George Manka
A Philosopher's Dogger
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”
WittgensteinHis tubed-steel attitude has manufactured the Chocolate Dilemma.
The empowered pincer of catastrophes; the beetle
conundrums; the jet-exfoliations whistling past pedestrian
analogies: a trampled box of crayons; a red and yellow
memory at the dog-bath: “The Alsatian Resistance.” Head first
into the washing hoist. Or it’s a doughnut choice that hampers
the dynamics of a theory splash-down. Crude oil spreads
investments into Kazakhstan and Nigeria. Diamond speculators
raise rates in Antwerp. Ceilings get lower by the decade, and a large
family beams in the picture before being transported. Was it
an overcast Sunday? We saw you on the platform, separating
linseed oil from pigment. That’s Elspeth with little Samuel. And Uncle
Abraham. He is holding the Amsterdam Edition of Spinoza. The muslin
tank-top absorbs the past on the Step-master. A mental event
toggles these tentative intentions into a brochure of horizons; a Monte Carlo
simulation that fissures into a putative delta of bile jokes and slap
happy twelve-bar progressions. The whisky flows and the lime
scale tips us off to the nature of the terrain: a bower prison
where a population of Argentine ants settles in for the fiesta
season. A small village in the Jura, and a young man scrums down
to repairing timepieces. It’s winter, and outside in the trees, the shrikes
pet and tickle a strip of cured lard. When evening associates itself
slowly with a line from Hardy, the crows amble up in twos and threes
through Brueghel’s gaseous states: a mile higher, and a tight craze
forms over our eyes. It snaps with a sonic boom, and plaques drop away
into Operation Overlord. Losses are never recuperated as pure form
rakes a Platonic profit. A candle graph commensurate with
a sore-throated falsification illuminates the marginalia:
“A calamitous nail-paring in a log cabin”? Or was it the weekend
subsidized by the Chemical Account? An impeachable executive
attracts that thunderous streaming over the channel. A heady belief
coaches us into these synthetic truths: innate gurglings that eruct
the superstructure and justify our having offspring: a gnocchi
pointillism that describes texture; or a wallpaper dichotomy that scrolls in
eternal returns of dentillated sutras and thin wooden dolls. Childhood is
oozing from the drainage tube into the bottomless Id. The raggedy
sutured smile begins to girdle its jokes. A well-licked rib
clangs in the kidney bowl. The mustard cheeks and the ketchup
trenches: the hospital notebooks. The laughter by the piano. It’s
saying the same thing, to wit nothing. An old Austrian
flamingo. Spray painted. He sings it with his fingers stuck in his nose. Bugled
easy over. The relief map of baked beans. The proposition shows
logical forms in napkins on the floor. Where have you been? Looking for
an honest man? A quiet smoke over the tripwire? No-Man’s-land
knife-sets; gauze mug-warmers; ambitions for property development, anything
but a church-hall of crooners. The mushroom festival powers down. Buffs
dawdle at the threshold. They are wheedling samples for history. Mud
flaps and baked cylinders: a forensic feast for the aftermarket. A tragedy
found in an old shoebox reconstructs a phosphorescent Mary. She cockles
an inflated universe into a rinse-smear on a cheese-slicer. Speaking of
before does not make sense. There was no before. Her outstretched stumps
(where Jesus had been) invoke the Louvre; the guide’s tin crowns;
the Peristaltic School’s oracle of Indian classics: cocoa beans and afternoons
at Les Deux Magots; there’s grazing Swami Robert’s One Minute Brinjal Fries: all
the a priories that instrumentalize the marbled dialectics of undressing in three-
quarter-time. A glib nothingness trails at the end of the conversation, followed by
the turning of the tables. You on top. Double-parked. From behind. Ying-Yang. Lolly
Pop. Smack. Priest. Scissors. He fabulates this aerobic Tantra from first principles.
He has crushed charcoal to smudges of Naples; scraped clean a Klein-blue Vesuvius.
Concrete fossilises into moist limbs beneath his pumice spit. Triremes dock
at Central Stations before returning to their museums. Their outcome is fixed
while a shower curtain wobbles at the lip of mildew. A cuticle trail
leads to the kitchen. There’s something on the cooker. It’s a skunk-works
of dogma. Its levels coax us to the Plasticine. A name sticks.
It sags beneath a whiff of citronella. It grows rich on compound interest
and drags its gouty foot back to the medicine cabinet. It remembers
bobbing for marshmallows in a lava tube. A cut-back re-entry manoeuvre. But old
age has caught up and it wipes-out at the mirror. The brittle lips ripple
out in the shallows. A chocolate fondue amasses under the chin. A guru
breaches the firewall. Polder creams overflow into rusted tins. Mucilage
and metastases. Tea-cosies snuggle up to empiricism at five o’clock. The tail
gunner swings around and pinches out a few inches of his belt. Dune churches,
photogravures of the small-craft armada, lubberly restaurant touts, a truncated
pineapple diet: he’s painted the dust and wedged a jowly god into a quark.
“When the worm stirs the ligament, the arterial tide apes the panache”.
Is that fair? It happened at the punch bowl. Judith upended the entire limpet
onto Vicky’s dress. Mild precipitate tease; oleander-inspired flanges; sequenced
endpoint calculations of analyte; bleach-deltas silting the tie-dyes: stall
after stall, right into the car park. We fought with the kids. They were thirsty
and tired. We had finished the powdered-wig. The cumin and sherbet blush
gave a sheen of health to an otherwise blanched quandary: how many sizes
before the tympanum? That’s five bars of irradiated rosette. At least a dozen
glass fragments before the lead is positioned. And the chorus pickles
a shock titrate with an inverted motif. The theme: Improved Parenting Skills.
He places his wicker chair next to the trouser press. The story styles itself
gigantic. He sits at moose-grazed purposes. A plethora sticks to his thumb. Mexico
trowels his beaches with driftwood. He anticipates an evening with the exact
capacity. The strings are his life. Desert flowers provide the initial conditions
for a new honey: “A Lover and a Friend”. He makes the market. He jockeys
for position.