Alasdair Gray - Unlikely Stories Mostly

100When time is ripe for it, my verse will do far more than illuminate the best essence of Thomas Malory’s text, it will translate, clarify and augment the greatest and most truly Original Book in the Universe.

101Such (said I) is my aim also, and I am thunderstruck to discover in the Puritan camp one who admires the work of Rabelais as greatly as I do; but speaking as a printed poet myself, I greatly doubt if verse is the fittest craft to convoy into English all the varied and witty exellencies of that algebra, which cannot yield the longitude; but by travelling the line of latitude, I would inevitably hit it.

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144He agreed that such a discovery must not only utterly transform and glorify myself who made it (if I made it) but equally transform and glorify whoever conversed with me afterward, and whoever afterward conversed with them &cetera, until by meer conversation the whole world was made again in God’s image, every man, woman and child becoming (he sank here to a meckanical metaphor) a sounding pipe in the Creator’s organ.

145However (he lowered his voice still further) he knew that the Cabinet Council would by no reason clear my estate of its encumbrances, or finance such an expedition, and he hoped this news did not utterly gravel me, for though he had called here from curiosity rather than kindness, he now knew I was more than a meer madman, and his heart went out to me.

146I walked to the end of the chamber and looked through the window to hide my face; having mastered myself I then turned, adopted the true stance of the acomplished rhetorician, and answered him in the words of my best epigram.

147 We weep to breathe, when we to being come,

After which Agon, all we gain is gift:

Air, sunlight, ground to stand on, yeah, disease

Which turns the soul to all from it bereft

By Adams greed, pain showing what was, left.

Delight without disease would stand us still .

Hell herds us hence to Heaven: ill antidotes ill .

148He nodded and smiled with one side of his mouth as if I had uttered a negligible truth, and I realized that I was again confronted by the jealousy of a fellow poetizer; but after a pause he said that the Council of State did not think that I greatly menaced the Commonwealth, and would soon admit me to perfect freedom.

149I answered that such freedom would be worse than the vilest slavery, for it would leave me free to do nothing but grappel till death with clusterfist creditors and esurient Kirkists; I now had a vision of a nobler sprout than my family tree; if meerly released I must live to tend the latter with pain, vexation and ingratitude: it would be better if I could escape abroad, for in that case I would be at least welcomed by friends of the Steward in exile, and be some degrees nearer my Goal.

150After long silence he said, that shortly, if the parole which for more than two years has permitted me to wander wheresoever I list within the liberties of London, were withdrawn, and Lieutenant Apsley knew that any omission to lock me in would be set down to an underling’s negligible oversight, then what thereafter befel would reflect dishonour upon nobody; but I must know his words were idle, random, unintended and unlinked to any outcome, whether speculative or eventual. And he took his leave absently, as though pondering something.

26 MAY 1660:

IN THE ERSTWHILE SCHISMATIC

PAPAL PALAZZO OF AVIGNON .

Into all lugs is verbal gold poured! The glib tongue of informed rumour dinneth it abroad that, lacking their Lord Paramount Protector (his tumble-down son Dick having proved a dwaibly mainstay) and the Model Army of the General Monck concurring, (the synagogical sanhedrins of the regicidal regiments glowring but holding aloof) the London Lords and Commons hath done no less a thing than invite from his den in the Nether Lands, the Eighth Royal Steward and Second Steward Charlemagnus, to become this very day Instaurated, Instellarated and Incoronated upon the throne of the whole Brittanic League of Kingdoms and Commonweals! At which bruit fell I into such ecstasy of mirth that I was like to have departed this life. But my greatest attempt recalled me.

26 JUNE 1660 :

IN THE STRADO CURTIZANO, VENICE .

The women of this republick leave a man as they discover him, but reduced.

26 JULY 1660:

AT SEA BETWIXT BYZANTIUM AND CRIM-TART ARY .

A good wind, but misled by light. Cannot account for this phenomenon.

3 AY AE E OE 2 EOE E EIE EI I-AAY A AAA

ew ie i oo Ο ae i ο oo ae a ie ae ea i e ei ie a aue e oe a eay a eei oe iaiaio ai uaio a aiio ee u ae a i e e I i ye aoui ο a i eo ee I ae oui

3 DS FTR TH CMT, 2 BFR TH CLPS: BTWXT CRM-TRTRY ND SMRKND .

Ν wn s pr. ld wtr s nt gd. Wtr nd wn r qul n th vns. Whl hlf mtrs th thr hlf des. Wht flngs ls mgntn gns. Sbtrctn nd ddtn kp sch pc tht n th nd fnd mslf mntng t tht frst zr whr strtd cntng.

MORE THAN A YEAR AFTER THE FOREGOING: AMONG ROCKS ,

My guide has absconded and I am at a loss to comprehend what the last four entries signify, in particular the previous two, which, were they not clearly indited in my own hand, would suggest the gibberish jottings of a dotard, drunkard or dizzard. Can I, in a moment of sublimity (which the Eternal Omniscience may wreak upon whom he listeth) have achieved that logopandocy whose Genesistical root Cromwell’s latinist sectary agrees was split at Babelon, and I hold to be the concluding Revelation of the Holy Ghost operant through mankind generally, and myself especially? And have I since, like an overstrained athlete, lapsed so far below my best achievement as to find its memorials incomprehensible? Did I indeed, when fevered with ague on a foggy island in that wide marsh, write dialects of the tongues of the Cherubim and Seraphim? I doubt. I doubt. However cryptogrammed I am certain that a sentence of the archangelic tongue would twang my discernment with some resonance of pluterperfect Pythagorean jubilee, and these syllables, omnivowelant and omniconsonant, evoke a strangely familiar dulness. No water here, but I suck the dew which distillates between the fibrils of my cloak.