Read Barefoot in the Head Online
Authors: Brian W. Aldiss
‘A new continuum has to alp itself from the screenery and potentiality is low from old corpses so mulch the old trodisues out of the worldbody.’
Her young face shrunk back to its ultimate socket. ‘You hate everything!’
‘Schweitz doesn’t line my inscape baby we’ll push east... Anyhow Anj I love everything that really has a shape.’
The rocking days closed over them, nights and afternoons with random weather, her womb rounding against the cracked april dayflight, the whole gestation-infestation opera yelling out on the revolutionary stage with mumps of pelting birds peeling larvae popping buds paregoric eggs in the drain downwards to emptying order-tors bared to the basalt. Until all his cogitations produced only To live with people Anj be with people love them hate their userpenting sleep, in a monosigh.
So you still breathe jesuspirations!
Get disenstrangled of this loot-in with Christ eh for gods ache its not for me that or you or anyone else ever agame that deathorglory boy with his nailed-up mystery and mixing pain with promise has all foiled up virtue against crudelty and permanan revel oution of our clockwatch west so now we break the square old charmed cycle. Be not do Anj be not do.
Amid the sprockets of his coinage he trod again the uncertain footage of his film seeing how it all fell in eternal recurrents and eddies of horning and horning with the everetrancing of steps slideways intombtime to the opening price of verture where the goahead geton-or-getout of caputulist christ was turd to ambivied materialschism and every grass and brute caught for an exploit.
So as the Pleonastocene Age curded to a closure the banshee crumbled under the thundering glearbox to grow up into deeply scarlet peony by the sacred roadslide where they finely went on foot with Anjie meandering through the twilicker her golden grey goose beside her it in its beak holding gently to her smallest twigged finger with Charteris choked in his throat’s silence.
Beneath them turned a greenfused planet where foliage unscrewed itself from the earthworld and they afflected by its field down to the last gaussroot of being. The wayfarers on their way youngbuds straplings or grey elders were of that earthworld impacted and she by this soothed Angey lifted from her lost garden and said to saint in a recurrent phrase
All the known noon world loses its old staples and everything drops apart. You should show us how to keep a grip until the bomfact wears thin and fight the growing forest.
When there was no forest were mock-ups of forest. When no PCAs organised religions as mock-ups of the personal paradise. Learn it angel not too hardly that the ferrocities of white officegoers had to crackup and tuck your city inside the only building is. Even in old concretions there pattered those our starcasters who went barefoot to the real experience hold their faith.
Expurience of drugged disorient.
Disorient we want and the nonwestered sun of soma.
In the dark under piping bushes the talk was all bodies they became interchanged statement to threnody stamen to peony ransacked of all loved lute.
He had grown out of too many lifetimes but this span bridged all there was valued. For her too no longer the grey-lagging little girl but that also. Some easement in the general break.
To the evereast they talked and walked among the littling humlets with stopped steeples while to meet them avrilanched from there even from Serbia itself curled hunters forest away but a day now retidings in its roots small black ringletting pigs and its boles whisperfaced littlemen and its trunks the glowing eyes and razorbones of subsisterly glowing eyes and razorbones and its branches the quick lead thing still scunnered with eyes and bones enterbal and in the leaves scabrerattle of birdsong and in the earth beneath a whole sparce tempscape ciscumstantialing the grotted world.
She broke with elmed summer into twain and he glazed through the furry wires of his conch to see his baby girl with Anjys lip of beads touch still between them the poor wages of pain words how everstretched never pinioned truth flying feathers of lovenests sprawling at heroic dusks sumptuary in feeling midfeeling deepernal but the white always winning as light flapped and varicosed in rustickled veins it cried at night barehead in all garrots where he spoke or harped silence as the concrete towers regressed.
The girl needled her small tranjecstory by his side or sprang after the rumpattering piglets in golden time so Anjy offered again seamly thewd thighs in splicing gesture. In him inartriculate patterns fuzzed and fazed stridulant through leafmoulded enterospection daytripping beyond his old throught records fobsilled deep only sometimes distirred by menacimages someone always drowning in beanstained waters beyond shingles behind a line of noctous epijean figures where shilluettes the sherd.
Living barefate in sheughs or hams where travellers now could share salaami and bread in humbled rooms they lodged craking ramshack many citizens lined to speak many he felt he could reckonise their plane shapes crossing and recrossing between him and the recessed light all asked him What you make of christs tearching or even Are you anti-Christ
So he Friends think fuzzed in diseither-organisated for mid-paths neither for nor anti what he said its Those whore not for me are agrainst me just a bit more punchy phallacy in westrun style there’s a newtrality to cultivate to be more receptive look for shades patterns where this goodevil stuff cant rise he startled too many hares for Man the Drover
The shins of the flesh mere alimbic fantasy
Don’t be for or against anyone only the waking thing that lies in sleep
Hold firm to dreamament
Its the pattern of percertivity
Awakes the greater sleep
Don’t think we’re too well made or permanent
You are more merged each than you believe
Better sensuous than sensible
All you must have within is outside among verdance Christ and the westering thing supposited the inside out
Never imagined where all the roads would lead
Here
The eternal position
You have to have been there first
Many theres
For the here no multernatives
His thought chewed deeper and deeper into the ruralities as the herding greentides lipped them
Other thought impacted two thousand years
Driver man became pedestrian. Be not do
At times he trod in every belief beneath a broken art sign or died again the thousand psychic deaths of croesus christs last autobile age
Barked the shins of the flesh under dogroses till senescence Saw and herded many nakedassed children to become holy men and whoremongers and homebodies
Talked less wondered more thought of crafty old G only a span along the net leaning on an old rope bed picking his toes as christs millerimage hitler came and went
Never knew anger allowed himself to be laughed at by strangers
She knew they who knew did not laugh who laughed did not know
Yawned as the phimpricked autumn grilled her hearsole
Tried not to teach but learn from his disciples Peeled off the long long sepiage of photographs
Watched aeroplanes in another sky
News from the statedepartmented north not reaching
Scratched himself
Taught the disciples to sit and weigh dust All alternatives and possibilities exist through old mottled gums under a spreading square tree where some tiles still lodged but ultimately of course
Ultimately they asked listening
Poignantly shall I tell them
No way of telling anyone only through silence
Ultimately of course
They let the vast blackdrop curtain their waiting
In the hours of morning he said I will answer your ultimate question thinking that glowing eyes and razorbones burned unattended
So under the sparky starcover he let her old arms lull him but the brain still burned towards its wisdom he crept away from her guzzling sleep amid the multibrood climbed out through the stiffly hole in their thatched roof lay flat there under pulverised galaxies
Put his arm over the curved spine of roof rough and warm breathing
Gigantic beast patient My ultimate wisdom my nonsense
Suddenly wildly flightening the hateful faces of his discarded selves when a man dreams instead of acting falling by the wayside the slow bonfire of unaccustomed words had he had a bad dream the archetypal figures or was he still lying arrowed on a hyperborean shore.
Feeling himself half-slipping from the roof he roused ultimately of course
Keeping an fuzzed open mind
That wasnt enough the forests are back
Brains just an early model half unwaked shaped for the forests
You want it both ways
Did I have it both ways
Made and destroyed lived and tomorrow maybe Both means two more than two many ways many many ways my chief word to the world I’ve been thought as well as body spirit and prick soul and stomach both
Slipping back into old astotelian ways of thought slipping off this damned roof cold
Was aristoddle also christ the proudwalker too old too damned old to think clearly back to nearderthal times
Climbed slowly down off the roof woke one of his grandaughters who went with care to blow on the embers and brew him a mug of redcurrant tea the warmth back to basics Pinhole camera my sight of shapes all fluffed Either too old or too young to think but who knows old angeline where was it I met her I loved her loved her in my way loved her being in many women
Thought about waking her till dawn came then she stirred bent nearly double came patted his gnarled hand and said something he had forgotten his bit I had a little speech for you
Heard too many of your speeches in my time you have to make your ultimate speech today do you know what you are going to say do you ever know
Perceived that this old place is really a great beast cantering us over the nightplane
Give me your animist patter again waking us all up in the small hours
Once they were everlasting hours
Do you know what youre going to say theyll all be under the meetree expectoring you
Meant to tell you something personal angel something about a flower or a cactus or something
Tyrannical really he still had not come to the end of words What year was it where were they she forgot finally he went out shuffling must be ninety who knows if its still this century even
I wonder if he was jealous of Christ
A doityourself christkit no nails needed
They were under the tree had his old bed there where they flies flicked about in the peeving shade he smiled his crafty old G smile and sat on the bed scratched his toes maybe he really would tell them
They waited in droves
No knowing the calendar
On this special day saint you were to speak about the ultimate
Yes
Well you patterny people with hands Byzantine born to genureflect below the low hair weigh dust well let it drip an hour or two we may not have beaten time but it no longer drives us desperate before it nothing like a catastrophe to lengthen lifespan pledge my last liquors to humbug the humbuggers and the ones who never made it
If they knew the flip old thoughts I blaspheme against my own holiness
Green and tawny under the tree the patterns they mean
We learnt to sit under trees again stop looking for better trees concentrate yourself under an inferior tree
One of his grandsons sneaking away he had news of an organised state north somewhere what was his name that man dead now a white sort of gown or uniform Boreas no matter Concentrated on his big toes the long within We learnt to sit under trees again the longer without In the old days Now the empty bowl
But I can remember sitting in a car and driving all through the night
Remember the old autostrada del sole the red lights paired tinily capable ceaseless countless swarming pintabling under the hills and over the bridges viaducts mighty mountains headlines slicing nature in two not a thing ever like it never no greater thrill we were all little christs then own death or salvation right there in your steering hands.
Autocrashes full of orgone-content like copulation bayonetpracticide war nothing personal in it only all things inferfused and the exhaust-throat snarling The sparks died into the earth finally My capital crime nostalgia Fault of early brain model flickering
During the long silence a small boy trotted round with fruit to eat and a disciple deferentially handed the saint an apple cut by his pocket knife the saint mumbled a segment
When they were all silent he sat up toes in the dirt
They waited
He waited
Their dull conformist minds he would have to give them holy law okay but spiced with heresy let them grit it right up their nostrils
Ultimately he said