The Most Wretched Thing Imaginable: Or Beneath the Burnt Umbrella - Softcover

Moles, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1944697152 ISBN 13: 9781944697150

Verlag: Sagging Meniscus Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Fiction. Stephen Moles' remarkable novel THE MOST WRETCHED THING IMAGINABLE could be described as any of the following: --A modern-day Book of the Dead which uses important events from relatively recent history (such as the Mayerling Incident and the Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 crash) and elements of popular culture (such as the Beatles and Shakespeare) to give expression to the same basic narrative found in all the ancient funerary texts from around the world. --A semi-autobiographical novel about the author's work with the Dark Meaning Research Institute and his efforts to stop their ground-breaking parasemantic findings from being appropriated/suppressed by the authorities. --A sister publication to Moles' previous novel, Paul is Dead, offering insights into the book's main themes (such as how to create a Möbius-strip-style twist in one's life story and make contact with an alternate self). --A poetic work in which the imagery (which has its own grammar and syntax) tells the story instead of the words: the entangled symbols are brought to the fore to such an extent that the reader is able to see the unconscious beneath the partially visible surface narrative and decide on the full literal meaning of it (rather than the other way around, as with all most books, where the literal meaning is made explicit and the underlying meaning remains partially or completely hidden). By whichever corner it is picked up, no matter how gingerly, what will be uncovered is an endlessly inventive and delightful work of wit, ingenuity, personal charm and no little substance.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen Moles is the author of seven books, including THE MOST WRETCHED THING IMAGINABLE: OR BENEATH THE BURNT UMBRELLA (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2016), Paul is Dead (CCLaP, 2015), and The More You Reject Me, the Bigger I Get (Beard of Bees, 2015), as well as many other shorter pieces. He regularly carries out undercover literary assignments aimed at both fighting the centralisation of meaning and bringing about the linguistic singularity for the benefit of society. Stephen is also the founder of the Dark Meaning Research Institute, a group of parasemantic investigators and quantum linguistics pioneers who are currently working on a way to blast him off the page and turn him into the world's first zero-person author.

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The Most Wretched Thing Imaginable or Beneath the Burnt Umbrella

By Stephen Moles

Sagging Meniscus Press

Copyright © 2016 Stephen Moles
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-944697-15-0

CHAPTER 1

Many birds, through no fault of their own, are forced to carry terrible secrets around inside them ...

A feathered creature can be forced into becoming the custodian of the memory of a dark human deed for the rest of its days simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A bluebird that builds a nest near a road may find that the sight of a fatal hit-and-run incident becomes a rotten egg that it has to sit on for the rest of its life to stop a plot for revenge being hatched out elsewhere and causing even more lives to be destroyed. While the amnesic driver wakes up the next day with a hangover and experiences mild confusion about why there is a dent in his Volkswagen Beetle, the traumatised bird suffers intense recurring nightmares about the terrible burden it has taken on.

A dove that happens to be sitting on a telegraph wire may glance in the direction of a bedroom window and be left with the knowledge that the upcoming marriage of two humans should not go ahead because the bridegroom has had an illicit liaison with the chief bridesmaid. The poor creature will have to forever hold its peace as the secret pecks away at it from the inside.

Next time you admire the sweet-sounding song of a lark, it is worth remembering that the melody may be the means by which the bird is drowning out the sour notes being played repeatedly in its head because of the selfish actions of someone you know.

The dawn chorus covers the screams from the night before.

What can those creatures with their infamously tiny brains teach us?

Quite a lot, as it happens.

As part of his search for deeper meaning, Stephen Moles decided to disconnect from his fellow humans after their habit of reducing complex ideas to 140 characters became widespread, and he attempted to discover what the original twitterers had to say instead.

Arming himself with a notebook, a pen and a strategy for translating their tweets into English, he went to interview the birds in their homes. He did this by walking around woodland areas while reciting the alphabet over and over again in his head and jotting down the letter he was on whenever he heard a bird try to convey something with its voice.

The end result was a vast archive of bird words (or "bwords") which is currently housed in the Dark Meaning Research Institute's secret underground liboratory. It contains entries such as "gwillterposch", "bemsbunsh", "hesperryheha", "oytiwincks", "fotizosh", "whoulamang" and "ghilowrax".

These are just some of the words that Stephen Moles found to be trending on the avian social network. #kwank was another, and it seemed very meaningful to the writer, so he made use of it in his work as part of a heartening message to those who had unknowingly brought him into existence:

There is a way out, via the Globe, the Swan, the Rose, the Hope, to a place where all the suffering finally has a purpose — the birdman who was the eggman is already flying out of something that hasn't even been described yet. It is a vision of beauty, ours to see in all its brightness, with other rare and undescribed animals, designs copied from nature and curiously coloured after life.

The green language", also called "the language of the birds" or "the language of unsaying", is a supposedly perfect means of communication. It is believed by some to be a universal language which was spoken by all creatures until division entered the world; others believe it is a form of secret communication that allows birds to communicate with the initiated.

"When for much my love that happy heart; world of paparazzi, my love green girl parasol."

'I am a thought in the mind of the forest,' said Stephen Moles. 'The birds singing are the neurons firing as the network of trees thinks me.'

Grtash! Ploof! Kwank!

When the words are read in the sequence they were given by the birds, they form a sentence that describes the path of energy through a higher mind when it thinks of the receiver of those words. This illustrates how, unlike regular language, this language of the birds works by uniting rather than separating: Shakespeare can be found in the character of Hamlet, and Hamlet can be found in the head of Shakespeare.

In order for you to have this thought right now, there may be somebody walking around your mind and building up a new language with the help of the environment, and that person may only exist because you are currently thinking them into existence.

How I wonder ... #wtf

The project grew from a tiny seed into a huge tree that stretched across the entire Globe. All kinds of travel became possible in the Bark of Millions of Years, but because it was structured like a Möbius trip thanks to a mystical space-time signature, the action led back to the centre. The two hemispheres of the big grey ampitheatre gave expression to night and day and the rotating hemicycle turned theatregoers into theatrecomers, up the Falcon Stairs and down the trapdoor within the evolutionary stage at one and the same time.

When all living things were spun out like vines and branches from the Cosmic Egg by the supreme deity of the Dogon people, the septenary structure of everything to come was inscribed on the bark of reality: 'Bird A loves Bird B forever and ever and over and over again.' The omphalus marks the navel of the world, where the two eagles sent out by Zeus came together, and the Globe is pulled by the force of grAmma into an ovoid shape that conceals the most wretched thing imaginable.

As I walked through the forest, I had the tune of the 'K-I-S-S-I-N-G' playground song in my head, but the lyrics were different somehow. Once I was finally able to see the words for the trees, a deeper meaning became visible in the spotlight of the glade. First and Last were sitting in a tree, forming a nest that housed the egg from which they hatched.

Enigmama @specialbranc h 7yrs ago

Walking through the trees here reminds me of walking through a library. #powderisland #books #magic The optical-fibre cables used in woods and forests are typically coated with a layer of bark so they blend in with the environment and are not noticed by most humans. Light signals are sent through the cables to express, in the vernacular of the stars, the beauty of a lightning strike or the poetry of a fatal car crash.

The flows in the cables can be interrupted and sections of scintillating text sliced off to make the pages of e-books. One of the best tools for editing a libretto is a mouth since it ensures a continuation of the flow of material through the body towards the anus with which it is connected. Beginning and end can both be wiped with sheet music made by the Dung Beatles, and the songs of the wires can be interpreted as portents that the murderer of Carmen will eventually be found innocent when it is revealed that the whole tragedy took place in the Theatre of Cruelty as a test of the unwitting actor's endurance skills.

The drama of Anti-Oedipus or Anti-Carmen Electra is laid like an egg at the end of the ordeal by an Om of the body's trapdoor. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the most wretched substance in a baby carriage.

'Here,' said the professor, shining a light from his forehead as we came to a standstill in the middle of the forest. 'This is what you wanted to see.' I peered through the bark which had become transparent due...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sagging Meniscus Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1944697152
• ISBN 13: 9781944697150
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 132
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland