“Like stepping into a painting, that becomes a play, that becomes a memory but was actually a dream…” Ana Cristina Caelen

(Saturn)alian Eulogy

It was a cold, sunny day. The lilies in the pond at the park drooped from the heavy onslaught of rain the previous night; ducks ran in lines across the tarmac singing quack and dodging bread thrown from passers-by.

I sat in at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette and writing on a pad of paper, while the blender whirred, coughing up orange-juice-wads-of-sticky-phlegm which stuck to the plastic before sliding down, and the kitchen clock struck a quarter to the hour and ash fell on my knee and my balls itched and the heating element of the toaster burned brilliant orange, but I didn’t care.

I was scribbling a (saturn)alian eulogy about a man sat at a kitchen table writing about someone who was thinking of having orange juice and toast for breakfast but couldn’t decide. So, he sat down instead and wrote about a man sitting at a table who ended up penning a screenplay about an old guy who wrote about a man at a kitchen table smoking a cigarette and nothing really happened, except he wrote the story from the end to the beginning then couldn’t work out how it began. I think I counted nine men (including myself) all sitting at their kitchen tables writing about men sat at kitchen tables.

Eventually, the second man asked the fifth what the time was. The fifth pretended not to hear, so the eighth answered: half past nine, to which the sixth responded: you goddamn liar it’s a quarter to seven! I looked at the clock, it read a quarter to the hour, which was funny, because that’s what it always said. I couldn’t be bothered to wind it, so I asked the third how his screenplay was coming along. He said he didn’t know what to do with the protagonist, I told him to look at the clock and see what the time was, the ninth man told me it was eight o’clock, before I realised I was wearing a wrist-watch: it read six.

In lieu of all the polemic I ventured a question to five: but he’d got up and left, so I was left asking four. Four discussed String Theory with me for seven and a half minutes before asking nine what he thought of quantum singularities. Two looked a bit like me, but upon closer examination I realised I was in fact nine, so was looking at me sitting at the kitchen table writing about eight different men sitting at the kitchen table, thinking about breakfast. Then up popped the toast. Then up popped the toast.

Then up popped the toast.

Then up popped the toast.

Then up popped the toast.

Then up popped the toast.

Then up popped the toast.

Birds

Flock

Towards

The

Sun-

Rise

Feathered

Weathered

Severed and extant

Then up popped the toast.

Then up popped the toast.

I wandered into the City. Wondered at the City. Ignored the City, deciding to investigate my subconscious instead. Men and women danced in my head. No one looked at me strangely and so I continued. I thought it was a polka. The phrase in lieu of all the polemic joined the men and women dancing. Anaemic, polemic. I think it actually morphed into music in some smoky 1950’s jazz club where no one trotted and I had to get my facts straight. I think back to my chair and the back of my chair. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up [my brain, cerebral cortex, 2014]. My lair. Every scribe has a chair. And a desk. And notes. Scrawled notes. But did I care? I knew I had an interest in biology and vivisection but I couldn’t work out the origin. It had to have come from somewhere. I remember a class I took in an imaginary sweltering 1959 in South Carolina. Hurricane Gracie was crowned Miss Hurricane during the Atlantic Hurricane Season of that year. If I’d been born - and in that country as well - I would have been twenty-eight. I needed facts. In the lesson they were discussing whether the cerebrum was in fact covered by a sheet of neural tissue known as the cerebral cortex (or neocortex) and if it was possible to eat the dreams of dreaming? Or, was that just me daydreaming? Nothing disguises the fact that I have untoward inclinations, but I’m disinclined to acknowledge them.