Cephalopod
written/photos ©Daniel O’Reilly
In centuries preceding, during the long, dark night of people passed, the light from the moon was different, they say. Carpet weavers watched sporadic clouds wrestle with thick air as translucent sentiments, ribbed by fleshy coils, pointed fingers at old friends. Tarpaulin Triveni, female, teacher of twenty, payer of Federal taxes, architect of the west winds, lover of afternoons; Route 79 to Tiruvannamalai, rush hour smoke, brimstone, incense, pooja, sudden migrations: the temple, partly stone, partly human –
Astarte! At last, longed the cantaloupe queen, conscious like burned butter afloat in disquietning nodes of boiled heroism, sheer terror written on her bronze armour in longhand Sufic prose, arrows bristling brilliant shafts of light upon those who stand amazed. In showers of liquid lead and riddles like retribution she raises up her head in thunderous paroxysms of wildfire, incinerating the noise of the NASDAQ trading floor via the quietest opening, or tearing into the roaring twenties: like lovers they eat themselves whole. A pain-pointed predilection for killing gods of all sorts, striking them to the ground, howling, shrieking for mercy, but shewing none, misusing the corpse after the kill like orca with a dead seal, or Achilles with Hector’s remains. We play with death. It makes us young.
Silver serpents entwine the heart-locket of a young man in Queens. The crepuscular silhouettes of tall buildings all empty, as in a dream, bitter chills in the wind from Hudson’s channel, flashes of red lightning, banshees in the street below setting the dumpster afire. Concrete streets empty and dark, this wraith-like apparition only masquerades as a city: a riddle, an omen, a curse. A picture of petty consequences, catalysing a tuber shaped oath for remedying unlikely afflictions of the psyche, like the pinch of a rubber band wound too tightly around your finger. Entrenched layers of decimal decline pontificate politely to a crowd of mainly young goatherds, but they don’t mind, as any entertainment will suffice for a goatherd of the Bactrian valley, longsuffering in the August Afghan ovenheat, yearning for the cool Hindu Kush. Up there, queens look down from snowy temples, peaks outlined by the monsoon moon, vanished layers of paradise passing instantaneously from view. Instantaneously –
Tivenys Catalonia
Borders bind the wealthy to the poor, but in seaside temples of voluminous concern we count epigrams between sunsets, rallying fractious spirits in the meanwhile, damaging civic furniture installed in the Citibank Plaza. The old guard sits outside the bank on a plastic beach chair, machine gun hanging lazily at his side, smiling cheerfully at the calls of the brain-fever bird stirring raptures in the daytime as if coaxing clams from shells, a child of every man. Now we are ringing the new year by the seven bridges of Königsberg, full of cheap fortified wine and high on super glue, destroying the way of life for those who cannot know better, sweetening a joyous relation between the baroque lintel and its most spiritual rejoinder.
Openings, ruptures and fissures decimate Dorothy Drumwise on her drunk drive through the badlands of Blackpool, BMW unlicensed, DMT fairground flakeout. She sings sweet missives of the Golden Age, of Plutarch, Pindar, and of Ovid. Inclinations of ages move with tectonic twists, first shifting this way, then that way, as with the latest dance fad. I know that you know that the ‘this way and that way’ is a vital mechanism of natural philosophy. The waggledance of industry, the fiesta after the feast, festivals observed on Temple grounds, and with much smoke and incense. Astarte above, chariot rider of fury, smoking halos of pure fire above the heads of gathered postmodernists, crypto-Marxists, and other groups assembled for purposes only spectacle may account for. This terror and delight is for quivering flesh alone: no gods may get a taste –
Tivenys Catalonia
In an asemic New Babylon, an endless plan of a constant architecture, sketch after sketch of alleyways and avenues, flows, interruptions, passages of ludic intrigue: our only concern will be for how the wind goes. The city-gestalt, our new Babylon, is stacked tier-upon-tier as with a Hindu temple, complete with the sombre front of a necropolis, grey and overbearing, the pantheonic structures of dead gods hewn into rock, but haphazardly, without plan or meaning. The Temple of pure, empty worship, accessed via doors which only appear to be doors, words which only appear to be words, each word a door signifying an exit, but only signifying, without being itself –
Kuilapalayam India
The cultivation of ways, sulfurite ligaments imposing reasonable content on expounding gasses, phosphorescent burns blister the torn corners of Lloyd George’s copy of The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, but this will not be a problem for long – at least, not for several centuries. Down in the Centre Pompidou there exists a scale copy of Nieuwenhuys’ Labyrinthe aux échelles mobiles. Parisians drink pastis at 7pm.
The matriarchal temple builders of our mother, our lady, notre dame. The swollen, translucent body nurtures a billion babies in complex mythic tunnels underground. Our lady of the temple, founded with mortar and keystone, high Romanesque arches, transverse, ribbed, darkened by smoke of incense that beckons, intoxicates, shines, yet moulds-over quickly. The body of our lady nurtures a repugnant decay where fungi of a million kinds find resplendent consumption. A gentle breeze lifts the spores up and into the forest above, the penthouses, tower blocks, the Gothic quarter below, even the suburbs populated with a thousand empty houses, empty restaurants, empty hotels, emptiness, or so it is reported by La Vanguardia, thumbed in street corners by elderly gentlemen sipping coffee in districts of towering blocks, Brutalist forms, echoes of steel rod construction divining bittersweet sunsets of lackadaisical reform, wilted in margarita sunsets, sugary sensualities disinhibiting bashful dissimulation with the gait and libido of a wild cur, roaming street corners, lurking around the panty drawer, Our Lady intends two-thousand years of certitude for divine discourses on nature, for a thorough study of Deleuze, for a monthslong dance of the wild kind, for carnivals of a schizoid nature, for a Heraclitean passing, and passing, and never returning –
Our retreat towards a porcelain past resides in a turpentine residue of vistas opening above the Sierra Nevada, that pillar supporting the vaulted deep blue sky, the only thing keeping worm-eaten heavens from falling. Remember how we drove there in December of 2018, how the warning signs for ice hazards slowed us for many miles? We sat in the steamy car and drank tea from a flask, ate sandwiches prepared earlier at home, austerity gnawing at the innards. Porcelain does not prevent against cysts. Cysts large as an eyeball, pickled in vinegar solution, stacked on a forgotten shelf in a back room of the British Museum. Perhaps it was Napoleon’s eye? Perhaps it was not?
Tortosa Catalonia
It was I, not Napoleon, who took the moon and put it at the bottom of a lake, littered with the bloated bodies of Englishmen drowned in their re-sprayed Range Rovers. Between velour flaps, cold castellations and raptures coloured like velvet bands at the fair, phalanxes shimmer like desert lizards tussling in the heat of day, the axehead aligns at the very base of the skull to release a thousand demons from their hiding places, demons who vy against one another in their scramble to escape this mind forever, darting this way and that, a confusion of beastly shapes writhing in colours both sapphire and turquoise –
Daniel O’Reilly is an independent British author, publisher and internationally exhibited multimedia artist living and writing in rural Catalonia in northern Spain. In 2022 he exhibited stories, photographs and music from the [archipelago] project at the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Cairo & Alexandria in Egypt, which will travel to the Andre Breton House in France in 2024. He has recently published short fiction in the Margate Bookie Zine, Trilobite Literary Journal, Tiny Spoon magazine, Writer’s Block magazine, Sulfur Surrealist Jungle, the Bengaluru Review, Defunkt Magazine, Everything in Aspic Magazine, Chachalaca Review, The Room Journal of African Surrealism, and Black Flowers Literary Magazine. He is co-creator of The Unstitute, an online art lab and artists’ co-operative, and has screened original video art in competitions and exhibitions in over 20 different countries worldwide.
Visit the [archipelago] literary project on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DanielOReilly
Visit The Unstitute: https://www.theunstitute.org/