
Only you can get us back.

Now to the point, Winderby,
and even in the ether,
I would sooner you did not take notes.
Suppose a group of determined, dead
poets is seeking to sow this
landscape of intellectual ice
into our hearts.
While we choke on a tip
of ephemeral Ding Gedichten.
Imagine if these poets could persuade
through myths of self-fulfillment,
be busy seeking to construct
an infernal machine to
confer an immortality
on the body's imagination,
a cryogenics of the word.
It might be a virtual metaphysical device.
For centuries they could have
run civilization,
then bid to withdraw objects of beauty
into some power house
and might not have rested
until now the final piece is put
in their plan to seize
the wirework of the tribe.
Then the great work begins.
All culture is alchemy,
seeking to dredge sweet gold
from landfill scraps.

You think I’m joking?
Already young poets
are becoming exactly
alike to be immortal.
They compete perfectly
to fit the myth.
They seek an abundance
of goods in a hierarchy
of variable bliss.
The erotic pool
becomes inelastic,
chilled, but fully-employed.
Their hearts throb
to the Pigou-Bohm rates
for subjective preference,
as their now is the future.
Yet they crave anathema's
market dynamism despite
having lost old boundaries.

Together we must work
as surgeons and dissect
heroically that a model fiction
could provide the template
for an invasion of our souls.
so let us get down to it.
This Department has seen
five generations of vision
come to pitiful grief
strangling the passions of poets.
We are open to ruin aren’t we?
This ministry of secrets
seeks to defend the peaceful
transfer of rationality
from line to line and not the violence,
of metaphysical noises.
These enemies are inheritors
of a double desecration.
Still seeking the taboos of a stolen deity,
they hanker for the deification
of the ordinary, so oblivious to the past
that credit from Black Mountain
will not bail us out this time.

These men are dangerous
as they will steal our totems
and make a commodity
of our very souls.
Break their code, Winderby,
I beg you.
( Back shot. Close up on empty space)

7. The Arrest

(Studio)
Just back from a holiday,
with, close up, real suitcases
still unpacked.
The door-chimes sound.

“You get it, Trace. I’ve got to get tuh work.”
He reaches for his shirt.
“Oh all right.”
“Put summat on, Trace.”
“Aw riot!”
She wraps herself in a white sheet
goes down and answers
the questioning door.
Two men in black suits
run in to the house.
“Where is it then?”
“Wha?”
“The piano! Didn’t you get our card!”
We’re Demon Analogy,
the people about the new
free central heating.”

“Trace, if it’s about that woman
at the airport… I”

“No, Norm it’s the people
from D…demon analogy,
about the free Central Heating.”

“You see to them, Trace,
I’ve got to go to work. I remember now,
You’re offering free central heating
in exchange for showroom facilities.”

“Yes. That’s us. Sign here.”

“Demon analogy…

“Yes we’re a continental style,
operating from Kithera,
where our agents met you
on holiday. Less overheads you see.
Have you discussed this with your wife?’

“Yes, except so far we’re the only ones in it.”

“We’re avant garde.”

Norm’s sleep-heavy hand gropes for the thick form
and signs it as he leaves.

“Bye, Norm. See you tonight.”
(Leaves through set up door.
Shot left to right)
“Can we have it then?”

“Wha’?”

“The piano.”

“Woi?”

“The contract states’ No musical instruments’
because the vibrations affect