Jesse Ball - The Village on Horseback - Prose and Verse, 2003-2008

I fought with 3 older children in my father’s garden. What right had they to be there? They are painted, garish like a festival and I am wearing the plainest of clothes. They are older all and speak with authority of matters out in a world to which I have never gone.

And yet, it is my father’s garden. I approach them even now and the quarrel begins anew.

I came, when all the rest had gone, with many fine things to say and do. We went as tinkers through the farthest settlements in the fifth of your five lives. So often you would say to me if only our lives had been laid head-to-head and foot-to-foot — instead this brief exchange of shipwright and wind having less to do with what is known than with what we would know and tell.

The flea perched on the chair’s back reports with utmost fury: There are no studies so foolish as those taken up with another’s leave.

Of not less than three I speak now coming in rain in dubious transport through borders of clay and roadways of stone. The mast is off course and next shall cause — treason, which is the poor man’s chance, dubbed fortune in an era of coalbins and apple trees.

A project:

1. Find a man out for a walk with his two children, both of a portable and inconsiderable age. Though old enough for memory’s sake. Say five or half past four.

2. Come upon this man in prepared union with a friend (you and a friend or confederate). Spring upon him in a park, seizing both children when they are equidistant from the man. This is crucial: we will discuss why later.

3. Proceed to kidnap the children, running away at a hasty, but not overwhelming pace. You therefore force the man to choose from between his children which is to be saved. When he takes up chase the one pursued will lead him upon a merry run for a short stint providing time for the other to escape. When that aim has been accomplished (and presumably then the father will be close) the child will be set down neatly and escape will be easily effected for the father will then stop to take care of his stolen child. And meanwhile, the other captor is well away and safe, having succeeded in the theft.

4. The stolen child in step 4 will be kept away for a period not longer than one calendar day. Following that period of separation, he will be returned safe and sound to the bosom of his family.

5. It is crucial to understand here that while the child is held in illegal custody it will be supported in high style, given various treats and placated in countless inventive and surprising ways. Then the child will be taught about the event that has transpired. It will be made most carefully to understand that in an even contest, its father’s affections were led to choose its brother rather than itself. How sad the child will be then. Perhaps it will be shown footage of the crucial incident such that it can see for itself how its father abandoned it to a cruel and uncertain fate. Then, as we say, the child is returned secure in the knowledge that its father chose not to save it.

6. The plan now proceeds to stage six. Immovable bronze statues depicting each boy, the father and the kidnappers will be placed in the park in correct relative position complete with dedication and name-plates. At the induction ceremony the family will be invited and the entire matter explained to the press.

7. However uncomfortable things are in the happy home, they will be made still more, for a sum will be laid on the stolen unchosen (by his father) boy and provided annually and overlooked such that he is capable of a standard of life of which his brother and family could never hope to attain.

THEN the chosen child will wish himself Unchosen and all will be quite grand for of a Sunday in the park as they grow older and age into death they will now and again come upon these statues and remember deeply and indefatigably their father’s true choice.

Meanwhile in the forest the door to the very largest tree had been left open and all manner of creatures whether desired or not could come and go through all and any rooms of the great and complicated house that he had made both at once in passing in a childhood conversation and later with his own two hands from a place of hiding. Who then to come once and for all and set matters straight?

I was nevertheless famous in many circles, my name known, for instance, to those who dwelt alone, to those who drew water in silence at midnight from the well at the world’s heart.

A character who enters the scene, always by balloon.

An Egyptian painter whose lettering and figure work was so precise it far surpasses the precision and accuracy possible today through the use of machines.

I should like very much to have a shop in the downstairs section of some boarding house or general store that I own. The employee would sit behind a desk dressed well, and would make boldfaced lies to whoever comes in. These lies would in some sense be regimented, for instance, no promises of any kind would be made.

A man came to Inilvick out of a great storm repeating over and over the seventeen characters and fourteen formulations that make up the long lost language of the countryside. For once in Inilvick man had the faculty of speaking with animals and such as he liked. For that reason, though the old arts are long lost, all the best animal trainers of the fourteenth century were born in Inilvick.

Some began the meeting with loud angry or dissatisfied talk while others shrank together at first out of fear but sometimes verging into inappropriate groping. I admonished a handsome woman who sat beside me in a dress having no fewer than 93 buttons: WHY MUST YOU WEAR SO MANY BUTTONS? to which she opened wide her pretty mouth to show 3 rows of sharpened teeth.

Cleverly we accord no respect to wily makers of intricate toys or to the writers of wire-thin stories that confound even the kind attentions of dressmakers crouched resolutely in a sultan’s hourglass with precise, indeed all-comprehending instructions.

OH the long winters! Yes, we in Lundil do survive from year to year, or so we are told, but the tactics we must employ, though perhaps obvious, are lamentable and leave us powerless to know how things were in the previous year, or even who we were. What of my associations? What of my medals, my friendships? What of our great tradition of letter-writing, second only to the town of V. far down the river? Well, each year we of the town congregate and are assigned notes as in some staged production. It is then, in the aftermath of four months’ hibernation, in which dreams have emptied our minds of all true import, that we can slip with impossible ease, into our new roles, like the scissored rain clouds of some failed attempt to render the ever-present sky.

Goodbye, again, and all of them going off down to the shore, and out to sea. Well, we shan’t see each other again I say, not in this life, and then I too am off into the waters, swimming at my resolute, far-grasping pace. We shall not see each other again, I say, but how long life is, and how foolish all predictions. Throw me ashore on some desert coast sweep me up on some eastern river: All that I plan is replaced with that which I dread in a manner so very predictable I find I often see the world makers’ hand. Yet what then? Knowing you are being tricked is no help if you can find no one to tell you why.