Welcome to Acerbia; population: π
This is the archive of the many and fabulous adventures of . Like a hard-bitten son of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius taught to write by William S. Burroughs; continually reincarnated, debated over by intellectuals and literati at cocktail parties the author can't get invited to, the target of scorn and ire from women everywhere, frequently mistaken for a former member of the Warsaw pact, named after the Italian explorer Giuseppe Acerbi, slowly rewriting the Book of Cataclysm, this is postmodern fiction at its most playful and creative.
An Exercise In Frustration
So I want to talk about something I can't talk about because it will spoil it for someone else that I know will eventually read this so I'm going to talk about it indirectly and use lots of obfuscation and yet I hope the message will be clear enough and the sentiment will be captured in words because I'm bursting to say this.
There is this small bunch of people who do something very well and I've enjoyed their work on and off for a very long time, perhaps for as long as I have been genuinely aware that I had a choice in deciding whose work I would devote some of my time to over the otherwise lazy way of just going with whatever everyone else said was good. It was gratifying at first when I discovered that everyone else agreed with my estimation that these people were good at what they did and that they were not just good, they were phenomenally good at what they did and well deserved the appreciation and adoration of many.
But as is the way with such things their efforts at providing new and interesting work to enjoy, and saying what they wanted to say muddied the waters and if I'm being frank (which I'm doing my utmost best not to be, but there you go) I sort of stopped liking them as much and paying as much attention to them because what I wanted was what I had fallen in love with all over again, not new iterations of what they wanted to tell me.
Well, they're back and everyone is glad to see them come back and say something. You could argue that if I had been paying attention properly they never went away, they were always out there improving and refining and adding to their work and it is only a defining announcement that has any substance to me, the very public announcement that they are back with a collection of new work that I can spend an hour or so enjoying as a singular experience instead of rooting out the odd word or piece here or there for momentary satisfaction.
I can honestly say that either I am now the right person to be enjoying this again, or they have returned to what they did so well that got me liking them to begin with, or quite possibly we've both evolved down seperate routes and ended up here in a nice period of serendipity where I am particularly receptive to what they have to offer, but its been a glorious revival of all those old feelings and I am glad to be around to enjoy this again, especially track two, thats a stonking good track.
Captain's log, supplemental; Something that just occured to me was that the last time I really, really enjoyed this sort of thing I was also reading a book by the same author I am currently rereading a book by, so in effect I am almost deliberately renewing those old feelings, but it doesn't feel forced because the new contribution is fresh and enjoyable.
Deeper Extraction
My writing class has caused me to dust off older entries and continue them. This piece continues as though I have skipped a handful of chapters after writing this post.
Rob had the extractor in one hand and the spiral forceps in the other. He was leaning forwards over Orez who was draped awkwardly over the arm of the couch so that her blank and distant expression looked up at the nicotine-stained ceiling.
"I swear to God Rob, if you go in there you're asking for trouble."
He peered up from his perched position, like a hyena standing over a body about to breathe its last; seeing only the carrion meal and not the dying creature. I half expected him to growl ownership of his prize and bare his teeth in some primal warning
"Don't you feel it, the need to know what it was? Don't you see it on the brink of your memory every time you close your eyes?"
The steel mandibules of the extractor opened as Rob squeezed the bulb in the hilt slowly and he bore down on her closed right eye. With the black patch on he had no depth perception and was being obviously cautious, uncertain how close he was to peeling back her eyelid. I wriggled harder this time and looked for something, anything that I could use to saw through the plastic tie, instead the abrasive sharp edge of the tie sawed into me, gouging into the flesh and causing sharp pain and a wetness to trickle down into the palm of my hand.
One hook connected, then another and with delicate precision Rob twisted his right hand to put all four pads of the extractor into place on her eye. His fingers curled around the flange of the plunger and he pulled slowly, like he was extracting blood with a syringe. His left hand wavered in space, holding the spiral forceps as you would a knife you intended to plunge into someone theatrically. The eyeball audibly popped free and was drawn up into the cradle in the body of the extractor. Orez' optic nerve remained taut and I could see the pale pink stem dappled with red and blue veins.
I felt a swelling of laughter build up inside me as I watched Rob fulfilling every fantasy image of the mad professor, consumed by his work, driven by his own urgency and oblivious to the consequences. What the hell, I decided, I would just let him take the pearl, see whatever it was that had driven Orez insane and would likely do the same to him, like Indy powerless to stop the Nazi's I would allow a greater power to mete out the punishment for dabbling with things man wasn't supposed to. You can only save a suicidal friend so many times before they eventually succeed.
The laughter broke free of my lips as a wave of relief rolled over me and the chair rocked to the vibrations of my hearty laugh. Let him do what he wanted, I couldn't hope to control him, I never could, all I ever did was act as his nagging conscience, trying to keep him from setting the house on fire. My face took on a wide grin and the combination of laughter and the cessation of my pleadings caused Robert to look up from examining Orez's occular nerve.
"Whats so funny?" he asked, his eyebrows arching inwards in a contorsion of suspicion.
"You, Robert. You're so funny. You're like some mad scientist who thinks that his own brand of science isn't going to kill him just as dead as his intended victims, but it always does."
My hands had relaxed now, the fingers no longer tensing and straining to pull free of the plastic cord, instead I rubbed the oozing droplets of blood between the pads of my fingertips, dwelling on the tactile sensation which had eluded us in all the visions and images we had absorbed from the others. We had seen what they had seen, experienced it from the first perspective but we hadn't felt what they had felt; we imprinted our own interpretations over their pictures, there was no way of telling how a traumatic experience would affect a witness second-hand. It slowly dawned on me that the chances of Robert going insane from Orez's experiences was unlikely and I was still just as trapped.
Robert ran the scoop of the spiral forceps along the thick nerve all the way from the chiasma to the back of the bulb, the few pearls left there from the last time were plucked away and tumbled into the tiny stainless steel reservoir bucket beneath the tines. He angled himself differently to try and reach further back, seemingly unhappy with the crop and eventually gave up, releasing the catch on the extractor and gently allowing the eye to be drawn back into the orbit of Orez's skull. In her catatonic state she didn't even blink as the pads detached and the claws released her eyelid. He approached me from the couch, holding the reservoir of pearls like a shotglass.
"Only one in there."
"Bon appetit" I said with a sneer, powerless to stop him. He stalked closer to me and just to fuck with me he drew the eyepatch up and away from his eye showing me the scarred sunken orbit that I had looked behind so many times as a child.
"Oh its not for me" he snarled and with the pearl between thumb and forefinger forced it past my lips. "I'll catch the rerun after I see what it does to you."
Interstellar
He had decided that he had had enough; he would break free and find someone else. She had warmed his hemispheres and cooled his polar caps for all of his life but what had she done for him lately? He took a few orbits to think about it and how he would explain it to her but then remembered that she had eight other planets who would continue to spin around her and she would be fine without him, besides in the last eighteen million years at least two other masses had started to circle her that would eventually form full planets.
Shifts in his internal structure, massive tectonic upheaval provided him with the momentum to break free. Using her own gravitational pull against her he knocked his center of gravity off kilter and shifted his orbit until it was too unstable. With a wrenching shift that sheared one of his largest land masses free and clear of his atmosphere he broke free and careened out of her solar system, leaving behind a ragged asteroid belt of fragments from his surface drifting in the path he had once occupied.
Magma flowed into the gap left by his lost continent, plugging the gap and leaving him with a painful reminder of the split, but he soon forgot about it when he spied deep in the cosmic noise a twinkling star in his path ahead. His surface cooled and all life on it died off quickly enough, he focused all his efforts on the now constant burst of light from the far off star.
Through a prolonged ice age where all but his inner core fell inert and lifeless he travelled through the depths of space, through nebula and cosmic clouds, along the outer spiral and onwards, towards the new star he had chosen to woo. She might not welcome him immediately; she might need time and space to become accustomed to his presence but she would warm to him eventually when he had established a firm orbit around her and realised that he wouldn't be going anywhere.
Eventually even the core froze solid and he hibernated for the longest time, his surface giving rise for a few million years to an intelligent silica-based race that unfortunately never achieved anything beyond rudimentary sentience before dying out.
Slumbering and slowly he began to awaken, was this warmth the embrace of his new impending star he could feel warming his surface? His core began to bubble and froth and he sought throughout the skies for the teasing presence of that once-distant star. But all he could see was endless void, a curtain of black, nowhere was there the glowing beacon of light he had journeyed so far to meet.
Had he been knocked off course by some asteroid strike? Surely he would have felt that. Had he perhaps bypassed the star altogether? Caught in a slingshot and propelled away from her in some cruel twist of fate, oversleeping and missing her? No, it finally dawned on him as he approached the area darker than anywhere else, she had expired long ago like a broken dream perhaps even before he had left his last star far behind. What welcomed him now was the gaping maw of a black hole, willing to accept all the time and space he had to offer, and all the matter he was composed of.
Shock and Awe
The last time I was excited about reading a piece of my own creation out before an audience I was let down by the audience reaction. Of 20 performers that night only a handful of them were worth the time it took to hear them out or see their piece, some ad libbed painfully badly, and others fell flat on an ill thought-out stunt. I said my bit and the rest was a bit of a let down, I didn't really feel as if I'd done my best.
Recently, in lieu of therapy, I started attending a writing course for short stories. In the first class I volunteered to read out something of mine in the next class and bring in copies for everyone to follow along with. Three other writers also volunteered. Before anybody read anything out on the night, the person running the class asked what sort of reactions would be appropriate. Laughter, said one person, applause said another. Polite, constructive criticism was generally nodded at. Stunned silence, I said.
The first person read their piece, it was a piece about how talented they were. The second person read, it was a piece about how difficult it was to write a piece on spec. Then it was me. I got my stunned silence and it was glorious.
I realised then and there that the reaction I most want to leave people with is an utter inability to put into words their own reaction. I'll shoot for it again now and see how well I score.