JUNO
By Hydropneumapyrosis circa 2001.
- I woke up this morning and the world was a grey ball of wool, so I started to unravel it. It was wrapped on a reel, so I secured this upon the handle of a wooden spoon which earlier I had used for stirring oats. I regularly boil oats at breakfast time in milk gathered from the cow I own. This is the cow I bought at market for three hundred thousand pounds, worth every penny. I’m very fond of her.
From the moment I first set eyes on her, I was utterly smitten by her good looks and quickly convinced beyond having any reason to doubt the value of an investment. Some old time friends offered me the severest counsel, describing, from their perspective, the extreme financial commitment I was already certain to make as “lewd” or “shameful”. I was so sure of myself nonetheless, that I became like those men and women from history who have been impassioned by some clear as crystal revelation, to them imparted and taking form as an all consuming fire burning within.
I instantly discarded all the age-old dreams of being a successful, well-respected man and of owning a moderate estate and proving myself dedicated to all the greatest causes. Owing to her, I honestly believe I was besotted with passion akin to that love a great war hero has for the country which he serves and I put my whole heart into her purchase. I named her Juno since I valued her like a goddess, a three hundred thousand pound goddess, my sweet and terribly beautiful holy cow.
It must go almost without saying that I would much rather have named her Venus but the man who lives three doors down from me had bought a dog three weeks prior to my bringing Juno home and had called it Venus first. His loud voice calling down the garden to his bitch “Venus!” would have been of no aid to Juno during her settling period at home had I also given her that name.
I smiled through the window at Juno this morning as I grasped the world by it’s trailing end. Pulling slowly at first then at a more confident speed, I watched the grey twine unfurling, spinning and whistling around the spindle that I had made. The handle of the spoon was long and it spread out very wide at it’s useful end whilst the world itself was a very large thing which would not have fitted in my kitchen had I had even just one friend round.
I did wonder if the world would hold there as it span and the spoon seemed often to come under strain as it bore the weight of the spinning reel. One thing I was certain of was, that the consistency of the oats into which the spoon was buried deep offered perfectly adequate restraint. Any other porridge would have given way under the weight of this grey spinning globe but this batch I had made myself with the milk of the goddess Juno.
As the woollen line came spinning off, it wound it’s way across my kitchen floor and as I watched, firstly, there were piles of wool, spirals with peaks and ridges and valleys in between. Then later, lines appeared, running from this end to that end of my kitchen and all across it at regularly spaced intervals, leaving the floor overlaid with an accurate grid, rising and falling, marking out contours across the ‘knitscape’.
After this, all became still and the main thread which was still running off the world as it span, found a space to fall into behind the cooker where it was gathered out of sight for a time. I relaxed a little during this period and sitting down on the kitchen table I watched the world spinning and tried to count its revolutions. I thought it marvellous that I could count for as long as I liked and yet it never seemed as if the world were getting any smaller, so I kept counting for hours.
After I had counted 365,000,000 revolutions and realised that a whole million years had just passed, I began to feel concerned about the mystery of the wool that dropped behind the cooker. It had been falling down there for a good three hours, twenty-four minutes and I was starting to puzzle over just exactly how, a million years of world history could really be contained in the space between the back of my cooker and the kitchen wall.
Nervous as I had become, I glanced at Juno standing tall and proud in the yard outside and was at once comforted. She blushed.
I don’t know how it happened but it did, the cooker door was opened and out of it came dancing, very many grey knitted people on a grey knitted carnival float. One of them was holding a knitted collection jar by a handle made with a single strand of grey line. I was thunderstruck when it opened it’s knitted woollen mouth and spoke the words, “put a little colour in the lives of the grey and woolly, Sir,” while holding out the jar to me. I had to explain that I’d spent everything I had on my cow and had to wait until December for a license to sell on her milk and that the funding I was to receive from the sale of the patent for the cheese recipe I had been perfecting was not going to hit my account for another week or two at the earliest. After I had said this, the whole party stopped dancing, turned around and with knitted eyes fixed on the knitted floor, skulked off back into the cooker and shut the door. I got down off the kitchen table and walked across the soft grey woolly floor until I could peer through the glass window at the front of the cooker. I found then that the grey woolly people had put up a grey woolly curtain across this glass so that I could not see in. I tried to open the cooker door to see what the knitted people were doing in there but there was a grey woolly padlock attached to a grey woolly chain running the whole way around the cooker and I was prevented from seeing inside. I pondered over what I should do about the unwelcome obstruction to my day-to-day living this lock and chain had brought about. More significantly this incident posed a significant threat to my psychological stability. I have always been extremely cautious with regard to what I eat and since I am a sensitive soul, anything that puts off balance my routine and wrong foots the experience of my being in control of things, grieves me with great torrents of anxiety for which in the past I have had to take various courses of tablets.
Such anxieties had been greatly alleviated when I bought Juno since her company gave me great comfort from the very beginning, making it all the more infuriating when incidents such as these occurred, endangering even that small sense of bliss which I had of course, paid through the nose for.
After some deliberation, I took it upon myself to change the course the world had been following as it unravelled and ran down the back of my cooker. I took a pair of tongs from the kitchen drawer and opening the kitchen window above the cooker, I carefully took hold of the running line and passed it out of the window. I then made haste to Juno, and brought her over to the mound of world which was already huge and spilling over like a river through the yard. I found a free section of line and passed it through one of the loops which secured one of Juno’s bells to her collar. I pulled the line through the loop and laid it out as a wide circle on the ground, then Juno obediently stepped inside at my request. I lifted the circle up over Juno’s back and pulled firmly on the line, securing the world around Juno’s neck.
Since the world’s fate was hung about Juno’s neck and from that moment on became entirely my responsibility, I chose to pursue a course for the world that would take it beyond the confines of my limited dwelling and into spaces in which it could be much better accommodated.
- One week prior to the aforementioned events I had been given a unique gift by one of my better friends, the leather dealer. This man was short and stubby, always wore shorts (probably still does) and had neat grey stubble on his face. He used to own a small jet aircraft in which he flew around from place to place trading in leather and earning a reasonable keep. He would often have things made from the leather that was his trade and the gift that he had had prepared for me was a saddle made to fit Juno. I had been very pleased with it at the time but until now I hadn’t had a real chance to try it out. I strapped on Juno’s saddle, fastening it just in front of her udders, then I jumped on board and we headed off to join Route 66 with the world streaming out behind us.
Down Route 66 there are some marvellous views and all sorts of fascinating things lie about along the side of the road. Like camel hooves in pickle jars, cigarette buts, the cogs of an old machine and a video player.
By the remotest good fortune, when we left, I picked up the self same jacket I had been wearing at the weekend which still contained in the left hand inside pocket, a small disposable camera I had bought on a whim, and now here we were, arriving in the most invigorating of wide open spaces. Some time after, in my retirement years, I made a careful evaluation of the photo that was taken there. I reckoned on the approximate distance to the furthest point in sight to be eleven and a half miles.
The photograph was taken just before the sun went down, when I dismounted Juno and said to her;
"Juno, it do'th appear to me as though I travel many leagues away, yet alas, I remain only half way between A and B. Thus, in truth I shall away to I do'st not know where, whilst you my steed, you are too, directed where e're the fates may lead us. I am'st not permitted any clear premonition of that future, so esoteric, since yonder sun, alike to mine own spirit, is sunken full down".
"In the knowledge of your blessed proximity, I am deeply warmed as I hearken to the rhythm of your steady hallowed breath beside me and to my right"
"I here am with a cow and the world around a cow neck. I try once, twice and again to mean words I cannot think whether I know or not whilst into an empty hole/void I ride and I walk like a grey man into a freezing winter fog."
And then we went to bed.
We awoke in the morning to find that the world, which had been gathering for almost nine hours since we stopped moving, had reconstituted itself as a grey woolly military air base with grey woolly military aircraft to boot. A grey woolly military pilot in a grey woolly uniform was just climbing into a grey woolly cockpit whilst elsewhere a grey woolly fighter jet was taxiing toward the nearby grey woolly run way. Grey woolly satellite dishes stood gigantic alongside a grey woolly aircraft control tower on top of which a grey woolly radar receiver was revolving and a grey woolly windsock was gently blown by a hot dusty breeze. I found myself on the outside of a twelve-foot tall grey woolly fence with a grey woolly sign hanging on it and the words “Danger, Keep Out” embroidered on it. Grey woolly posts supported this fence at regular intervals. I was aghast when I discovered that Juno had somehow been tied to one of these grey woolly posts by a line of grey wool passing through one of the loops which secured one of her bells to her collar. I immediately got down on my hands and knees, crawling around and looking for a piece of flint in the sand, hoping to cut the cord that kept poor Juno bound. Five long minutes of searching in vain lead me to the conclusion that there was as much hope of finding flint in the dust here as there was finding hot fresh popcorn in a month old bag of frozen petit pois. I eventually resolved the original difficulty by removing Juno’s collar, unfastening the buckle and letting it slide off her neck and fall gently to the ground.
On the ground, next to where the collar landed, there was a young cactus with a small pink flower in bloom at the very tip of the stalk. I gazed at the cactus for some little time and then I looked up again.
Now directly in my line of vision there approached a man. He was tall, going grey with a sickening pair of sideburns doubtless fit for Mozart in his day but thoroughly backwards in light of the contemporary context. His walk was sluggish and his face betrayed an expression that acknowledged the importance of concentrating incredibly hard on maintaining plan A, ‘getting there’, despite continual awareness that plan B, ‘staying here’, was inevitably the preferable option. He wore glasses on a silver chain that ran round the back of his head and behind him he was dragging a suitcase on wheels by a long telescopic plastic handle. I was inclined to assume that he was one of those big Americans commonplace in states such as Missouri or possibly a Texan, but he didn’t look like a Texan (no hat, jeans, braces or cigar) and in his lethargic yet attentive approach to his spectacular surroundings he did not exhibit the nonchalant oblivion commonplace to such aforementioned commonplace citizens of the US of A. When he was standing right next to me and about to pass by, he spoke and he told me how he had frequently imagined slicing up his work colleagues and putting them in ‘Tea-crates’ which late at night he would throw into the Thames never to be found again. It was then that I recognised him for what he was, a middle aged Clerk from a London office on a touring holiday. I watched as he continued to make slow progress towards the hot tarmac of Route 66. Once he met the road my eyes followed him as he went towards the West and eventually he shimmered and faded through the dancing vapour of a road-surface mirage and was gone.
On seeing the mirage and remembering the heat, I noticed my thirst so I then milked Juno which was evidently also of considerable relief to her at the time. You see, cow’s can sometimes get a little over full, it really slows them down both physically and mentally. I think for the better part, it has been precisely that need for regular milking which has helped Juno and myself to sustain such a good relationship. Without me she would be continually frustrated and without her, I have already hinted at the fact that I would be both very much a loner of a man and a man whose life were devoid of any purpose in his work.
Before Juno and I met, I had always believed that my anxiety in life was utterly bound up in my work. I blamed myself as the maker of my own problems and believed therefore that I had personally to be the unmaker of the same. For example, there was a time when I used to work for a large Scandinavian bank. I had spent around about six months working towards providing ‘way out’ advice for a client experiencing a monumental financial crisis. The ‘way out’ I devised, regrettably, sent my client spinning, his case notes were removed from and re-filed under <OUCH/xxx/951/rediculous>, bankruptcy ensuing. I did not anticipate that I would loose my job over the matter, but unfortunately that was the way it turned out, greatly to my embarrassment, and so for the next twelve years I dedicated all my free time to fund raising ventures in order to clear my name and fervently work towards the remuneration of said client.
I first met my friend Lawrence the leather dealer, at one of those fund raising events and he, bless him, made a tremendous contribution throughout the campaign by giving ever so generously in all possible ways, especially abundantly in terms of his seemingly limitless resources of time, energy and finance. Without his help I may never have come to find my feet again after my fall.
I had been up a ladder tying balloons to a rafter in a barn I hired out prior to a fund raising dance that was to take place one evening and anyway the ladder slipped out from under me and I fell and broke my ankle and as a result was obliged to manoeuvre on crutches for some months afterwards.
I’ve only ever had two broken bones in my body, that ankle and my left fibula one time when Juno got a bit ill tempered and kicked out at me. That was the only real argument I’ve ever had with Juno, a small disagreement we rapidly overcame with a few slight tears spent more for the relief of settling a matter with a loved one feared lost than for any sacrifice made in the practice of the issue’s resolution.
- Strangely, the past events of my life seemed to fade to nigh on meaninglessness, from our position in that open isolation by the roadside. We were clearly a good way from home. That didn’t worry me much, as a matter of fact, there were probably places we might have gone to within just a couple of hours riding at Juno’s regular pace. I was certain I knew of a number of roadside cafe’s, bars and motels in either direction from there. Still, in that particular place at that time I felt a sense of tremendous isolation even with Juno alongside.
I sensed that the circumstances leading me to that place had been allowed to run as a matter of course. It was as though I had simply taken a series of logical steps assuming that I was under obligation to act as I did. Therefore I came to face the fact that I had not given any forethought to the consequences of the responsibility I had taken onboard and had considered from the outset to rest upon my shoulders.
Juno was on the whole in agreement with this acount of the experience, however, she clearly considered my inclination that our circumstances could have benefited from greater initial caution to be speculative.
I knelt on the ground and drew in the dust, trying to map out the route we had taken and developing a set of symbols and markings that might form the basis to an in depth analysis of the various relative conditions of my mind and several of the external factors that had lead me to that spot.
The warm red dust was loose and fine. I turned my finger through it swiftly and it started to become thin. A tepid breeze blew the dust away revealing another surface underneath. Hard, cold, smooth and black, like hand-finished marble. It coloured the lines of my dirt drawing black and playing over its perfect surface, the suns light was returned blazing, by a mirror-like glaze. My drawing was coming apart. My empty lines became planes and swallowed each other like black cells growing and multiplying. I clung heavily to Juno because the surface was rising. From the point where my drawing had been, there was nothing but cold shimmering black within a seventeen metre radius. Those dimensions diversified while underneath the two of us a convex black plateau arose amidst a soundscape of falling sliding earth and one loud low hum that sounded numb as if mimicking silence.
Route 66 was destroyed as far as the eye could see, and the hills that lined the horizon were gone. Now all that remained was black shining lacquer under a blue sky, Juno my cow and I.