Red Mirrors
Extract from the novel in progress
In a world in which psychological states are real landscapes, a pair of shipwrecked lovers cause each other's deaths again and again, a half-human island girl searches for her missing sisters, while in the mountain citadel a guardian investigates the parade of red mirrors and a timeless woman speaks with the voice of blood.
In the mountain citadel, I ate my eye so I could see. The mountain dissolved me, took me inside his deepest secrets and made me watch his genesis. Then I watched his long erosion so I’d know how to perceive what wasn’t there, how to fill the space he once filled and sculpt his shape from our tattered geometrics. Once the mountain had broken himself upon his core, he magnetised my dispersed grains to attract me to myself. He kept me molten for longer than can be measured so I flowed through his cracks, snaking into the places he himself dare not visit. When the mountain cooled, I cooled too, my inner bonds realigned by his noble pressure. At last he released me from his cracked and folded skin. Many fluid moments passed before I grew ambulatory again. Walking down the mountain made more of spaces than of matter, I knew I’d be prey to the sea, who spying my cavernous innerscape would want to fill me up with himself so he could race through all my channels, into every cave and catacomb of me, eroding my insides to uncreate my hidden inlets, my stranded islets, and wash around me so I could only feel the other parts of myself through his reluctant refraction. The sea wanted to use me to taunt the mountain, who was so full of days he was wearing out, while the sea through me expanded his territory and brought me the first survivors of the great wave.
I instructed the survivors to build the spaces the mountain had shown me so he could speak with the voice of blood. The sea had instructed the leviathan to keep the voice hidden, keep it molten, to keep himself liquid too so he could abrade the mountain, who grain by grain was sinking into the depths of the sea’s ravening mind. Rising, rising waves. Cold glitter, I told the survivors of the great wave as they dug the tunnels with makeshift tools, the granite mountain kept the quartz racing with the heat of his pressure, so she could slip-slide through his cracks and find all his secret selves. In her rose river, chunks of him bobbed downstream to land in other places and muddle up his sense of self. But I saw him better with his blocks all haphazard. I opened up his mineral luminescence and ground his pieces into pigments. Then I whispered to the rose quartz that as the mountain cooled, she too should cool and seal up his breaks. While she might not want to be his seam, might prefer to slip-snake forever inside his broken self, it would be no good for her to be forever searching for his breaks to mend. I mixed the pigments of his mineral luminescence and painted a new surface world of apparent depth on his cracked and folded skin.
All deceptions flowed from my brush as I depicted the utopia of demons and monsters, the foundation of the mountain citadel, this hellish heaven, our heavenly hell. When I blended the last of the mountain’s inner luminescence on his crags, I wrapped a whole new world around him in scenes of colour tang and bite. The first survivors of the great wave fell hard for my utopia of demons and monsters, they fell right in, they dashed their skulls on the surface of the mountain covered head to foot with my wild imaginings. They relieved themselves of their survival by painting their brains into my utopia as I hoped they would, mingling with the mountain’s outward glow. Then the ravens and jackals took the body sacks away.
The ravens and jackals already knew utopia, they’d coughed up the bones from which the demons and monsters grew. Colonial beings like ocean coral, the demons and monsters were a reef on land. My utopia welcomed all marine life that chose to leave the sea. In those days, sea and land were intimate with one another, they changed places whenever they liked as they explored who was best on top. For a while the mountain himself had been under water, all the way up to the pinnacle upon which I danced with one bare foot planted on his igneous spikes and my other pointed in the air, following the sun as he chased the moon across the red raw sky. I played my tricks on the sun and moon long before they thought to use others to play out their endless game of days.
When the first survivors reached my rock, the mountain had been transformed by his long sublimation. When at last the waters fell, new structures had grown on him and he never quite knew himself after his bitter subordination to the waves. The rose quartz who sealed up his breaks had reached his surface in many places, and there she broke into pieces so she could roll down his slopes and leap into the hands of the next survivors. After the evolution of iron redundancies from the ships, she tempted the survivors into carving and polishing her, then sold herself to foreign merchants and crossed the shrinking sea to newer lands. Amulets of her returned to our island centuries later and, as tiny figurines in a game, she moves geometrically to capture her glass counterparts.
In the winding alleys of the citadel, cobbled now and hung with pennants proclaiming our allegiance to the kingdom of frankincense over the water, games of carved symbols are played night and day. The heated exchanges over win or lose are firing up the mountain again. He watches for his moment to melt the last of the wayward crystal who barely holds his breaks together. On the seabed he dislodges his ancient feet from where they petrified to the earth’s stone heart. He’s getting ready to dance a jig to displace us all from where we’ve fixed ourselves as carbuncles on his fissured skin. He wants his surface utopia of demons and monsters to rise again, he wants my help to grind pigments from the people who have congregated in the citadel from across the newly risen world. The mountain believes their bones and skins will yield a varied palette for his liberation. I promised him a new utopia when he agreed to grow a little taller, to spike for me igneously when I needed to rise above the ocean purging himself of his shameful thoughts.
In the granite citadel, I see the parade of red mirrors, I see the thoughts of prophets and the streamcloud city we used to be, but the eye can’t settle on the rampant fighting spirit, so I ate my heart and now I pulse the granite’s blood.
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Note on method: In writing this novel I’m experimenting with subject as process, responding to various works of visual art as a way to actively draw on the collective (un)consciousness. I began by writing fragments, with no story, characters or setting in mind. After a while, voices coalesced and settings suggested themselves, while sequences and episodes emerged from the rhythms of my thought. I’m keeping it open for as long as possible so there’s plenty of space for surprises to appear. And there have been many so far! Writing as discovery is what makes my atoms fizz. For the remainder, I’m relying on my structuring skills (hard-earned through writing Emerald Noose three times from a blank page) and the ability to see what isn’t there. I love creating coherent wholes out of apparent chaos. Immersion in the process is the main event.
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