BLACK SWAN

OF TRESPASS
metafictions

by

MICHAEL BLACKBURN

Lindum Colonia Electronica

Sunk Island Ebooks
2004
 GREAT WEIGHTS CAN BE LIFTED

On the bus home at night, the lights, white and yellow, sliding past the windows
that were slowly steaming up. On the top deck she considered various parts of
her past and present. Seven o'clock, lasagna, the smell of furniture polish in a
room in which she had been locked alone for hours as a child. Her mother,
whom she hadn't seen for nearly twenty years. She saw that the frost still lay
along the roadside even though in town it had all thawed. Her mother's
chronic, persistent lying. She remembered this happening when she was just a
small child, her mother lying to her schoolteachers, to the doctor and nurses.
No sense of right and wrong, no sense of shame though she could preach it like
a vicar. As the bus moved along the main road out of town, toward the village,
she saw the water in a ditch still frozen and white. Beside her in her bag was the
book she had been reading for her course. Now, as she mentally checked off the
attributes of this particular psychological type, she felt something crystallize in
her mind. Complete inability to feel sympathy, fellow feeling, love for other
human beings. Herself now, divorced and childless, but free and not unhappy.
She wanted a child, she would have children. The bus moved without
smoothness along the road, jerking as the gears changed automatically. Her
mother had stolen from her and her brother. Had frequently just gone off and
left them with relatives for weeks, sometimes months. She thought about
Cousin Emily, some immensely distant relation her mother had discovered in
Bournemouth and how she had gone to look after her. Then went on a holiday
to the Bahamas after the old lady's death. The need to be the centre of
attention at all times. Glibness, plausability, charm, even. Had she understood
this for a long time without wanting to acknowledge it? Twenty years was not
too long. As she got up to make her way to the exit she knew she could take her
time to examine it all carefully. She was certain now, though, of the source of
her mother's poisonous beauty. Her mother was a psychopath.
 BLACKBURN AND I

Something has happened to that other man, Blackburn. Of him now I hear
nothing at all, though I used to glimpse his name in small literary magazines, in
newspapers or on lists of committees. I have a taste for pictures of naked
women, maps, old typefaces such as Caslon, Bembo and Sabon, walks in the
country and the company of good friends. The other Blackburn liked these, too,
but not in such a way as to make people connect them with his personality. It
is true that some excellent poems were published under his name and that a
stream of books and magazines appeared with him as editor. But now I believe
he was merely a phantom, a sickly vampire whom I fed with my own blood, my
own imaginings, my own talent, a vampire who failed to materialise fully.
Despite my efforts he remained almost invisible, repeatedly crumbling away in
the sunlight of other people's indifference. And so, luckily, I did not suffer the
fate of being mistaken for him, of having his contradictions and foibles
mistaken for my own. He did not exist, he does not exist. Only I exist, and, as
Spinoza asserted, everything desires to persist in its own being. And so, in my
self-persistence that other Blackburn has vanished. I am taking back all the
words and images I gave him, all the poems I lent him which he published
under his own name. He allowed me to bestow them on him, and therefore, in
a sense, he stole them from me. I now reclaim them. I shall never expect to
encounter his presence again as I walk by the Tower in Newcastle, or by the
river in Richmond. I have a few copies of his books and pamphlets, the
uncollected pieces and manuscripts of unpublished poems. These I may keep
or give away, as the fancy takes me; perhaps I may burn them or turn them into
compost. My power over him and everything he named his own is total, if
inconsequential. He's not coming back for anything.
 MR ISBN

Travelling in the Midwest a few years ago I came across the case of a man who
changed his name. This in itself is nothing noteworthy these days: film stars and
musicians, after all, do it all the time, as do those tired of their given names, and
many who are plain eccentric. In the latter category, for instance, I would
include Haywood Ritter of Indiana, who in 1989 became Chicken Chicken
Jones. I recall, also, a joke told me by a friend from New York about Joe
Horsepiss who asked the judge to change his name from Joe to Dan, but that's
another story and not funny to me now I'm no longer a 20-year old pot-smoker.

What intrigued me about Paul E Stankovitch was that he became Mr ISBN

187477840X: surely the first case of a man who voluntarily became a number.
For those of you unaware of this form of code - an ISBN (which stands for
International Standard Book Number) is the unique number which identifies
a particular edition of a book. After the change Stankovitch insisted on the 'Mr'
part, by the way.

Unfortunately I didn't keep the article from the paper where I read about this
transformation, on account of being in a hurry and having other matters on my
mind at the time. I did, however, and for some reason which I cannot
remember, write down the actual number. The only other detail I can recall
from the article was that Mr ISBN 187477840X worked for a local utility
company who had not looked upon his self-appointed name-change with
pleasure. Neither had the Inland Revenue Service at first. He also had a dog
called Nixon, but he wasn't planning to change his name. It occurred to me
that if the dog was one of a long line of hounds he could give him an ISSN - an
International Standard Serial Number, like a magazine.

I occasionally thought about Mr ISBN 18747740X. What did his friends and
family call him, for instance? Was he called 'Is' or 'Isbn'? Or 'Ice'? Did some of
his workmates call him '40X'? Did ISBN serve as a first name at all? It wouldn't
be a problem to his kids, if he had any. He'd just be plain 'dad' or 'pop'. But I
can't imagine his mother or father calling him anything but Paul. Can you?

If he was an embarrassment to his friend and family, thay must be used to it by

now. He's only a mystery to people who don't know him, like me. Why a book?
Why not the title of a book instead of its number? Did he read too many books?
Was he a local genius with no outlet for his creativity? Was he a homegrown
Thoreau making a statement? Was he mad? Did he do it for a bet? Sometimes
I muse on these things while I'm sat on a plane over Utah or the Atlantic.

I checked out the number on various databases and no book exists that fits. So
he is unique. Maybe he is the book he's writing, so he is literally writing his own
life. I like to think that's the case. At least, that's what I think on Thursdays.
 CHIPS WITH HITLER: AN EXTRACT FROM A DIARY

Most diaries are boring, and most dreams are boring, because most lives are
boring. I offer this small item because it amused me a little when I first read it.
I extracted it from a private diary uncovered in a junkshop in London. All I
know of its author is that he was called Lawrence Elman and that he lived in
Fulham at the time of writing. This dream came to him on the night of January
21st 1980.

A note for the non-UK reader: for 'chips' read 'fries'.

Last night I dreamt I was summoned for a private audience with the Fuhrer
himself. I knocked on a large dark door, heard him reply, and walked in. He was
seated at a small table. There were a few other people in the room I didn't
recognise. I sat down opposite Hitler and a plate of chips was placed between
us. The chips were rather scrappy and pale. I noticed a couple were cut flat and
square. They were nonetheless hot and tasty. As we ate, Hitler said how much
he loved cricket because of its elegance and timing. I said there were mythic
elements to it and he agreed. That was the extent of our conversation. I ate
more chips, removing a large hair that was stuck to two of them. I think it was
a human hair.

Elman's handwriting was clear, legible and regular. In all of 64 pages, however,
this was the most interesting entry.
 THRESHOLD

As soon as they had entered and closed the door he said to her let your hair
down. She undid the band that held her hair back. Then he took her face in
both hands and kissed her on the mouth softly for a long time.
 WHAT PHIL SILVERS HEARD

Phil Silvers heard the dollars calling in the middle of the night, Daddy, Daddy,
take us home. But they were fickle children and fled his addiction to chance,
leaving him to years of darkness in cheap rented rooms and the madness of
psychiatry. He became just a turnstile. The traffic drove straight in and out.
That's no good, I tell myself. When the money comes in you should make it stay at
home, bring it up with a sense of family duty, so you'll end up with a whole tribe of
your own to look after you. I know that doesn't work, of course, and that like
millions of others, the only way I could amass a fortune would be through luck,
through wheels, horses, winning numbers, that kind of thing. But Phil Silvers,
he was a genius; he was on tv and in films, he made money. He could have
coasted it to the end of his life if he'd wanted to. He had no need for horses and
wheels. He lost it and kept on losing it. I dreamt about him once, he was in his
shirtsleeves, standing in the darkness outside his motel room, crying into the
silence: Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.
 I HAVE CROSSED THE BRIDGE BUT NOT THE RIVER

Some discussion has ensued over this now defunct proverb. Its generally
accepted meaning has always been: I have accomplished something with ease
and hence without the experience of its potential dangers. Henryson (in
Tauromachia, Berlin 1936) argues that there is a moral self-criticism implicit
here: because I have easily achieved something which was once perilous I am
now complacent and therefore open to fault. There may be some corroboration
in the view that a moral criticism obtains, in view of Mendleson's comments in
Eros and the Helping Hand (London 1954): she had, indeed, crossed a bridge but
not a river in that she [Tracey Gray, the novelist] slept with her husband's
analyst on a frequent basis without being discovered. In this case, however, it
seems that the act of crossing the bridge represents transgressing an ethical
boundary and not crossing the river signifies evading punishment or
condemnation. A further twist is added by Matthaeus (Regenswald, Malmo
1948) who interprets the meaning as I have proposed or intended a
transgression but not carried it out.
 FABULOUS FRAGMENTS

My late friend, Moravia, told me he believed that life is absolute chaos from
which, if we are lucky, we can pluck a few shining, mysterious fragments of
order. It was not long after this that he died, and when I went back to his stories
I realised that it was his style I loved as much as the characters he wrote about,
ordinary people caught in the nets of their own passions, desires and
foolishness. It was as if he had discovered that style, any style, however
transient, could rescue these fabulous fragments of redemption from the daily
mess of our lives. It made me think about those moments of order, such as when
you wake to a morning of immense golden stillness, or when you hear the sound
of rain at night, continuous, gentle, like the earth meditating upon itself. And
those moments, scattered throughout a life, somehow make it meaningful and
significant, holding it together tenuously and without explanation; moments
that are rare and beguiling, perhaps even deceitful, but the closest that most of
us can ever get to what may be called the divine (whether it exists or not),
moments pungent as hyacinth that give us the sweetness we crave, like fresh
honey torn from the hives of angry bees.
 MAGNETS, MOONS AND MYSTERIES

Here is how I wrote this book. I emptied my mind out like an old chest that has
been stored in the loft for a long time and made a heap of what I found. There
seemed no end to the things I kept piling up. As I looked around me I saw so
many other things, books, papers, overheard conversations, paintings,
photographs, secrets, dialogues with the dead, films and letters, magnets, moons
and mysteries, that I could no longer tell what came from inside my mind and
what already lay about me. It was then I understood that what the old
alchemists used to say was true: that the matter of one's Great Work was to be
found everywhere and in all places and at all times. In other words, it was as
infinite as the universe itself and bounded only by my own mortality.
 ACCIDENTAL

A British tourist was passing through Queens, New York, to visit an old friend
called Pete, whom he hadn't seen for nearly twenty years. On his way he
stopped off at a liquor store to buy a bottle of bourbon. As he was being served
the store was robbed at gunpoint by a young man who made off with the cash
from the till. A soon as the thief had gone the storekeeper pulled out a large
black handgun of his own from behind the counter and started to give chase.
Jesus Christ, said the visitor, can't you go anywhere in this country without someone
waving a gun in your face? Hearing this, the storekeeper turned, as if to say
something. He was fumbling with the gun and his hands were shaking and
before he could say anything the gun went off accidentally. The bullet struck
the visitor in the heart. He died instantly.
 YOUR GOLDEN DOUBLE

All day he follows you like a tacky song that won't let your mind alone so you
find yourself humming it in the car, the office, the street: your golden double
whose presence you feel somewhere behind you as if about to call your name
and hand you the winning lottery ticket or take you away to a life of workless
pleasure by a warm pool in the sun. You don't speak of it to anyone, not your
wife, your lover or your friends because it would be like admitting you believe
you've come from a world of angels and unicorns and this planet whose tiny
acres you shuffle across is only a place of mistaken banishment, your life the
shadow life of one twin split from the other.

Sometimes the awareness comes upon you like the blunt ache of hunger or the
sensation that your walking body is thin as tissue paper a shower of small rain
can dissolve. Other times it blossoms briefly like a drop of clear honey on your
tongue or flashes on unexpectedly like a faulty lamp you're trying to fix, so
intense and short it leaves you half blind with a dark hole in your eyes for
minutes after.

Whispers, cryptic messages; it makes you feel you're going mad, perhaps,
understand how people get religion so bad they stand up in the high street
waving their free pamphlets in embarrassed faces, chalking The Kingdom of
Heaven again and again on their portable blackboards for the benefit of
shoppers and drunks lost in their own daily exile.

You see in all this the hand of your golden double who can live in both worlds
at the same time without having to write cheques, mend fuses or sidestep
beggars on the way to the shops. But each day is the same: nothing arrives, no
one calls your name. And each night is the same: you lie down to sleep knowing
your double has been there ahead of you, meddling with your dreams. You see?
- blue angels in a tree. A unicorn set free by the river.
 INSCRIPTION

'...a place where I once lived as a child, the tall, thick walls of its garden, already
two hundred years old, pierced, fractured, bound together and canopied by
tree-like ivy among whose dusty branches I would climb...'
 THEY MADE LANDFALL

They made landfall that night and camped out on shore. At dawn they made
their way inland, taking with them candles, black robes, ropes, oil, holy water,
ritual knives, swords, cups and towels, as well as provisions and the wooden
case containing the sacred book. For five hours they travelled over dirt roads
and through trackless forest until they reached the clearing of their traditional
ceremonial ground. For the next three hours they prepared it, clearing away
vegetation, removing stones and building a fire in the centre. Then they
stopped for refreshment and rest. As darkness came down and the moon glowed
above the horizon they began the ritual. Four robed figures stood ten yards
apart from each other, foursquare, their arms pointing towards the fire. The
light from the flames revealed the eager faces of the silent watchers who stood
back in a circle. The High Priest entered, bearing the Holy Golden Sword,
which he raised toward the moon. Hail!, he shouted
 CYCLING FOR TAOISTS

The bike that can be ridden is not the true Bike. The bike that has no wheels
is the way to the understanding of the Tao. The bike with no handlebars is the
signpost to the understanding of the way of the Tao. The bike with no rider is
the Tao. Therefore the sage learns how to pedal without pumping and to reach
the end of the journey before setting out. In summer he breathes through his
nose and keeps his mouth shut. Thus he swallows no flies.
 ASTRID VISIONS

Harry Zen’s famously cultish recipe for making art was - I pick it up. Throw it
around a bit. If it bounces, it’s right. It certainly worked for Astrid Visions, the one
and only classic LP that he issued with his band, The Jan Sax Quartet, in 1978.
The band achieved a certain following that persists today, so there will be a
market of sorts for the new digitally-remastered CD of its unique output. The
band, of course, with due irony, was sometimes a trio, sometimes a quintet and
occasionally even an octet, but never a quartet. And neither did anyone called
Jan Sax ever appear in its line-up.

Never go back, they say, without explaining what happens to those who never
leave in the first place. Following Harry Zen’s simple philosophies, such as
Reverse the mechanism, I did go back, and listened again to my old copy of Astrid
Visions before trying out the CD. Sometimes the past is worth a visit, especially
when you find that it’s not only part of the present but also prefigures the
future. The Jan Sax Quartet pioneered the fusion of techno, jazz, rock and just
about everything else, years before everyone else. I won’t try to describe the
wonders of the title track, or of its accompanying numbers, such as Headingley
Vespers and Take Six. Rumours about the identity of the beautiful Astrid have
multiplied over the years - Zen has resolutely refused to comment, never
confirming or denying her existence - and the new documentary to appear
about Zen and the Quartet, The Band That Never Was, due to be aired on
Channel 365 soon, only deepens the mystery. It contains previously unseen
footage of the band live in various Leeds bars in the 1970s plus extracts from
a recent interview with Zen by Didi Tsunami, who has made a name for herself
by her probing but sympathetic treatments of other lesser-known contemporary
artists.
Zen, minus the hair and beard of the glory days (What I call The Cheesecloth Era,
he says in the interview), talks publicly (if cryptically) for the first time about
the band and some of the musicians who played in it in the period of Astrid
Visions: Buckton - What he didn’t know couldn’t be known and Mohilton -
Message man from the cloud chamber, he was truly cosmic.

Even if you don’t check out Astrid Visions (and you’d be a real no-brain not to)
then you should catch the documentary - if only to see the delectable Tsunami
interviewing the wacky Zen in a jacuzzi.
 FROM THE FRAGMENTS OF ANAGLYPTOS THE GREEK

121 As the wood of the doorframe shrinks in the cool of the night, with a sound
of creaking and groaning, so too does a man toward the end of his days.

122 Do not blame the rope for hanging the man.

123 Even the hunter must perish.

124 Every man believes he thinks for himself and that his actions arise from
within his own soul. But his words reveal him to be no more than a sheep,
bleating what all the others in the same flock are bleating. Hence the need for
a clear-eyed shepherd to guard against wolves.

125 The watcher also is watched, but the eye that watches him is in all places,
at all times and does not blink.

126 They stand in the marketplace proffering paradise and punishment in equal
measure. Children laugh at them and dogs bark and still the taverns remain full.
But for them, as for the rest of us, the sun sets in the west, which is when they
fall into the arms of sleep, with his dreams of apples and shadows and the
twisting forms of naked bodies. Their sophistries then are useless in the same
way that a harp is to a deaf man.
 MY NAME IS WYATT EARP

This was in the late 1950s. The first school I went to I hated. I hated the place,
the smell of it, the teachers who sat high above us. I had no friends there, or if
I did I cannot recall their names or faces. I cannot remember anything that I
was officially taught there.

One day when the teacher read out the register I refused to answer to my name.
Michael Blackburn, she said, looking directly at me. No answer. Three times she
called out my name and three times I refused. Then she came down to me and
said, If you're not Michael Blackburn then who are you? To which I replied My
name is Wyatt Earp. For the rest of the day I answered to nothing but Wyatt
Earp.

Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp, hero of the gunfight at the OK Corral. Born in the
Year of Revolutions, he would live through momentous times: the American
Civil War, the Great War in Europe, the Bolshevik Revolution, the first
stirrings of fascism, the invention of the machine gun, the aeroplane, the
telephone, the radio and the automobile. When he died he had already outlived
one of my own grandfathers by three years, by which time my father himself was
already entering on his early youth. When I was born he had been dead no
more than 25 years. By then, of course, he was a Wild West hero and a
favourite of mine on TV.

Earp understood how the hypocrisy of the law was in constant conflict with the
need for order. He knew that the compassion of the left hand was
counterpointed by the brutality of the right and that everything lives by the
death of something else. So it is that each day in secret I repeat his name and
invoke his spirit. Each day that wounded child learns how to protect himself
and not take shit from anybody. That's television for you.

Extracted from The Life by Michael Blackburn

 THE WRITER, THE THIEF AND THE GRANDSON, PART TWO:
THE THIEF

In 1982 Henry Arthur Harrington (27) was brought before Banbury magistrates
charged with stealing a book from a local secondhand bookshop. He asked for
1,321 other offences to be taken into account. When police had searched his
flat they found exactly 1,321 copies of Axel Munthe's bestselling book, The
Story of San Michele in different editions, impressions and formats, all in English.
It was Harrington's own meticulous filing system which condemned him, as he
had carefully noted the date, time and location of every theft. These notes
revealed that over 12 years he had travelled extensively throughout the UK
stealing every secondhand copy of the book he could find. Bookshops he had
plundered (some on repeated occasions) included The Side Bookshop in
Newcastle Upon Tyne, Reader's Rest in Lincoln and The Petersfield Bookshop.

Harrington offered no real explanation of his obsessive quest, saying only that
he had read The Story of San Michele when he was 15 and had developed an
intense interest in obtaining every secondhand copy he could find. He was
ordered to see a psychiatrist from the local hospital.

Nothing else is known of Harrington's career since then. The Story of San
Michele is still available in new and secondhand editions.
 THE WRITER, THE THIEF AND THE GRANDSON, PART
THREE: THE GRANDSON

Tucked away in an old copy of a biography of Munthe at a friend’s house in

Australia I discovered a newspaper clipping whose publication date I calibrate
as 1981, the paper being the London Evening Standard. The short text appears
in the gossip column and concerns Munthe’s grandson, Axel. It comes complete
with a photograph of the young man (then in his early thirties), in casual ‘at-
home’ garb, ie tieless shirt with the collars outside the pullover (fashion victims
please note); a head-and-shoulder shot with suitably erudite background of
bookshelves. A young man strangely reminsicent of Bruce Chatwin in looks.
The piece concerns Munthe’s association with Princess Margaret (they shared
pasta and Soave last week at the Fulham Road trattoria Il Girasole [I knew it well])
and says: Munthe, a dilettante theatre director, [is that shorthand for self-indulgent
rich-kid with no day job?] may surprise the Queen’s sister with his antics. He takes
his parrot Augusta to dinner parties, sometimes sleeps in a coffin in his basement and
busks Albinoni and Vivaldi on a musical saw on the King’s Road. Luckily, as I was
living on Fulham Road, just around the corner, at the time, I didn’t bump into
melodious Axel, otherwise I would have felt obliged to smack him one in the
face and use his saw for more surgical purposes.
 ELATION PAST

For approximately one month during the summer of my twenty-first year I

experienced a continuous state of gentle elation that was nearly religious in its
nature but not induced by any form of spiritual exercise or experience. Neither
was it chemically induced. I felt that no abuse, misfortune or accident could
destroy this powerful sense of calm and security. The elation persisted through
moments of sobriety as well as evenings of drunkenness and mornings of
hangover. It endured more days of cloud than sun. It throve in hours of solitary
dullness as well as in hours of madcap company. I cannot remember if it arrived
suddenly or if it made itself known by a steady, barely-perceptible increase, one
day after another. It occasionally incensed my friends, who found it contrary to
my usual nature. At times I was amused by it. Mostly I was just happy to enjoy
it, like a child, self-absorbed at play in a sunlit meadow or field. Its great virtue
was that it persisted for so long during my waking hours and made everyday life
more than bearable, unlike the various forms of ecstasy, which are always brief
and inevitably lead to a sense of disappointment when they have worn off. Why
this gentle elation arose when it did and what subtle alterations in my brain
chemistry produced it I cannot know, but it vanished as mysteriously as it
arrived and has never returned.

Extracted from The Life by Michael Blackburn

 BLACK SWAN OF TRESPASS

There can surely be no doubt now in the mind of the perceptive reader that Ern
Malley, Australia's greatest poet of the twentieth century, was a real person and
not the product of the the embittered imagination of McAuley Stewart. It was
Stewart who claims to have written the 16 Malley poems first published by the
avant-garde magazine, Angry Penguins, and subsequently as a separate book
(which is still in print).

...[text totally unreadable]...

the streets where Mally [sic] lived and worked have long since disappeared,
buried under Walmarts, Coles' supermarkets and drive-in bottleshops. But in
my researches I have managaed to track down a genuine relative of Malley's, by
the name of Larry Chester, who now lives in Windsor, west of Sydney. For
many years Chester ran a secondhand bookshop in Paramatta before selling up
and retiring.

...[text unintelligible]...Malley well and has written a memoir of his friend

(unpublished and unread) he is extremely reticent on the personal details of his
friendship. 'The literary business,' he says, 'is still twitchy even after all these
years.' However, Chester, now a neat and sprightly 92-year-old, showed me
manuscript copies of some of Malley's unpublished poems.

mcAuley Stewart, he said, a b [text unreadable as a result of

wine-staining]...but 'I've seen truth rot like an apple by the side of the road'

passed me another tinny

From the rescued papers of the late Alan Renfrew

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

'Mr ISBN' first appeared in print in Dreamcatcher 12 (Spring 2003).

'Fabulous Fragments', 'Cycling For Taoists', 'From The Fragments Of

Anaglyptos The Greek', 'What Phil Silvers Heard', and 'Chips With Hitler' all
appeared in a limited edition pamphlet, Chips With Hitler, published by Sunk
Island in 2002.

All texts first appeared on the Art Zero website:

http://www.artzero.org.uk/

This is the first electronic book version of these texts.

© Michael Blackburn 2004

Sunk Island Ebooks, Lincoln, UK, 2004
ISBN 1 874778 80 9
 OTHER WORKS

Poetry
The Constitution Of Things
Why Should Anyone Be Here And Singing?
Backwards Into Bedlam
The Lean Man Shaving
The Prophecy Of Christos
The Stone Ship
The Ascending Boy

Internet Works (viewable on Art Zero)

The Last Of Harry
Return To Eskeleth
Mike Fabulous And His Famous Friends
Portrait Of The Artist As A Cyborg

Texts
Chips With Hitler: Six Metafictions
The Dark Female

Website: Art Zero

Publisher: Sunk Island Ebooks/Sunk Island Publishing
Contact: sunkisland@hotmail.com