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

the system.”

“I rather like the piano. It was mum’s.”

“Just think you’ll never pay a single
heating bill again in your life.”

“Well if it’s got to go. It’s got to go.”

(Location shot)
Outside, Tracy could see
a sullen herd of Bechsteins
munching at the verges.
She was surprised it had stopped raining.
(Simultaneous time. Norman passes
Attwater towards station)
The man has closely-shaved hair
of rich black, which falls
over a forehead of remarkable whiteness
which makes his head
look like a Saracen helmet.
His eyes, the colour of Spanish tobacco
have great profundity
and spirituality about them
and a distinct penetration
which was probably
a little too much so.

He asks her if
she has ever played the piano
and feel its boards
for the warmth of past sonatas.
The other man, with a mass of dark hair
and an immense forehead takes out a pistol.
Tracy, shocked, flings her arms
around the polished wood

“It won’ hurt it, will it?”

‘No. It’s only a piano. It won’t feel a thing
(Sound added: gunshot)
The sudden rasp of the stun-pistol
that smashes the hammer mechanisms
with a hum of dying strings
startles the estate. (ext. slow motion)
Next door, a cat
loses its prey, a feral pigeon
startled into flight.

To Tracy, it sounded like a
little whimper, doomed and despairing.
Tracy’s hug had steadied it only for death
as it staggered to the ground,
with an involuntary, staccato shudder.

Expertly the two men skin and joint
the instrument and take it out.

They return with a series of boxes.
(Vertical access speeded up)
Once they are all in the house
the taller man explains:

“It’s a self-assembly solar
central-heating system
called an ‘Athanor’. Do you know
anything about central heating?

Tracy shook her head, pulling
the sheet tighter around her.
The sunlight though prim,
was still spare.

“Nah.”

“Well, there are four packages,
the Sundew Tharmas, the Costa Urizen ,
the Vorsprung Urthona and the Café Luvah.
The Tharmas just emanates the water
round the radiators
with the hot water driving the out the cold.”

“Oh, Is that the one we’ve got? ”

“No. Now the Urizen uses pressure.
When the hot water cools ,
a valve lets it out and lets
the fresh water in.

“Oh, Is that the one we’ve got? ”

“No. The Urthona puts the water into a manifold,
or a sorter and then sends it
through thin pipes called
reflections to the heaters.”

“Oh, Is that the one we’ve got? ”

“No. With the Luvah Athanor you
reject abstract reasoning
you use
a special water it comes
from the earth’s magma…”

“Oh.”

“…and it’s cooled by
the light of the moon.”

“Oh.”

“Then a LED light turns black.
Only you won’t see it.
That’s for when the searching starts,
then it will turn white,
that’s to purify the system
and eventually it will turn red,
but we’ll tell you about that.”

“I’m not so sure of this, Sir.
It sounds like
some kind of
old fashioned stuff.
We have to do science now.”

The man became disdainful,
drooping his left hand
over his nose
he began to intone.

“Isn’t water precious?
Don’t you think it should be free?
I’ll tell you who the alchemists are,
it’s the water boards, they’re the ones
making gold out of the natural
resources of the world?
All life comes from water.
Water is a sacred right.
You must love it,
or it’ll be your enemy.”

The other man added his views,

“Think how the water
falls on the town
and cries in the heart, Madame.”

Tracy began to panic.

‘I don’t want water to be my enemy.
How could I manage the washing..
But I didn’t know we needed
the Water Board to cry.”

“Now now Ma’am
Just because Luvah costs more,
you get a free entry
for a lottery
First prize a trip to Kergyra,
a Greek island.”

I’ll talk to Norm tonight about it.”

The two men say goodbye,

(Location shot)
carry the dead piano away
and lead their herd of uprights
for slaughter down the street,

past an old man, wearing a frock coat
staring out at the railway tracks.

8.Attwater to Winderby 4.

(As Scene 2)

And you my teacher, my friend,
have not yet spoken, but being dead,
I know famous difficulties present themselves.
Yet you can still help us
protect the timbers of vision
against these wildfires of madness.
To be truly human, ecstasy
cannot be natural to us,
even though all our love seeks it to be so.
We must reinstate our titles to streams
whose sources and outwashes
run below the horizons of consumption.
In the long run we cannot survive
our own reality. Land, buildings,
corporate equities, consols
mature beyond our temporality.
Death is a weakness on the demand side.
When a man dies he has not
finished with interest.
If we thrill, it is mortality we clutch,
as time-speeded clouds race to senility;

The absolute-claimants
have made a right of this undeity.

(Fizzle to archive film,
the cellars of National Gallery
Night. Tom-Tom music added)

Swinging in its vacuum,
suppose some great referent,
untouched by Clarke,
Blunt or Cellini, is a permanent thing.
Perhaps it is a sculpture, or a score
which has swallowed every Rabelesian
second intention in history, and, as antique,
is lost largely to the collectors.
It must have been unsought in salerooms.
When the recessional bite of Treadwell’s
occult design and Heseltine’s democracy
lay bare a bitterer taste. Imagine culture
drained of everything we bring to it.

Yet a deal seems to have been made,
and lied about in the usual manner.
It came perhaps into the possession
of the Bollingen Foundation,
or Steiner, Paul Bourget,
even Wittgenstein père.
We have it from Ingarden that the reality
of the world is ontological.
The real work of art is thus
only its substrate and its perceiver
glued in an otherworld.
Suppose, my silent friend that
there was a mass substrate
or a substrate of substrates,
a supervenient machine that sucks:
such materials dry of their meaning.
That an artefact should remove itself
so fully from the language for 'to find'
could lead to a reduction in thought’s affective grid
and force down the price stimulation.
Jouissance, come on again, could reach heights
which Malraux advised for those 'well-placed.'
See how profitable the Situationis ecstasy has grown
from the natural and inexhaustible
power of cultural dupes so
timeless and unchangeable.
(Tom-tom music fades)

That standard language of abstraction
cannot satisfy us. To believe a myth
we need a truth. What if some school
of madness is poised to take over in the
name of some collective instinct,
an atavistic mania that drugs us to conform?
A sacrifice of innocence in the name
of fatal violence, a cycle to which
we lend ourselves like flare-stunned moths?
(Still shots)
Somewhere the muse dances
with a freedom than defines
To believe Alpha Centauri burns,
we need a truth for myth,
the accent and the attitude,
that give luminosity
to our fatal violence,
to which we are loosed,
like flare-stunned moths?
(Still shots)

We have only the stars
and dance in this age of silence.
The spectral types
are vanishing in the Doppler shift
of apparent magnitude.
What happened to Subligny,
or Taglioni beyond visible light?
The binary spectrum of
the Camargo sisters
became the myth of Minkus.
As such they could dance
the misread blue-shift in
Correggio’s Procris-cluster,
with a piqué-rebound.
Buchanan’s Jephthah
the flare-star tears
of a woman wrong-footed
on God, failli the right front
touches while the raised left
slides to the front
and the face turned in.
Garnier’s Hyppolita,
in the Soubresaut galaxy:
the stolen main belt leap
touches down on
the crossed death-cry
of her friends for revenge
that finishes her.
Racine’s dark asteroid,
tombée en avant , Iphigenia,
leans on the extended leg in plié.
Her breath given for a take on war,
Kleist’s occulted Penthesilea,
Her position taken on arms,
eclipsing her absolute magnitude
by distant Weimar novas.
Ozerov’s observed Polyxena,
orbiting the sun,
lock-stepped in
sweetheart position,
swinging to a stop.
What will happen
to Katherine Hepburn’s
eccentric Antiope,
in the main belt, changing sides,
that denouement of ankles?
Or Claudel’s, Ida Rubenstein?
Why couldn’t she dance,
Galileo’s Callisto,
the woman killed by her tribe,
a reverse turn on the natural,
with her face always Jovial.
Hughes’ flint-bodied Alcestis
In a pas de deux until the adagio
of the boat arrives on the dark river?
They’re lost in time’s stolen intertext,
back to back, spine against spine,
where statues dance and music
might build arches and words
say nothing to be expressive.
Against those death-woman's voices,
they sacrifice life
to their greatest love,
themselves, swapping
bonds for currency, unable
now to follow like voices.
Guilt and bliss are joined apart,
in our contour century.

You have to look long at Papa Westray,
(Archive)

to long for the Auk,
or Salisbury Plain for the Auroch,
or the Ardee Bog, for the Elk,
for the imperceptible ethos
of loss, to reconstruct their ecology
and read their silence into the present.
It is the same for les danseuses.
This how what seems to be absent
can haunt the culture of frailty.
The fusion of voices is too heavy
for this Post-War world.
The dance of burning brides
has slowed to a still
from an unmade film,
eclipsed in a pollution of lights.

(Attwater fades)

 


2. Chapter: The Storytellers

9. Winderby Haunts the Ashmolean Museum

Before taking the 1. 61
Train of Thought to Paddington in Kilometre/miles.

Before I died I thought this place
would be a palace for ghosts,
now I see only the junk
of dead protagonists,
too time-worn to haunt.
Texts without bodies
cannot linger, perfect numbers
without a tale of place

The shield of Achilles
was only ever an optimal design.
for the tender fallow field
and the ploughmen with their teams.
A magnetic shield,
surrounding the earth
and the heroic sharp sickles
among the swathes in the furrows
and the clusters
in the vineyards
of optimisation
and for the boy and girl with
honey-tasting fruit,
the supervenient machine
of time is a heat shield
against re-entry
through sundials, the
furnace of the hours.
to which the Ephebe
has long since disappeared
in the chlamys that
burst into flame
and the mourning girl’s
grave-offering
measured down to dust
and the theft of myth.


10. The Perils of Tracy

1.The first reality: fixed ratio
“Dear Mr and Mrs Cley:
With allusion to
your recent message,
I am signifying to connote
the construction of the Athanor
instrument Ref. Xn.Yn=Zn.
I would enjoy it if you could
exchange the text
received to day
with your sign.
I am frightened
that the price of
aqua permanens
insists that you adopt
voluntary signifieds
on your ankles
as the effective
fields are now volatile.
Please find yourselves enclosed.
Please contact us again
if you seek reference
to another meaning.
I predict
your