PATRICK TEN BRINK
A Present, an Apology and a Tribute
Magnetic words. I liked that idea, so I tried it literally. I mixed an iron solution with black ink and wrote words on rice paper in looping, joined-up writing, with the letters of each word joined together and a breath of space between them.
When my message dried, I dissolved the rice paper. Some words floated, others sank. I dried them off and held a magnet near. The words moved – some closer to the magnet, some farther away, and others turned on their spot. Great, but not enough.
I coiled copper wire around a large nail, linked to three batteries in series and a variable power switch. I flicked on the current and turned the power wheel. Some words raced away, others flew and stuck to the tip of the nail. I changed the power and watched which words fled first and farthest, but there was no pattern worth noting. I wrote a poem about a wave and switched on the current, changing the settings, and the words rose and fell. Better. Fun. Again, not enough.
I gathered the words in my hand, set the current to medium, and threw a handful of words onto the table near the magnet, like sowing seeds or casting runes, and tried to see which words took the same path and which took another.
Aurora came in, watched, then laughed and said, ‘You do everything the hard way.’
‘What do you mean? Can’t you see that some words attract and some repel, and not just due to the magnetism? Interesting, no?’
‘Interesting, yes, but I have a different science for you. Write and feel each word, each part of each sentence, write a prose poem as a block and a few verses and see how the words feel next to each other. Are there some that insist on being apart? Others that cling together? Are there any that refuse to be in a block, the claustrophobic ones or independent souls?’
I loved her, love her still, more even, since I’ve given up on physics experiments and spent months reading poems to understand the laws of natural attraction, gravity, and the laws of natural repulsion and the resistance of words, their psychology formed over millennia.
And now, I am putting down the last words of a new little structured stream of words for her about how clumsy I was when we met. I’m curious: when she peers at them tomorrow or in a week, will they be shifted around? Will the paragraphs object to being apart and shuffle closer to form a small, monumental block? Or feel constrained and, in a fit of independence, scatter across the page? What will my words finally choose to say? Will they speak a truth I am too shy to reveal with my own lips?
She decided to wait a week to give them time to marinate, reflect and decide what I should say to her. This is what emerged:
It Started as an Apology
Forgive me for not remembering your name the first time I heard it. It is not that I wasn’t listening or didn’t care. Quite the contrary – how could I focus on three mere syllables constructed from only a handful of letters when you are so, so much more? I was always struck by the gulf between the brevity of names and the immensity of a life – how absurd that a bunch of letters could represent hopes and desires, a person’s fears, their first steps, first words, first laugh, the immensity of each day, the family, friends, community, the tempting connections to strangers, hoped for familiars, discovery of beaches, mountains, stars, sunsets, joys at funfairs, concerts, a first kiss, all the kisses, all filtered through and into each person, people constantly woven into being through each second, each sound, each sight.
Layer upon layer, we are formed, the tapestry of us, living sedimentary tapestries one on top of the other, an ever-evolving skin. Rarely do we shed skins; we are not snakes or cicadas’ moulting exoskeletons, but slough off skin cells we do, hair too, and with it history, but memories, the us, keeps building, becoming the compound of our forty-million-minute lives, the sounds, smells, touch, tastes, conversations, grows an immensity of each of us and the between us, beyond comprehension, beyond the reach of the dozen letters they say is you.
You see, how reality eclipses a name? Staring at the sun of you, how could I hope to focus on the letters of your name? I was about to apologise, but when I pronounced your name, I felt a click, and all-the-you I admired, knew, basked in, our million moments together, the threads joining us, the echoes of past laughs, the promise of tomorrow flooded out, like a silent explosion of a bouquet, and I understood – I had always got it half wrong: the dozen letters of your name don’t need to capture you, constrain you, claim to represent you, they are a key to release the all of you, including so many parts formed far from me, and the you and me that created, create, the we.
She liked this. I liked it. It was different from my draft, better, judging by her smile. Maybe the magnetism did work just a little. Yet after a week, she smiled at me coyly and said, ‘I will leave you for a week, maybe two, or more. Think of me.’
Conquering Loneliness
I tried to bridge the wait for you by writing words as reading them was no longer enough. They lived inside me, but I needed more than echoes, more than words I already knew. The words I wrote grew on page after page. First, I typed, but they felt too static, too formal, too anchored, so I wrote freehand in ink, with a nib, a calligraphy nib, with flowing, looping letters and the occasional spattering of black when the nib caught the fibres of the page, launching little fireworks of unneeded, but welcome punctuation.
Initially, I wrote words intentionally, ones I wanted to write; then they just flowed from the nib, and I was the spectator, the audience to an advancing tale. Page after page, the story grew, but the growing stack of paper felt wrong. The words couldn’t breathe; some were claustrophobic and somehow calling to me. I spread them across the floor, each with its creation page number, a date and time for its birth, and wrote and wrote. Soon they looked like tiles in a bathroom, too ordered.
The story grew, but two dimensions didn’t do it justice; a 3-D pillar of paper didn’t either, so I bought some chicken wire and sculpted a human form. I placed my favourite paperbacks on her feet to ground her, then glued the pages onto the wire, like papier-mâché skin, starting with the feet, layer upon layer, until I got to her waist. I wasn’t mad, so I didn’t insist on intestines made from wrangled pages, but she did need a heart, a proper heart. I wrote poem after poem, with rhythm and rhyme, song lyrics to a three-beat waltz, melodies for jazz and wrapped them tight, a heart like a literary pomegranate, with tiny rolled-up poems as seeds inside. I couldn’t stop writing poems, my hands aching as I wrote them small, adding seed after poem seed, imagining my statue exhaling line after line.
But I wanted life and not just mine, so I added syllables, letters, a smattering of punctuation and pauses, and poured them into her lungs, a few dozen into her mouth, then wrote more stories on her skin. The hair was difficult until I remembered curls, and then they grew as literary locks, scrawling words in corkscrew ribbons, alternating with the back white, the story seen, then hidden, in a curious game of hide-and-seek.
Almost there, using a funnel, I poured letters, vowels mainly at first, into her ears, then consonants, in one, two, three languages. Yes, now for her independent mind: I took several books of poetry, and put them in a blender, added a few tracts of philosophy, a tome on the art of rhetoric, and some pictures of nature and gave her a brain.
It took a week, two, during which I never felt the pull of loneliness. I lie; it never left, but I converted it; it fuelled me, drove me forward, and now she is ready, standing before me, beautiful, interesting, but silent.
So I played her music, and the notes threaded into her skin. I read poetry, but still she did not move. I was tempted to feed her the Tales of Frankenstein, but we know how wrong that can go.
Life, life, how to give her life? Electricity would burn her. Wait, ah, I would make her laugh. I played her recordings of comedies, of jokes, and the room echoed with the lines and laughter. I too laughed and forgot for a moment my statue and my loneliness, until a particularly funny joke, which made me bend over with laughter. I thought I was going to die from the laughter. I opened the window for air, trying to gulp it in and quell my laughter, the jokes unhelpfully still playing behind me.
Down below, a woman’s voice laughed and filled my window. Not any woman’s. She shouted, ‘Did you miss me?’
I leant out further. Yes, yes, it was Aurora! Finally. ‘See for yourself how I conquered loneliness, momentarily.’
Patrick lives in Brussels; his day job is dedicated to protecting the environment, and his spare time is spent writing poetry, fiction and art reviews. His work has appeared in The Berlin Literary Review, Beyond Words, Night Picnic, Hyacinth Review, Dreamers Creative Writing, Honeyguide Literary Magazine and (forthcoming) The Belfast Review. His writing has been published across the US, Canada, the UK, India, Belgium and Germany. His poetry chapbook, Urban Enigmas, was published by Dipity Press.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/Patrick_ten_Brink