Luke McCreadie
A lie for a sculpture…
Part IV
The E, missing for several months, but you wouldn’t even know what I meant, would you? You, with your suit on, trying to move across the carpet without making a noise so you can hatch a spiky word bollock from your mouth, a hermeneutics cloaca. The one you vomited on that group just now had hairs of exclamation marks and a spine made of capital I’s. If the E was missing from your keyboard, you would immediately replace it, wouldn’t you? Well this one has been gone for months, I wish you could find it, in a lame, helpless voice, one resigned to never being able to use any words containing the letter E. A small fish jumped from the water rendered on a model engine, on its simulated rear-end there is a small spiral that more than coincidentally looks like a lower-case e in something like Georgia or maybe it was Gill Sans.
I once had an extra-large spot on my hip, a few months after having an operation to remove a femoral pin from my right femur, put there after a car crash broke my bone. The spot ripened slowly and promised to be an experience. The removal of the pin, which held my femur together as it healed makes me think of typography like I was having a serif removed and becoming once again sans. The moment language was dragged from my hip, the structure slid out so the bone marrow could grow again. The word pin is I, a bit like a pin is I and it always struck me how onomatopoeic the operation was. As soon as the pin was put in, I had become an idea, it became an antenna for thought about the surfaces inside a body. The penetration of this stick slightly arched like a light italic. You couldn’t even imagine this, with your snotty nose and filthy, privileged position. You became too conscious as a civilization, prickling for information, desperate to be doused in the sensation of words, you have all fallen at the hands of commonality, reduction and categorization. The operation went to plan, however, I was lucid, I could hear the surgeons talk amongst themselves.
One said;
“…the thing is with fossils on that bit of coastline, is they are all much the same, and you don’t see much new or interesting.”
The other replied;
“mmmm…have you ever been to the Dorset beaches? They are fascinating, I found a few things and took them to a local expert to see whether they meant anything.”
The squelch of the flesh against latexed thumb and index finger, as the surgeon drilled the very tip of my femur in order to locate and retrieve the titanium femoral rod, seemed to jar with me in my semi-drugged state. I imagined my thigh as the white cliffs of Dover and revelled for a small moment at how simple life would be, if only I existed. And then the intangible, tacit things which I felt an unending desire to dig at and share with others would not be about effective communication but instead function as self-satisfaction, life becoming one elongated act of onanism.
The spot…on my leg first began to appear as the wounds from the operation had almost entirely healed. The day came, and I squeezed it fully, the gunk splattered down my thigh, there was so much of it, I thought. Then I realized an unfamiliar post-spot-pop sensation, there was the tip of something sticking out of the hole, my head went fuzzy, I thought of fossils, my cranium tingled, I thought of the way barnacles grow, my scalp animated, and I pinched between my thumb and forefinger the end of a piece of thread that came directly from the middle of the spot. I dragged about 10cm out and then it became harder to pull and I feared snapping it. I was later to find out that it was a subcutaneous suture, used to minimize scarring, my body was ejecting it. I pulled some more and with the gunk of blood and a widening of the whole, a small black letter e came out attached to the end of the thread with a bowline knot.
I was back in the cliff face, as I looked out I could see men and women with brushes, coming over to me, one smashed me over the head with a small, very clean axe, I split open and inside I was a small letter e, the archaeologists gasped.
The problem with all this is it is not true, it is a lie for a sculpture, you need to lay off language, purge it for a bit. It was all a lie, I make these things, but you knew that you’re fully engaged, aren’t you? You write about it, don’t you? He showed me his sculpture, in his back garden, he said he had wanted to make something in glass and make it about liminal space, transience, betweenness. He commissioned a writer to write a writing about the writing he did when he wrote about writing. A text to write this proposal to research some texts so he could make this liminal sculpture and commission a writer to write the writing and dream about dreaming, and dream, dreaming a thought that could dream about a thought, that could think of the dreamer that thought, that could think of dreaming and getting a glimmer of God, I be dreaming a dream in a thought, that could dream about a thought, that could think about dreaming a dream, where I cannot, where I cannot, let’s be frank. In the Ocean of words, the words of words wave E’s over E’s until it started with so much language, the liqueur of the brain and ended with language the hangover of the brain. I pulled this e from my body, it came out of solid flesh into the air and it is a sculpture, a lie for a sculpture, but then you already knew that, didn’t you?
