Firstly, an apology. last week, relying on memory (often a mistake with me!), I unintentionally (and unnecessarily) bigged up the Hazda diet, saying they chose from a menu of over 800 species when in fact, having listened to the radio programme again, it is “only” 500. My bad.
Now, as flagged up last time, some fiction, Konsk the Metafiction1, (or is it Patafiction2?) now at version 6. While this may seem at first to be a fairly radical departure from my normal pieces here, it is in fact closely related, though it will probably take three or four chapters before that becomes clear. How I proceed from there will depend upon your responses and comments.
I will continue to post pieces on other subjects and these will appear under the different sections, including The Real Coed Y Brenin. At the moment you'll get them all but if you go to the E.S.P. Adapt home page here on Substack, you will see the different sections as tabs towards the top of the page and you can unsubscribe to any or all- its up to you.
So, without further ado, I present, for the first time, a work long in the making, straining to be released into the wild-
Konsk: ver. 6.6. The Great Takeover Of The Place
Prologue: In The Rotunda.
The crone lies curled in her rotunda, her ancient body a mass of wrinkled aches after sleep filled with long and colourful dreams separated by pauses, lying awake in the darkness, occupied in profound thought, alternating with anxiety.
The rotunda is a domed space, framed by great circles of bended tree stems, covered with textiles and layered with humus, earth and sod. Inside, materials are hanging, the colour, weave and pattern indicative of the three primary ways of being, which are only one really. She is surrounded by various tokens, each embodying one of the Twelve Keys of the Forest. In addition, the sigil of the Last Resort cantref, with a single word inscribed upon it, in the Old Language, denoting Stop, Wait, Pause and implying Think First!
More concrete objects serve as reminders of the significant others whose various perspectives, or stories, require inclusion in the integral intervention she is preparing to weave. So there is a battered helmet, stained black with a wreath of flames around the temples; there is a small, brown, metal container, so useful for boiling up quantities of herbs or fungi over a fire; then the fractured remains of a more complex device, reflective of a constrained and disturbed individual; a few more objects, perhaps not so obvious, twisted wood, stones.
First she groans and does her physical work, opens and closes each joint in turn, beginning with that between second and third metacarpal of the smallest finger of her dark hand and continuing throughout her body. The arthritis eases somewhat; she breathes more deeply. She is lying down, then sitting, then kneeling, then standing, then moving. She chuckles at how much longer it all takes now but then, what's the hurry?
Next, the emotional; she folds down a veil over her eyes and two glowing spirits appear, floating before her, one to either side, they have taken on the roles of a Mother and a Heroine and have put on dark robes with wide brimmed black hats with tall points. The Heroine seems to be attempting to suppress laughter.
“Oh, you idiots!” Grates the Crone, before recognising the value of their humour- it is a strong contrast to despair and, being familiar with the technique, allows her to plunge immediately into the depths of her emotional being. She howls and screams it all out. Of course, when she speaks, she speaks in the Old Language.
Then, after a time, she cries. The tears run freely along the wrinkles of her cheeks, into the deep lines at the corners of her mouth, blur together and drip from the point of her chin.
When the fear arises, she looks to the spirit figures and they are smiling.
“Come on, you old toad!” the Mother mockingly chides; this role is also known as the Matron, “Its not that bad! Don't be such a wimp!”
When the anger rises, the Crone begins to rage, using an animal voice. She strains wide her mouth and roars, beating and clawing at the floor before her. After a time she starts to laugh at the madness of it all; the two spirits join in, like echoes, enjoying the hysteria.
Thoughts begin to resurface as the Crone employs the word system of thinking, in a rapid babble to begin with, tailing into laughter, or rage, or despair, as she revisits the emotional world.
“What on Earth am I thinking?” She cries, “look at me! A knackered old woman, a wrinkled old bat, hoping to save the world!”
The spirits contradict her, belittling the fear.
“Just use your superpowers, Grandma!” cries the Heroine, “it'll be easy!”
“Yes, you have your impregnable command centre,” chimes in the Matron, gesturing to the crude rotunda, “Your mighty Battle Bender! Come on, its not as if things are dangerous, it'll be a walkover!”
The Crone laughs and laughs and for a while she can't stop laughing, at the great danger, the inevitable, relentless great danger, the futility of it all and also, the idea that there might be an Enemy. The curving walls and roof of the structure, softened with organic materials, absorbs the sound until, eventually all becomes calm.
Having thus paid good attention to her grounding and reminded herself of the boundaries that constrain her purpose, the Crone states the immediate challenge and relates it to each aspect in turn; thus there are environmental concerns, socio-cultural concerns and individual concerns.
Requiring a solution that attends to the concerns within each aspect, she begins to speculate; she tells stories. Each story is like a strand or thread that weaves through the various concerns within each aspect, addressing some well, others not so well, still others not at all.
Some of these stories are hers. Some belong to others that she has gathered over time. She has remembered them faithfully, internally or in various types of external recordings or through physical tokens that cue access to her internal memories. Some of these physical tokens are arranged within the rotunda, towards the periphery, out of immediate sight, yet she knows that they are there; being an experienced elder, this is generally enough to trigger her recall.
She tells more stories, seeking a tale that addresses all concerns in all of the aspects, layer upon layer, weaving together and through each other.
After a time there emerges an awareness of a vast complexity and she knows that she has provided sufficient stories. All that is required now is to abstract the very best possible story, the simplest yet strongest story, one that can contain other stories, if they may be required. A story that is flexible, able to take advantage of currently unknown opportunities, a story that is also a strategy.
It matters not if this story might appear to make no sense at first, nor if it leaps apparently wildly from place to place, from character to character, or time to time; nor that the components of the story should radically change, nor that the story might include itself or retell itself differently. All that is required is a story that leads through each of the ways of being, attends to their essential needs and provides a solution to the current challenge. The simpler, the better.
So she enters an intuitive state, for times and a time, until, with sudden clarity, the solution manifests in a single strand inspiring wondrous, complex ramifications. She recites the story to the spirits, the outline, the bare bones, as it were. As had been her way in the past, once revealed, she at first doubts the adequacy of her creation.
“That can't be it,” she denounces her success, “It doesn't make sense! And surely I've missed a load of stuff!”
The spirits contradict her.
“Sounds bang on, to me!” the Heroine insists, “Brilliant!
“A stroke of absolute genius!” The Matron affirms.
When the Crone has finished laughing, the spirits congratulate her. She records the story, pausing often to yawn- it has been a long night. She performs some stretches and throws some unusual shapes to entertain the spirits; how they laugh!
“You know what you are to do,” she tells them and they agree. She thanks them, most heartily for their support, finally removing her veil to dismiss them.
She finishes with a feeling of great lightness, noticing the entry of a strengthening oval of gold between her bare, browned feet, the light of the rising sun peeping through a small hole in the material of the entrance flap. She smiles, detects a lilt in the wind outside that playfully sighs into padding footsteps then a whispered conversation.
Rising, she moves to the entrance and draws aside the flap, revealing in the bright morning, two small, upturned faces with crescents of smiles, the teeth whitely shining. Each of the young visitors holds a bowl of liquid, one creamy with an island of flakes, the other brown with a wisp of steam.
“Well, thank you my lovelies, thank you!” The Crone is delighted. “How thoughtful!”
The two little ones, cradling the bowls with great care, share the delight. Then, noticing something else, the Crone continues.
“And what is this then? For me? A present? A hat! Well how kind. And so black and pointy it is too. And I am to wear it, now? So there it is on my head. Your mother's idea? I might have guessed. Well, thank you again, lovelies.”
She takes the bowls and they, laughing, they run off down the narrow path between the green.
“And tell your mother,” She calls after them, “That I will have words with her later!”
Muttering an oath she returns to her rotunda to break her fast, ducking her head to avoid knocking off her new hat.
There we go- ‘tis begun and who is to say what will become of us all? The illustrations used here are all mine except the “spirit figure in the stone” which is one of my wife’s, Lyn and the photograph of the stone inscribed with ancient spiral recordings, which is the work of my good friend A. Wolf.
Till next time, please feel free to comment as it is your feedback which will influence where and how we go on from here. Konsk is still fluid and open to modification and change, hence your suggestions are of great value and much appreciated.
Hwyl!
Metafiction. Way back in the early nineties I was looking at Lyn’s bookcase and a title “The Metaphysical Poets” caught my eye and I wondered, for the first time, what the “meta” actually meant or implied. After looking it up in a dictionary, I took it to suggest being above or beyond what it referred to and sort of looking back, or down on it. Intrigued I wondered if anyone had applied it to fiction as in “metafiction”.
I checked on the World Wide Web, as it was then known, using, If I remember correctly, (Ha!), the web browser Netscape Navigator and the search engine Yahoo. I was a bit disappointed as (obviously!) someone else had already thought of it…nine results came up.
Somewhere around 2010 I did another search for metafiction, this time with that soon to be world-dominating search engine that-shall-not-be-named, (I use Duckduck go now), and got over nine million results; metafiction had become a commonplace term. Oh well, never mind!
Patafiction. I’ve taken this from Pataphysics, coined by Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), a Frenchman who was so far ahead of his time as to be almost invisible. A genius, usually described as an Absurdist, who among other works wrote and produced the remarkable drama Ubu Roi. The first word of the first performance in Paris, 1896, “Merde”, sparked a riot.
Oh the atmosphere! The texture somewhere between Blade Runner and Where the Crowdads Sing. More!