When I learned that the poet Dylan Thomas had spent an uncomfortable night stranded on a headland called Worm’s Head I wondered what thoughts, if any, had gone through his mind at the time. The headland in question is the furthest westerly point of the Gower Peninsula.
I know Gower well. I have often hiked the coastal path that winds around this spectacular wedge of land that juts into the sea. I have climbed on Worm’s Head, though I have never been marooned on it. The headland consists of three small islands connected by causeways.
The main causeway linking the formation with the mainland is covered when the tide comes in. In fact, it is only accessible on foot for two and a half hours either side of low tide. This means it is very easy to become stranded on the headland, to be alone on the Worm.
It is perilous to attempt to swim back to shore. Many people have come to grief in the endeavour. Official advice is to remain on the Worm until the tide turns. That is what Dylan did. He described the headland afterwards as “the very promontory of depression” but before his unsettling experience as a temporary castaway, he was fascinated by its contours, the air of mystery surrounding it, a feeling almost of some ancient magic.
The headland has a distinctive shape, rearing out of the sea like the dragon it is named after, for ‘Worm’ originally was ‘Wurm’, a Viking word for dragon, and has nothing to do with wriggly soil-dwelling terrestrial invertebrates. It is a fossilised monster, a petrified myth, an undulating geological feature that seems poised to dive down into the depths.
Dylan scrambled over the rocks with a book and a bag of food, and when he reached the ultimate point of the Worm, the head itself, he made the classic mistake of falling asleep in the sun. When he was awakened by chills, he saw that it was sunset, the tide had come on, he was cut off. And so, he huddled on the coarse grass, frightened of “the things I am ashamed to be frightened of,” and waiting for the tide to go back out.
What things scared him on that little adventure? The ghosts of his fraught imagination? I know from experience how our senses can deceive us when we are in similar situations. I have bivouacked on enough beaches and islands to understand that the slap of the sea on reefs, the rolling of submerged pebbles, the cries of nightbirds, the breath of the breeze, can sound like the footsteps of goblins, demons, imps, the whisperings of phantoms, the groanings of ghouls. And so I wrote a poem for Dylan and the Worm, a poem in the form of three islands, each linked by narrow causeways…
Dylan
on the tiny hill
at the end of the causeway,
stranded by high tide and waiting
for it to recede again so he might escape
back to normality. But there’s no
normality in the whole land,
only the devilish
night
&
those
gusts of icy wind
that bite the exposed flesh
of wrists and throat that poke out
of cardigan warmth. Next time he’ll check
the tide times and plan a crossing
with more care, he’ll boast
appropriately and
laugh
a
brisk
laugh that’s more
like a dragon’s bite in the
way it sounds, a legendary snarl,
but now his knees are drawn up and fears
gnaw gently on his spirit’s bones,
a man alone, far from home,
musing on a stone
skull.
Worm. Photo Courtesy: Rhys Hughes
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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I am currently staying with friends in the city of Exeter and they have given me a room, a room that contains a desk and a chair. This is a huge relief. One thing I have discovered since returning from India three months ago is that a desk is a valuable and uncommon item. I had always taken them for granted before. They never impinged on my consciousness.
My consciousness was rather neglectful in that regard, it seems. I assumed that everybody in the world regarded desks (and chairs) as fundamental aspects of existence. It simply never occurred to me that people might not require desks because they didn’t need to write books. I had forgotten that not everyone writes books all the time. What an oversight!
Since arriving in Britain, I have stayed with friends in a variety of locations but, only in Exeter, have I had a desk and chair. Only here, have I been able to sit and work on my next book. Or rather, only here have I been able to do so with relative ease, sitting perched on an adjustable chair, slightly hunched over, three fingers on each hand tapping away at the keyboard (I was once a two fingered typist but I have since improved), a desk lamp providing illumination and a mug of coffee not far away, and even disordered pages of written notes sharing desk space, because it happens to be a big desk.
Yes! A desk large enough to include not only my computer but books and messy piles of paper with garbled messages on them (messages that made total sense when I wrote them but now seem baffling and cryptic). There is plenty of spare space for me to move my mouse with grand sweeping gestures (instead of trying to restrict it to an area no larger than a beer mat). I have found a paradise of sorts. It is a desk that fulfils its promise, a desk that has no wobbly leg, that is high enough to prevent my legs bashing against the edge (and it is a blunt edge, thank goodness) but not so high that I have to crane up. It is a good desk, noble and honest. It is a friend and facilitator.
I don’t mean to sound ungrateful but friends who have accommodated my presence in their houses (while I seek a permanent place of my own) have been unable to cogitate the importance of a desk because the act of writing seems of no great importance to them. Can’t you balance your laptop on your lap? That is a question that seems perfectly logical to them. But no, I can’t. It slides off, just like cats often do when they fall into a deeper sleep and their muscles relax. My computer might call itself a ‘laptop’ but that seems to be a nickname rather than an accurate description of what it can do.
Well, if you can’t balance it on your lap, just don’t write anything. That is their solution to my dilemma. And I have written less, yes, and I do miss the big desk I had in India with the power socket right next to me and enough space on a generous surface for two or more mugs of coffee at once. Indeed, the desk was large enough so that my wife was able to do her writing on her own computer at the same time without either of us interfering with the other! Can you imagine a desk like that? That was a palatial desk.
Of course, I have done my best to improvise. I have used a cardboard box as a desk and sat on the edge of the bed. I have used the edge of the bed as the desk and sat on the cardboard box. I have tried to use a narrow bookshelf as a desk, standing up to type while striking my head on the shelf above it. I sat on the stairs and used the higher step as a desk. None of this has been practical or comfortable. Desks are hugely underrated.
One of my friends kindly gave me a bedroom into which she thoughtfully placed an inflatable bed and then she inflated it for me with an electric pump. It was a small room and the bed, fully inflated, was very large, so large that it took up all the space in the room, every cubic centimetre. Opening the bedroom door, I was immediately confronted with the bulging bed, which I had to climb onto. I tried writing on this bed but there was a leak. It slowly deflated and before long I was in the middle of a choppy pseudo-sea, feeling nauseous, while my fingers kept missing the keyboard of the undulating computer. No wonder sailors lost on the ocean have written so few books!
It is a different situation when I am looking after cats or dogs or other pets for friends who are away on holiday. Then I am able to employ kitchen tables as desks (although cats seem to want to take up most of the space on these surfaces too) and my computer and notes don’t even have to be cleared aside for dinner. I can eat dinner on my lap somewhere else.
That’s right, laps are for dinners and pets, not for laptops. I know there are writers who can write without desks and chairs. People who can sit cross-legged on a carpet on the floor or even while in the lotus position, serenely balancing the computer on their kneecaps as if it is a bridge anchored to two boulders and spanning the abyss between them. I admire such individuals, I guess, but I am not flexible enough to do likewise. I mean, I have a flexible mind, but my body doesn’t follow the example my mind sets.
Some ingenious inventor ought to invent a portable desk that folds up and can be carried in a pocket. Also, a chair that can be carried in the other pocket. It would reduce the frustration and sadness of desk-bound scribblers like myself. It would be an act of mercy. An alternative solution is for everyone in the world to start writing books, so they appreciate the necessity of a desk. In the meantime, I am making good use of the desk I have been loaned and I will miss it when I am gone from my current temporary residence.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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I sailed across the seas balanced on my knees, each kneecap in a little toy boat and for sails the flaps of my big raincoat, open to catch the breeze.
TURNING THE DIAL
Nash your teeth in envy, Ogden, when you read this rhyme for I have turned the dial higher on the daftness amplifier and now it’s on eleven, which is two more than nine.
WHAT WE CALL
I sometimes wonder what we call a sea in which a brave dog swims desperately through tempestuous and perilous waves?
Rough! Rough!
CALLING MY BLUFF
Someone called my bluff earlier today while I was sunning myself in the park. “Here boy! Good bluff! Who’s a good bluff then?”
And it actually came running! I have seen some weird stuff in my time but never a bluff that runs. That was tough on my sense of fun.
CROOKED SMILE
Someone just told me that I have an old crooked smile and I must confess it’s true. My smile embezzled 100 doubloons from the East India Company in 1642
CHARGING MY PHONE
I am charging my phone.
The field is a large one but I think I’ll be able to gore it before it reaches the gate.
THE WINDS IN SEASON
Spring Summer Autumn Winter do your worst, blow your best. There’s a splinter in the sprinter. North, South, East, and West.
Winter Spring Summer Autumn put your boots on and come forth. Silver talons finally caught them. East, West, South, and North.
Autumn Winter Spring Summer scrub the dishes for the feast. Fools in clover are made dumber. South, North, West, and East.
Summer Autumn Winter Spring Arch an eyebrow, gape a mouth. Hark the harps unattended sing. East, West, North, and South.
SCIENTIFIC POETRY
Newton with a suit on Einstein eating limes Archimedes in a tree and that’s just three who rhyme.
Von Neumann in a bath Faraday on a trampoline Gödel playing castanets and that’s just three who don’t.
MY BROTHER
My brother is captain of a soccer team and he wants me to play in goal. And he says that if I refuse they will lose the game and he’ll weep and do some other melodramatic things. But why should I oblige him? Am I my brother’s keeper?
AS A SPOON
I went to a fancy dress party yesterday.
Most of the evening remains a blur.
But I know that I was the only man in the room dressed as a spoon.
Caused quite a stir.
THE BAD BANDIT
The bad bandit has been banned from banditry because his moustaches when twirled got out of hand on his face.
So he joined a band in which he plays a rubber band mandolin and now it’s only girls who twirl on the dance floor during the encore.
Not his whiskers anymore.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Published in 1972, this novel by Italo Calvino explores Marco Polo’s journey to China and is in the form of a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.
Last year I began work on a project called City Life, which will consist of fifty short stories that are each exactly 500 words in length. I don’t know where the idea for this project came from, but I suppose it must have been influenced by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Perhaps my project is a modest tribute to that magnificent author, my favourite writer of fiction, but there are differences in approach. His cities are imaginary; mine are real. I tell the stories of my cities from the viewpoint of the cities themselves.
I feel a little uncomfortable trying to compare myself to Calvino. I stand in his shadow. City Life will never match Invisible Cities, yet I am pleased with my progress so far. I have written 32 instalments to date. I am at present unsure how I will go about finding a publisher for the book when it is completed, especially as my ideal format is for the book to be published in a box, with each individual city on a separate piece of paper, meaning that the tales can be easily read in any order. I will deal with that issue in good time.
Meanwhile, the following two extracts are told in the voices of Bangalore and Colombo.
City Life: Bangalore
Bangalore in 1890sModern day Bangalore
Once I was a garden city, full of lakes and trees, an environment with a climate very conducive to good health. But someone in another country discovered the transistor and then the computer chip. How did these technological innovations change me? I rapidly became a major centre for the new industries generated by those inventions. I expanded, lost my original definition, acquired a new one. A human being who expands too rapidly does so because of misapplied greed and a reckless disregard of bodily danger. I had no choice in the matter. I turned into an electronics hub, one devoted to the money that can be made from computers, those miraculous and alarming devices.
Yet my appearance matches no true vision of an imaginary future. Do not suppose that I am clean and beautiful, filled with crystal towers and monorails of gleaming glass. My roads are clogged with traffic, I am dusty, cracked, prone to flooding, polluted and overstressed. My air smells of smoke and chemicals. I am ashamed of my lakes, plastic-choked and foamy with effluent. I have grown huge and ugly, I tremble with the urgency of the commercial transactions taking place inside me, as if I have a nervous disorder, damage to my spinal cord. Yes, I generate enormous wealth, but who for? Not for the majority of the inhabitants who fight for the daily right to survive.
We think of deserts as empty wastelands and we suppose that the addition of a thousand lakes would transform them into paradisal realms. But deserts can be created by intense ambition as surely as by weather patterns and geography. Cut down trees, build roads, pound the ground flat in order to erect buildings, absorb villages on the edge of the sprawl. The process is too late to arrest. It will keep going until I am unable to recognise myself in my dreams. Not that I sleep enough these days for dreams to be common. I am a restless giant. The noise of the traffic is permanent. It reduces at night but never ceases. The coming and going of freight trains keeps me awake.
But I am not yet ready for despair that resembles an infinite resignation. Every desert, even one manufactured for profit, should contain an oasis. Near my heart, at the centre of my flux, there is a certain street and halfway along it can be found the greatest bookshop in the world. Blossom Book House not only has a tremendous selection of titles, it also provides the burning desert traveller with pools of thoughtful quiet. I am a city that contains a bookshop. How can I enter and browse that store without turning myself inside-out? This is a mystery with a solution I intend to keep secret. Perhaps a city’s spirit can enter a human consciousness every once in a while?
I immerse myself in books full of pictures of the way I was. When I was the fairest one of all on my high plateau.
City Life: Colombo
Colombo
There is crime in all big cities, that’s a law of life, and a certain amount of crime occurs in me too. On the western shores of the island of Sri Lanka I recline, but it is difficult to relax for long. There are sirens, shouts, a scuffle. Someone is robbing pedestrians at knifepoint or breaking into a shop again. What is to be expected? There is even murder on occasion.
The police frequently arrest those responsible, but sometimes the best detectives are mystified by a cunning theft or abduction. They admit defeat. One day there is a spectacular homicide near the ocean. The perpetrator leaves no clues at all. The experts are baffled. At last, a forensics specialist comes up with the ingenious idea of turning the case over to me.
I am the city itself and must be fully aware of every incident that happens within me. If anyone can solve this case, it is I, the capital of my modest nation. When I am approached with the proposal, I agree immediately. There’s no need for me to examine evidence, which is non-existent anyway. The usual methods of the criminologist are suitable for human beings only.
I am a metropolis, not huge but significant enough, and the killing took place inside my body. I tightly shut my notional eyes and concentrate. Where do I feel a peculiar itch? In one of my southern suburbs, in a particular street. I narrow it down quickly enough, to a house and a room in that house. A man is sitting on a chair at a table. He is eating his dinner.
I speak to him. He is so surprised that he drops his spoon. But he is rather a resourceful person, able to recover his composure in a matter of moments, wide grin on his mouth, his eyes full of mockery. It is clear he feels safe from arrest, an assassin who carefully covered his tracks after the deed.
Securing his confession is the only way he can be prosecuted and he has no intention of admitting anything to a disembodied voice, a voice he assumes is his own guilty conscience toying with him in order to test the firmness of his resolve. I ask him questions about his movements on the night of the murder and he answers in an offhand manner.
He doesn’t even pause while eating his meal. He has an alibi, a plausible answer for everything. Half an hour of questioning and I am ready to give up. I tell him this and he smiles thinly and nods. I turn to leave. On the threshold of his consciousness, I suddenly stop and turn.
“Just one more thing,” I say, and I reveal that I am the city of Colombo, that he lives inside me and I’m aware of everything he has done. He is deeply shocked. His confession follows. How could it not? We might betray the people we love, but who willingly betrays their own home?
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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I went to Sri Lanka before I travelled to India. I wanted to travel to India but it turned out to be easier to go to Sri Lanka first. I supposed the countries would be similar, and in many ways they are, but there are significant differences too. Obviously, I only learned about the differences after I departed Sri Lanka and reached India. The first difference I noted is that dosas are better in India, or to be more accurate they are better in South India. I have no idea what dosas are like in the northern parts of the subcontinent. But in Sri Lanka I didn’t care for them very much. They were spongy, soggy and filled with cold mashed potato, almost as if the very notion of ‘crisp’ had been expunged from the minds of the cooks who made it. In India, conversely, I found the magnificent ‘paper dosa’, so crispy I only had to glance at it to make it crackle. Thick green chutney and filter coffee and paradise is near at hand.
In Sri Lanka the tuk-tuks are called tuk-tuks, as they are in Africa, but in India they are called autos, which is short for auto rickshaw. I don’t suppose it’s much of a difference, really. When I was in Sri Lanka I was told that drivers in India never stop for pedestrians who are crossing the road but deliberately try to run them over, so that they will be reincarnated as higher beings. In Sri Lanka, drivers are willing to wait for Nature to take its course. No point being reborn as an elephant or dolphin prematurely. What I actually found was traffic chaos on the highways of both countries, but India being much bigger has more chaos, of course. Nobody tried to deliberately run me over in either country, at least not to any noticeable degree, but I won’t make light of the dangers of walking along a road without a pavement. It is harrowing.
Autos in IndiaTuktuks in Sri Lanka
At least for me it is. I have always taken pavements for granted. I wonder if they have taken me for granted in return? Never again. Whenever I happen to catch sight of a pavement now, I feel like I am greeting a long-lost friend. “My dear flattened sir! Where have you been? And where are you going? Would you object to me walking with you for a spell, perhaps as far as the bookshop or the restaurant or the metro station? My, but you are looking well. And how are your little potholes? Off to college soon, no doubt! Ah, they grow fast. It seems only a week ago they were tiny cracks in the concrete and already they are yawning chasms. Good heavens, what is this? Motorcycles appear to believe you are an extension of the highway. How improper!”
Pavements are like paper dosas, they shatter at a glance. But this is true in both countries equally, India and Sri Lanka, and doesn’t constitute a difference. I am on the lookout for differences, not overlaps. Monitor lizards. Now that’s a thing! In Sri Lanka there are monitor lizards and although there may be monitor lizards in India too, in Sri Lanka, I saw them by the hundreds and none in India so far. Saree styles too. I don’t mean that monitor lizards wear sarees differently in these countries but that women do. I only know this because I was told it. To my untrained eye, they looked exactly the same, lengths of cloth wound around the body, somewhat complicated, like an ancient toga but more colourful. The existence of ginger biscuits is another difference. They are plentiful in Sri Lanka, but I haven’t located a single packet in India. Ginger biscuits shatter like paper dosas on pavements, so crispy are they.
Sarees worn the Srilankan waySarees worn the Indian way
India won its independence in 1947, Sri Lanka in 1948, which means that for about six months Sri Lanka was a part of the British Empire when India was free. Could those six strange months have had any lasting impact? Probably not but how can I be sure? Sri Lanka has squarish electrical socket holes, India has roundish ones. Sri Lanka has roundish ginger biscuits, India has none, probably because they don’t constitute a ‘square meal’. In India, ‘milk’ is a liquid that is derived from a cow, in Sri Lanka it comes from a coconut. A cow is a mammal, a coconut is not. However, milk was created by Mother Nature to feed infants. Cow’s milk was originally intended for calves while coconut milk was intended for baby coconuts. In India there are many festivals, in Sri Lanka fewer. In fact, there are so many festivals in India that I own a calendar which marks the days of the year that aren’t festivals. It’s easier.
Bookshops. There are many great Sri Lankan writers and I have been told that there are many bookshops on the island, but I didn’t see one. I searched for them in vain. Not a single bookshop anywhere! I must have been looking in the wrong places, but all the same it seemed mighty strange. I did find shops calling themselves bookshops that turned out to sell bottle openers or corkscrews, but I never found a place selling those flippable cuboids filled with words that one is pleased to read in the evenings. In India the opposite situation prevailed. There are so many bookshops that it is difficult to find anywhere selling corkscrews or bottle openers. There are shops that claim to sell corkscrews and bottle openers but in fact they sold books, highbrow literature mostly, none of it doubling up as a tool to uncork wine or give access to beer.
The final difference I wish to mention is one that is somewhat unfair to the phenomenon known as ‘temperature’. Let me explain. In Sri Lanka I boiled, it was hot all day, every day, and even at night it was very warm. The ceiling fans kept me comfortable and without them I should have turned into a human kettle with steam coming out of my nose and ears. In India I found the climate perfect, warm but not hot, and the ceiling fans were allowed to take the day off. Yet the reason for this marvellously cool India is simply that I was based in Bangalore, which lies at a fairly high altitude. Altitude makes all the difference, a truth that I learned in many countries along the equator. Roast on the coast, cool off in the hills. Go up, keep going, and you will eventually have snow on your brow, no matter your latitude. This is the philosophy of Yetis. And if anyone thinks I am obsessed with Yetis, I will admit it. Yes, I am.
YetiMonitor lizard, Sri Lanka
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Most of us know that Humpty Dumpty was a large sentient egg who liked to sit on walls despite his unstable shape. He fell off and was broken and that is all that is certain about his life. Various apocryphal stories have become associated with him since his accident. Some people insist he was a philosopher as well as an egg. Others claim he invented a new emotion quite unlike any other emotion in the history of the world, but they are unable to describe what it might feel like. One professor has insisted that he was not an egg but the hull of an alien spacecraft from a distant star or a time machine from the future.
My aim today is not to add to this unhappy catalogue of fictions. I have no tales to tell about the kinds of antics he performed, nor can I offer insights into his character, beliefs or aspirations. Instead, I wish to ponder something that is talked about too seldom. If Humpty Dumpty was an egg, what thing would have hatched out of him? Had his shell not been shattered by an external force, we may assume it would have been broken by an inner one, for the ovoid stage of his existence could only be brief and something within must have emerged to escort his identity further along the path of natural development.
No forensic evidence was collected in the wake of his death and our speculations remain purely notional. Yet I think it is possible to construct a plausible scenario using inductive logic alone. First, we must attempt to establish what kind of egg he was, reptilian, amphibian or avian. One clue is his propensity for sitting on the tops of walls. It is true that lizards are accomplished wall climbers but they tend to cling to the sides rather than dominate the summits. Amphibians have no interest in walls that are not made of water and while they might congregate at waterfall tops they are disinclined to balance on narrow brick ledges.
There is always the possibility that he was the egg of some organism hitherto unknown on the surface of our world, that he might have come from outer space, from subterranean realms or an alternative dimension. But there is no need to multiply entities beyond necessity and without evidence to point us in that direction, it is safer to continue to assume that he was the egg of a phylum familiar to our zoologists. Personally, I favour the avian origin as the most realistic. Birds are constantly perching on our walls and sometimes they fall off too, when icy winds howl or rascals in the neighbourhood acquire new catapults.
Most of us are familiar with impetuosity and impatience. We might be reckless individuals ourselves or have friends and relations who embody the blurred spirits of haste and risk. Humpty was eager to become the bird he was destined to be, whatever kind it was, so keen in fact that he acted prematurely. Instead of remaining in the nest, wherever that was located, he left it and engaged in activities that were too old for him. He perched on walls, yes indeed, but perching high safely is the prerogative of those with wings. He was an egg and probably ignorant of the laws of physics. His fall was almost a foregone conclusion.
Now it is appropriate to turn our attention to the kind of bird he would have become if circumstances had been different. He was a large egg, one sizeable enough to hold audible conversations with human interlocutors[1], so we may immediately dismiss the vast majority of our feathered friends as candidates. This leaves us with the ostrich, the rhea, the moa, and that extraordinary bird from the island of Madagascar, Aepyornis maximus, so enormous that it inspired the fable of the roc, the bird that swooped down to seize elephants in its talons. No sentient examples of these birds’ eggs have been found, however, which is a pity.
All those birds are based in remote countries, and we are compelled to wonder how an individual egg might cross the oceans that separate these species’ homelands from our own, for it was in England that Humpty had his crisis and those birds are flightless. The ostrich and rhea are too small anyway, and the others went extinct before Humpty existed. The more we consider the matter, the less likely it appears that he was the egg of a bird known to science. Thus, we draw the conclusion that he was the egg of an undiscovered bird. What might the bird have been like? Because there are no clues there is no reliable answer to this.
But there is one solution that has an elegant absurdity about it and for that reason alone I am inclined to favour it. Some years ago, I happened to be strolling through the city of Cologne. I stopped in order to check the time on my wristwatch, for I am one of those unfortunate fellows who are unable to read numbers and dials while on the move. As I lifted my wrist to my face, a dull but loud creaking above my head made me fear that an object was about to fall on me. I looked up. It was a cuckoo clock fixed to the exterior wall of an old clock shop, one of the largest cuckoo clocks in the world. And it was striking the hour.
The hatch doors were opening, ponderously and painfully, and when they were fully agape the monstrous cuckoo came out. It emerged with a great deal of mechanical effort on an extendable trellis that sagged at its furthest reach. Then the cuckoo widened its beak and after an unsettling pause gave forth a cry of astonishingly dismal cadence. It repeated this sound three times to indicate that the local time was three o’clock in the afternoon and then, as exhausted as a senescent gran, it withdrew into its sanctuary, the hatch doors slamming behind it and the whirring of internal cogs ceasing as abruptly as they had begun.
I was astonished and affronted. I felt an outrage had been committed against my consciousness, that this clock was an insult to public decency, and I found myself wishing some other bird occupied the clock instead of an unmusical cuckoo. And it occurred to me that a different bird had once done so. Certainly, it must. We all know the cuckoo’s life cycle. It hatches in a nest not its own and destroys the other eggs in order to be the solitary recipient of all the attention from the bereaved parents. If cuckoos occupy clocks, then it logically follows that some other bird once lived in them. A bird of magic. But probably not a phoenix.
What bird lived in the clock before the cuckoo? This question is the key to understanding Humpty Dumpty’s true identity. That is what I now believe, at any rate. Somewhere in this peculiar world of ours the decayed remains of a cuckoo clock may be found, a cuckoo clock vaster by many orders of magnitude than the one I saw in Cologne. The bird that was its original occupant was the one who laid Humpty Dumpty and eggs similar to him. A cuckoo invaded the nest and left an egg that hatched first and rolled out the others. Humpty Dumpty did not break on that occasion. The start of his life was a rehearsal for his death.
[1] See Alice Through the Looking Glass for more details.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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I wrote this work on my honeymoon on a remote coffee plantation in the mountains. It is surely obvious which major poem inspired it, namely the famous disjointed epic by T.S. Eliot that I have struggled to understand since I first encountered it. But although The Waste Land baffles me, I can’t dismiss it as nonsense. It has a logic I find obscure, yet I have no doubt it is authentic literature. Therefore, my own effort isn’t a parody. A parody requires a good understanding of the thing that is being parodied, a willingness to oppose it, or at least to disagree in part with it. I am unable to disagree with what I don’t comprehend. And so, my poem isn’t a parody of Eliot’s famous poem, but a parody of the poem I might have written if I had written a parody. It is a parody of a parody that doesn’t exist.
1: The Denial of the Trees
October is kind: the pumpkin
headed men
with toppled isosceles eyes
are satisfied.
The wise befriend the skies: bone
dry the hallowed
undersides
of the sober-minded anthropophagi
still mummified.
They cogitate clearly, those fellows:
one thought alone
ladled from the universal soup
pressed flat and joined
into an eternal loop: October is kind.
The leaves that sweep my face,
tongues of autumn winds
made visible: in the forest the trees
gradually mimic
old bicycles, skeleton finger spokes.
The path wanders away,
slowly deflating.
The puncture is the part
of the dream not worth pursuing
and yet we hasten
to pedal our goods into oblivion.
Alice is making daisy chains.
Daisy is oiling tandem bicycle
wheels again.
This is the realm
where everyone hurries.
The Haste Land.
And the only way out
is to float unafraid
on the stream that rises
in the glade
of snake-tongued Narcissus
and hope it hasn’t been dammed
before it reaches
the mouth
in the shade of understanding.
2: The Backgammon Front
The dice are shook, our nerves rattled
as the trenches fill
with bets: the surly players no longer
smoke cigarettes.
Ifs and buts, whiffs and butts,
they hunker in the nettles
whistling tunes of breakfast longing
they learned from steaming kettles.
Counters, saucers, the forces of good
are evil: the weevils
in the biscuit wait, hibiscus blooms
meditate, always odourless.
One quarter insane already
and it’s getting worse:
the terse verse
is a curse that won’t be lifted soon.
The pips of the dice
are like pumpkin seeds: the scarecrows
aren’t pleased.
But is this really war?
3: Advice About Water
The poor man pours
while the fat cyclist puffs past
and the future
is never an unwrapped present.
The ribbon is the thing
that won’t be untied: both tried
in their own way.
Today the pump has broken,
the water thickens as it trickles out
and the cyclist gives a shout
as he plunges through.
I knew you well in the days
before grinding wheels
when the spray of an accidental puddle
was unremarkable.
Daisy, Daisy,
give me an answer, do.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
the question was not
put to you.
The track becomes a path,
the path a road,
and the road slopes down to the eerie
quayside: wide enough
for the ships of petrified wood to knock
against full length.
We lack the strength to marvel at this:
an illicit kiss
between land and sea, fortunately brief.
The hulls were damaged
on some distant reef
and sluggish the overused crews.
On the horizon a whirlpool
of gigantic size
washes the sails of the vessels
it has turned
to splinters: those made of metal
are still intact
but rattling like shirt buttons
in the deep spiral.
Mostly the maelstrom destroys
but sometimes the helix
can fix ancient wrecks,
joining snapped planks back together
and the only question
is whether
anybody truly wants this.
The fat cyclist can’t say.
Out of breath
but never out of pocket
he is still
too far away
to have a worthwhile opinion.
4: The Triangular Raft
Adrift, the shipwrecked sailor
clings to planks
nailed into the shape
of a pumpkin headed man’s eyes.
He is the traumatised
sum of all the internal angles.
Spangles of salt spray
and he glistens like a society woman
who is drowning
in champagne.
Daisy, Daisy,
how does your garden grow?
I’m half crazy.
He had already dried his hair.
It wasn’t fair.
The waves had the last word.
But what was
the first ever uttered? Thirst!
He wouldn’t dare
to sip the brine in which he flowed
like time: the wine
of extinction.
The garden under the sea
will welcome
his bones to their new home
eventually.
The society woman is drinking tea
and politely refusing
to voice her views,
the same way she declines to observe
her worthless words.
5: Lightning on Strike
For higher pay
the atmosphere won’t obey
those dictates
of meteorologists called predictions.
Today the lightning
has a predilection to be absent
in the valley yonder.
I was breaking nuts
with a hammer in the toolshed
and I thought you said:
the thunder still rumbles, the bed
is rotating, our fate
insists that I remain under the weather.
Take my temperature, quick!
Take it far away,
release it into the wild, far beyond
the pumpkin fields.
But I was mistaken.
While breaking shells that boomed
quite unlike bells,
my ears were playing tricks:
you do not exist.
Daisy, Daisy,
or is it Ruth now?
the pumpkins are aglow.
We will always find
at the back of our minds
one simple truth:
other months might be mean,
cannibal chewed, serpentine,
but October is kind.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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Nonsense poems consist of nonsense without choice. You may choose to read or not read them, true enough, but once you have embarked on the journey you are helpless in the rushing of the raging word-torrent. Your reading mind becomes a canoe, sturdy enough but lacking a rudder or paddle. There are no alternatives to the direction in which you are rushing. You are committed, at least as much as the writer of the poem was, and the act of abandoning the work is equivalent to throwing yourself out of the canoe, immersing yourself in the foaming liquid, scraping your soul on the submerged rocks of the dangerous passage. Your inner being will experience this, even if it appears on the surface that you have simply ceased reading a few bewildering verses.
Therefore, I have decided, with some rhymes and a little reason, to create a nonsense poem that gives the reader rather more latitude in the way it develops. As an absurdist piece, the freedom of choice is limited to different meaningless outcomes, but my hope is that some of the permutations will be musical enough and sufficiently evocative to make the procedure worthwhile. The total number of combinations of lines is astronomical. This means that a reader who chooses a particular path through the poem will probably be the first to have done so. It is also likely he or she will be the last. The chances of someone else choosing the same route are vanishingly small. It can therefore be said that the poem was written entirely for you and nobody else. To navigate this ‘Do It Yourself Nonsense Poem’ simply choose a first line from the first grid, followed by a second line from the second grid, then a third line from the third grid, a fourth line from the fourth grid, and so on. There are twelve grids. The end result, if you persist, will be a twelve-line nonsense poem. It might be the case that a poem produced using this method makes some sort of sense. If this happens, I will be happy to offer you my condolences. But I think it is very unlikely a sensible poem will be found from this exercise, even if one really is hiding within the combined grids.
Among the multitude of poems that can be generated using these grids, one of them will be the best of all, and another one must be the worst, but it is simply unfeasible to work out which those are. The number of combinations is so high that the best will surely remain secret forever, and the same is true of the worst. This does not logically mean that the best is magnificent and the worst terrible. The difference between the best and worst might be very minor. But the grids are finished and I am the first reader of the work as well as its writer, so I felt entitled to find my own way through the grids. My random path led me to the following. After reading it through, my mind wanted to add the words ‘Well, wouldn’t you?’ to the end of the poem, but that is cheating. Attempts to twist nonsense into sense must be discouraged.
After cooking beans on the green platform the yeti mends a net
but never moon mice smell a rose inside my clothes
if singing a duet. The fanciest dress was bought new
thanks to rubber bones yet bedsteads gleam in smug dry streams
both to left and right. And why do butter puppets stutter on the stage?
The tangent was once unexplained, I guess, in situational anxiety
and so, aghast, four wise moons break a chair cogitating fruit.
The scholarly fruit trees rhyme badly, every day, or chatter with bees
greedily, noisily, sadly. And what of the butler? He loves all the clutter
under duress, he wonders while hissing, beautifully nonetheless.
And so the man blundered badly near a cockatoo but crystallised
and broke the cloud in the dusk to shun the vanilla fruit flies.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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An Indian newspaper published an article about adults who still read Tintin and I realised that although I would have liked to be interviewed for that article, my qualifications were inadequate, for there is no ‘still’ in my particular case. I only began reading the comic when I was grown up. In fact, I only read it properly in the past few years, and I am more than half a century old. True, I did read one or two of his adventures when I was young, but I read them half-heartedly, I don’t know why, instead of with unalloyed delight, as they ought to be read. Possibly they were too elaborate for me back then.
Yes, Tintin is elaborate, but this doesn’t mean it isn’t simple. Yet it has the kind of simplicity that seems complex to the very young reader. There are plots and subplots, conspiracies and clues, and all of this is perhaps a bit much for the mind of a child more familiar with the primitive antics of Dennis the Menace or The Bash Street Kids from The Beano. Each of Tintin’s exploits seemed beyond reasonable length to me, too adult and requiring a heavy investment of my time and intelligence. I speak, naturally enough, only from a personal perspective. In some households, Tintin was read by minds younger than mine, understood and enjoyed too. I was clearly a late developer.
Thanks to a remarkable bookshop in Bangalore, I have been able to obtain the comic books in omnibus editions and catch up with what I missed out on. It intrigued me to learn that the elements I had regarded as impossibly modern in my youth are now quaintly dated. Tintin’s adventures are not hugely dissimilar in tone and setting to the adventure stories of John Buchan1 and they even put me in mind of Somerset Maugham2 at his most sensational, with their heavy reliance on seaplanes and tramp steamers and open-topped automobiles. The pacing is as fast as The Thirty-Nine Steps or Greenmantle, the atmosphere as exotic-colonial as The Moon and Sixpence or The Narrow Corner. There are differences too, of course, but the differences are less surprising.
The pacing is incredibly fast and Tintin blunders his way into scrapes and pickles almost as if destiny has chosen him for the role of spanner in the cogs of the workings of villains, which in a way it has (if we regard Hergé as Fate). He is highly competent most of the time, but can also be inefficient and even inept, often hampered as well as helped by his dog, Snowy. But no quantity or quality of hampering can keep him down for long, he is deft at seizing the opportunities of coincidence that extreme contrivance throws his way. He is fully the equal of any ancient hero from legend or mythology.
And he is mentally strong: no amount of trauma, no near-death incidents or hair-breadth escapes affect him psychologically. He falls out of an aeroplane, an assassination attempt by a dastardly pilot, and his parachute malfunctions. A flat character on a flat page is about to be flattened on the flat ground, but no, he has the singular good fortune to land in a hayrick being transported on a cart. There are no broken bones and no gasping for breath. He picks himself up, dusts off a few straws, resumes his mission with perfect aplomb. One might even say he is inhuman in his attitude to danger. A touch of psychopathy, perhaps? But he is a friend of goodness, an enemy of criminality.
He is also weirdly tolerant of the pompous ineffectiveness of all the sundry supporting characters who populate his existence. Thomson and Thompson, the detectives who never get it right but always take credit for cases solved in their vicinity, provide comic relief, which justifies itself, but even a cursory analysis of their deeds raises a few awkward questions. How on earth are they entrusted continually with missions requiring the utmost delicacy, tact and cunning? They are negative factors in the field of detection, hindrances rather than boons, a pair of slim buffoons (we normally regard buffoons as portly) with a strange sartorial taste and peculiar speech patterns, dramatically underperforming sleuths who are prone to take what they are told at face value. They are worse than useless; they are beneficial to the continuance of evil.
It was a long time before I was able to tell them apart but now, I know they are doubles rather than twins, and that the one with the drooping moustache is Thompson and the one with the flaring moustache is Thomson. In the original French, they were Dupont and Dupond, which is a little less confusing but not much. Tintin ought to have nothing to do with them, but he is always delighted to see them and treats them as highly competent and valuable colleagues. This is a symptom of his own occasional incompetence. But this has nothing to do with India and so we must regretfully forget them.
Tintin travels to India on several occasions. In Egypt, he daringly escapes a firing squad, requisitions an aeroplane, a 1929 de Hallivand DH-80 Puss Moth, one of the highest performing aircraft of its time, with a 130 hp (97 kW) Gipsy Major engine (this aircraft is also notable for being the first to cross the Atlantic from east to west, in 1932) and he courageously, some might say foolishly, sets off for India. Unlike the pilot Nevill Vintcent3, who flew the exact same aircraft from Britain to Sri Lanka (Ceylon, as it once was) without crashing, Tintin runs out of fuel and comes down in the jungle.
Although extremely absurd, the idea of piloting such a plane so far isn’t as implausible as it might appear. We should remember Maurice Wilson4, that very noble but eccentric mystic who planned to climb Mount Everest solo in 1934, forty-six years before Reinhold Messner5 managed the feat, and of course it was inevitable that he would fail, for all the odds were against him. Despite his lack of flying experience, he purchased a de Havilland DH.60 Moth, a more rickety aircraft than the one Tintin used, and flew it from Britain to India in a series of hops. It was a lunatic thing to attempt and yet he succeeded. His failure was on the mountainside, not in the air. Therefore, we have established that Tintin really could have flown to India from Egypt.
Tintin, after his crash landing, meets elephants in the jungle and he wishes to solicit their aid but he doesn’t know their language. He decides to learn it and improvises a trumpet in order to do so, carving the instrument from a block of wood with a penknife, an amazing feat of carpentry (but in Land of the Soviets he creates a new propeller in a similar manner). Now he can fluently talk to all elephants in their own tongue, for elephants apparently speak in a kind of jazz. It is good to have such magnificent animals on your side. One elephant is worth a dozen human friends when it comes to strength and endurance. And they will never forget a service rendered. That, as far as I’m aware, was Tintin’s first visit to India, but he had another a little later.
Tintin in Tibet, often regarded as his finest adventure, finds Tintin visiting Delhi in the company of Captain Haddock, that boisterous, drunken, bumbling, loquacious master mariner who frequently makes matters worse rather than better. They admire the Qutab Minar, as I did, awestruck, when I was in Delhi. I have since learned that the Qutab Minar was based on a tower in Afghanistan, the Minaret of Jam, which must be the most marvellous name ever devised for a tower. I imagine it is made from apricots and strawberries and I lick my lips as I contemplate it. But this has nothing to do with Tintin, who after leaving Delhi travels to Kathmandu and then overland into the mountains. He meets a Yeti and scares it off with the flash of his camera.
The Tintin comics always had a very substantial fanbase in India and letters from Indian readers often were mailed to Hergé. It is therefore unfortunate that a Tintin adventure set entirely in India doesn’t exist. Personally, I would be happy to see one set in Goa. In the 1990s, a nameless artist designed a series of t-shirts bearing images that are parodies of the Tintin book covers with the title “Tintin in Goa” on them. They show the intrepid reporter doing nothing intrepid at all, simply lounging about the beach or going for a joy ride on a motorcycle. Even a comic character as psychologically resolute as Tintin needs a holiday once in a while. What better place for a relaxing stay?
John Buchan ((1875–1940), Scottish peer, writer and editor ↩︎
Neville Vintcent (!902-1942), South African aviator ↩︎
Maurice Wilson (1898-1934), British soldier, mystic and aviator, who died trying to climb Mt Everest solo ↩︎
First mountaineer to ascend Mt Everest solo, without oxygen in 1970 ↩︎
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
I am intrigued by the whole process of translation, a most remarkable alchemy of words and meanings, and when it comes to the translation of poetry, I find the operation especially bewildering and beguiling. But this is not the place for me to discuss my views on the mechanics of the subject, for in fact I have no such views. I am not a translator. I merely wish to explain that the following poem is the result of a minor experiment I have been planning for a long time, a variant of the ‘Chinese Whispers’ game, performed using an automatic translation program. A poem is written, a poem using fairly obvious imagery, and then the translation game begins. The poem is translated from English into another language, in this case Albanian, then from Albanian into another language, Arabic in fact, and from Arabic into Basque, and so on. Eventually the poem exists in Zulu, and from there it is translated back into English.
Possibly it will no longer sound like a real poem at this stage. But it can be easily adjusted, turned into something resembling a new poem, and presented as a continuation of the original poem. The final poetic work will consist of the original stanza followed by the manipulated stanza. If they enhance each other, so much the better, but if not, nothing much has been lost.
The Transformation
The transformation is lengthy
but painless,
it does not drain us. The way
ahead is clear
as far as the glowing horizon
where the moon
has promised to rise. The eyes
of the night
stare intensely in preparation
for blinking
thanks to the white eyelid of
a belated moon
and we grow wise when at last
it arrives, saying
that the stars belong in sleep
and so they do and so
do we and finally
the change
occurs
rest
ful
ly.
This poem was automatically translated between all the following languages:
English – Albanian – Arabic – Basque – Bengali – Czech – Dutch – French – German – Greek – Hindi -Indonesian – Korean – Latin – Macedonian – Maltese – Nepali – Persian – Portuguese – Romanian – Sanskrit – Slovak – Swahili – Thai – Turkish – Urdu – Vietnamese – Welsh – Zulu – English
And the result, after a very small manual adjustment, is:
After a long time
I’m still crying,
a street name outside of us.
This is obvious at first:
bright horizon.
Where is the moon?
And so ends the contract.
Dinner?
I can’t wait to get ready.
This is not a rumour
of white hair
or months.
Finally we bring you a sage.
They started talking,
you are sleeping,
and so
I continue to do so.
Be careful,
what’s up is silence,
targeted
from where?
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Borderless 