Seventeen Syllables

James Lovegrove

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

* * * *

James Lovegrove’s recent publications include the novel Untied Kingdom and the double PS novella Gig. Forthcoming are Worldstorm, likely to be the first of a big fantasy trilogy; Provender Gleed, a stand-alone novel; and a second short-story collection, Waifs And Strays. In the pipeline is a Young Adult novel, Fallen, expanding on the world James created an earlier short story, ‘Wings.’ ‘Seventeen Syllables,’ as you may be able to see, embodies his yearning for a life a lot less busy than the one he has. No, only joking.

* * * *

A moment of thought

The poet heeds his spirit

Brush falls on parchment

In the year of his fiftieth birthday, Dr Matthewson took a long hard look at his life and decided it needed simplifying.

There were, he saw, too many Things in it. Too many possessions, too many appurtenances. Too much extraneous baggage. Too many matters which demanded his time. Too many problems which were not of his making but which took up valuable acreage in his mind. Too much chaff and fluff and clutter. Too much that seemed to inhibit his enjoyment of living. Too much that he could do without.

Dr Matthewson longed for a lack of complexity. He longed for a life that was straightforward and unencumbered. He longed for a life that was as precise and economical as a Japanese poem, a life that could be encapsulated in seventeen syllables. A life like a haiku.

Think what he could do if he were just able to free himself up a little. Think what he could achieve if only he could gain himself a bit of breathing space. Think of the peace it might bring.

In five decades on earth, Dr Matthewson had accumulated a lot of emotional and material lumber. He resolved to be rid of some of it.

* * * *

The unwise healer

Knowing all about bodies

Nothing about souls

He started with his mistress. She was not, in fact, that much of a burden. She made few demands on him, and the stolen hour which he shared with her every Wednesday afternoon was not something he would desperately miss. Indeed, for a while now he had been thinking that the fire had gone out of the tryst somewhat. Seeing her had, in its way, become as much a habit as anything, and the lovemaking was hardly more passionate, after five years, than the once-a-month, listless, rustless coupling Dr Matthewson engaged in with his wife. His mistress was an excrescence he could easily shed. And so he did.

She took it well, all things considered. She said she thought she had known something like this was coming, and though a tear trickled from her eye and a single sob escaped her, she mostly managed to retain her composure.

It was, to Dr Matthewson, comforting that she was so little affected. It meant he had made the right choice. If she was only mildly upset by their breaking up, and he not upset at all, then perhaps he had made the disconnection just in time, while there were still some dregs of excitement left in the affair, before it had become completely meaningless. It was, perversely, good to end it before it fizzled out of its own accord.

They parted company with a handshake, and Dr Matthewson walked to his car with the bounce in his step of a man relieved.

* * * *

Vainly fluttering

Trampled beneath careless heel

Crushed butterfly

At home, Dr Matthewson announced to his wife that he was going to clear out the loft. How much stuff was up there? The place was crammed to the gunwales with papers, old furniture, rolls of carpet, discarded clothing, files, LP records, great swathes of Things which no one had any use for any more.

His wife expressed doubt, not so much at the course of action Dr Matthewson was proposing as at the strange zeal with which he was proposing it. The look in his eye worried her, and her concern doubled when Dr Matthewson rang a skip hire company and ordered a six-yard, drop-end skip to be deposited outside the house that weekend.

He spent all of Saturday and most of Sunday shinning up and down the loft ladder and hauling armfuls of attic jetsam out to the skip. In it all went: box folders containing bank statements and utility bills dating back years, an old (and now incomplete) china service that had been given to the Matthewsons on their wedding, various pieces of faded cartoon-patterned bed linen which had belonged to the children when they were small, some wooden chairs, some eight-mil home movie reels, some outfits and shoes Mrs Matthewson would never wear again, a number of the children’s toys which had been stored away in the expectation of grandchildren (but the grandchildren had not yet materialised and perhaps never would), and some items of bric-a-brac which Mrs Matthewson had long been promising she would donate to a charity shop or try to sell at a car boot sale.

The skip was soon filled, and Mrs Matthewson then went through its contents, plucking out a few articles she felt should be salvaged. She was horrified to find photo albums in there. Irreplaceable souvenirs of her and her husband’s life together! She was even more horrified to find her wedding dress in there. She still had hopes that their daughter would find a nice man, settle down, and get married in that very dress.

Mrs Matthewson took the rescued items and stowed them in her wardrobe, resolved that her husband would never lay hands on them again.

Dr Matthewson surveyed the empty loft, the loaded skip. He felt good. When the lorry came to take the skip away, he felt even better. He watched a huge weight of impedimenta trundle off down the street. He had done well.

* * * *

Opening a door

Leaping from rock to water

Madness is easy

He soon realised, however, that he had only made a start. There was more that could go. His books, for instance.

Dr Matthewson and his wife were avid readers and the house was crammed with books. Shelves of them everywhere. Bookcases in every room, in every corner. But what use was a book once you had finished it? Keeping it then was an affectation. It sat and took up space and gathered dust, all to prove that it had been perused and digested. A useless memento. You knew you had read it. Why should you care if anyone else was aware of that fact?

Dr Matthewson’s wife looked on appalled as he began clearing the shelves, stacking the books under his chin and carting them out to lay on the front drive. She tried to intervene, but Dr Matthewson brushed her aside. She remonstrated and he ignored her. Finally she resorted to rushing around the house grabbing all the volumes she wanted to keep. She had some first editions, some treasured childhood story compendiums, some broken-spined favourites that she read and reread. She managed to secure almost all of these before the shelf-emptying hurricane that was her husband reached them. Then she watched forlornly as Dr Matthewson three times filled up the car boot and drove to the town’s rubbish tip, to deposit their library there.

* * * *

Written or spoken

The destiny of all words

Is wind and ashes

The house seemed weirdly bare. The denuded bookshelves gaped like empty cradles, like robbed graves. Mrs Matthewson shunned her husband for several days, while Dr Matthewson himself waited for a sense of lightness to set in, a sense of serenity. He had dispensed with so much. Now, at last, surely the mental peace he craved, the clear space in his brain, would be his.

Apparently not. Dr Matthewson felt no more contented than before. What next? Something else must go. Some other Thing must be jettisoned from his life.

It wasn’t too difficult for him to see that that Thing should be his job.

Dr Matthewson was senior partner in a thriving general practice that catered to the medical needs of over a fifth of the local community. Over the course of twenty years he had built up the practice to its current level of success and respectability by dint of sheer hard work and drive. He had spent more hours of every day than was conscionable receiving patients in his surgery and listening to their complaints and taking down their histories. He could not even begin to count the number of heartbeats he had listened to, throat glands he had felt, abdomens he had palpated, rectums he had wormed his finger into, rashes he had studied, pregnancies he had confirmed, tongues he had held down with a depressor, testicles he had twiddled, venereal diseases he had diagnosed, moles he had ordered removed, prescriptions he had scribbled, terminal prognoses he had delivered, deaths he had pronounced. Day after day he had lent a sympathetic ear to fretful and fearful souls, taking on their cares as his own, helping to make their lives easier if he could. And then there were the extra hours he put in: the evening admin meetings, the budget-balancing sessions, the general behind-the-scenes running of the practice. So much time which had not been time for himself.

Well, enough!

Dr Matthewson announced that he was retiring. He would be handing on control of the practice to the next most senior partner, Dr Gearing. He was sure Dr Gearing would continue to run it with the same care and attention as he himself had run it. The changeover would not discommode anyone in any way.

Naturally there were protests. Dr Matthewson was far too young to retire. He must stay on. His patients even organised a petition begging him to reconsider, but the petition, and the fact that they had gone to all the bother of organising it, served only to confirm to Dr Matthewson that they relied on him too much. The impingement of their lives on his was too great. How much less complicated everything was going to be when he no longer had to worry about Mrs Baxter’s corns and Mr Wilberforce’s arthritis and young Sondra Chaudhury’s ongoing tribulations with eczema. How much smoother would his days go by when he was not constantly on his mettle, having to keep an eye out for the lump that was not benign, the symptom that could be innocent and just as easily could not, the pain in the chest that could mean myocardial infarction or just plain indigestion. For once, he might actually be able to relax. He had saved up a tidy pension fund for himself. Retirement was going to be like one long holiday.

* * * *

When the tree is felled

The flowers it shelters curl

In sun-singed dismay

But boredom did not take too long to set in. The luxury of idleness soon became routine. Each morning: the newspaper, a leisurely breakfast, then a round of golf or a country stroll. Each afternoon: a trip into town to wander around the shops (and every so often he would bump into a former patient and in no time was being subjected to a whispered litany of recent ailments). Each evening: watch TV or a video or have dinner with friends (in the absence of books to read, this was what they had to resort to). Restlessness grew, and with it, dissatisfaction. Life was still not Spartan enough for Dr Matthewson. There still seemed to be too many incidentals laying siege to him from without. He had not found inner release. He was not sufficiently free from mundane paraphernalia, not yet totally liberated from the tyranny of Things.

A simple expedient, one that would help in the short term, was to abbreviate his name. He informed his wife that from now on their surname was Matthews. He even went as far as having the change confirmed by deed poll.

By this point the long-suffering Mrs Matthews—formerly Mrs Matthewson—had become thoroughly fed up with her husband’s lunacies. It could hardly be expected that she should feel otherwise. She hinted many times that he might wish to seek psychiatric help, and when the hints fell on deaf ears, took to suggesting the same in no uncertain terms. But even when her suggestions became demands, Dr Matthews paid no heed. Psychiatry could not solve what was wrong with him. Only further simplification could do that.

He decided to break contact with his children. Neil, aged twenty-seven, lived in Sydney now, and was to some extent already estranged from his parents, having come out as gay when he was nineteen. The relationship he had with his mother and father was confined to infrequent, long-distance, short-lasting phone calls, and it was not difficult for Dr Matthews to opt not to speak to his son on the rare occasions when he rang. His wife could do the conversing for both of them, and if he himself happened to pick up the phone when Neil was calling, all he had to do was solemnly and wordlessly hand the receiver over.

Beth, aged twenty-nine, presented more of a problem in this respect, since she lived in London, not that far away, and now and then came down to stay for the weekend, often with her latest boyfriend in tow. Said boyfriend would each time be touted as potential husband material, only to disappear off the scene shortly afterwards. Beth was serially unmarriageable. She liked her job and irresponsibility and alcohol too much.

When Beth next visited, Dr Matthews did not speak to her or to Jim, her new beau. He acted as if neither of them existed. This, of course, led to an unpleasant scene, with Beth ranting at her father and calling him mad, then storming out of the house with Jim trotting bemusedly in her wake. Following that, Mrs Matthews herself screamed at her husband for a while.

Dr Matthews withstood it all stolidly, but inwardly he was distressed. His life was still, it appeared, far more sonnet than haiku.

* * * *

Heaven lends to us

Happy daughters, loyal sons

Hell repossesses them

When his wife eventually walked out on him, Dr Matthews reckoned he had come one major step closer to his goal. All at once the house was silent. There was no presence in it but his own. He roved the rooms and garden, marvelling at the sublimity of solitude. No one else’s opinions and sensibilities to consider. No one else’s behaviour to have to take into account when indulging in his own. No one else to interfere and interrupt, to snap the delicate lace of his thoughts. Bliss!

But even this seeming paradise could not last. For one thing, there was the bother of having to run a household. That had squarely been Dr Matthews’s wife’s province, and with her gone, things swiftly went to rack and ruin. Nothing got cleaned. Nothing got laundered. Nothing got cooked. Nothing got tidied away. The refrigerator and freezer remained largely empty, the kitchen store cupboards largely bare. Dr Matthews had no sense of domestic economy, having had to develop none. He went out to the supermarket to buy only what he required for the next day or so. Then he would go out again. But the supermarket troubled him with all its brightness and choice, its countless aisles and meandering customers, its dullard checkout assistants and their plaguing enquiries such as “Would you like help bagging your groceries, sir?” and “Do you have a loyalty card?” He spent as little time on the premises as he could, darting in, raiding the shelves for what he needed, paying, hurrying home again.

Dr Matthews’s situation got worse when writs and affidavits arrived from his wife’s lawyers, petitioning for divorce and laying claim to a goodly portion of his income and assets. Perhaps the most galling aspect of this was that the divorce papers cited “unreasonable behaviour” as the grounds for legal dissolution of the marriage. Was it really so unreasonable to want tranquillity in a vexatious world? Really so unreasonable to wish to be disconnected and apart and free?

* * * *

King of the forest

Tiger sits on moonlit rock

Feared, unloved and proud

Nonetheless, Dr Matthews did not contest the divorce proceedings. He gave in to every demand his wife made and signed every paper he was required to sign, employing his new, officially registered moniker, Dr Matt. He surrendered the house and its contents and most of his pension to his wife, and used what funds he had remaining to purchase a croft on a remote Scottish island.

There, Dr Matt lived surrounded by sheep, sea and mountains, and his existence was narrowed to a few basic prerequisites: warmth, food, water, shelter. He grew vegetables in a tiny plot, kept chickens, and once a week rode his bicycle to the nearest town—not much more than a village clustered around a small harbour—to purchase tinned and preserved goods such as meat and fruit, as well as the odd bottle of whisky. He exchanged no words with the locals beyond “hello” and “thank you,” and made the five-mile return journey with full carrier bags hung from his handlebars, clunking heavily against the front wheel and throwing the bike off-balance.

The roof of his cottage leaked when it rained. The wood stove needed constant feeding and tending, else it would go out. The chickens laid fewer eggs than he would have liked and succumbed to all sorts of distempers and diseases. But still, for a while, Dr Matt was happy.

* * * *

Pebbled shore, bare sky

Gulls wail over seething sea

The end of the world

Dr M was content, and the rhythm of his days was the rhythm of nature. He slept, and woke, and ate, and worked on his vegetable plot, and went out searching for firewood, all according to the length of daylight and the disposition of the seasons. How much time passed, he had no idea. Two years, perhaps three. He thought—he truly believed—that he had achieved what he had set out to do. He had made himself a being of pure necessity. Nothing came or went in his life that was not an essential requirement. His bed was a mattress on planks, with blankets but no sheets. His clothes were shapeless and threadbare, segments of fabric that served no function other than to keep him from being naked. He had grown a beard, so there was no longer the toil of shaving, and the only part of his hair he trimmed was the fringe, solely in order to prevent it from getting in his eyes. His mind was now almost entirely open to the act of contemplation, and he waited for the profound thoughts, the understanding, the insights, the serenity to come flooding in. Surely these must come flooding in. What, otherwise, was the point of this eremitic loneliness? This contraction of life to its fundamentals? This paring away of every shred of superfluity? Why, otherwise, had he subjected himself to this radical self-surgery?

He roamed his little, raw patch of the planet under torn-cloud skies and glaring sun, and shivered by the stove as snowdrifts piled against the side of the cottage, and dug with spade and trowel into the grudging ground, and beach-combed for driftwood to burn, and waited for his just reward to arrive.

At last he determined that something else must be holding him back. Some few shackles remained, binding him to mundanity. Somehow, he was still not yet sufficiently unchained from Things.

But what? What was there left? What more could be possibly do without?

The answer came to him one evening in late autumn. By then Dr M was a startling, starveling figure. His eyes stared and his cheeks were hollow and he walked with a stoop. In just a few years he had aged considerably. He was fifty-odd going on eighty, and in the light of his gas lantern that evening, sniffling with the onset of a cold, he understood, with sudden and absolute clarity, that it was his body itself that was to blame. A body had innumerable demands. It had to be fed and clothed and shod, its bowels and bladder needed regular evacuation, its hair and nails had to be tended, its various aches and pains had to be heeded, it expected continual periods of rest. It was a demanding vehicle. It craved attention almost all the time.

If he could somehow lessen its grip on him…

* * * *

The spirit spirals

In ever tighter circles

When too much alone

Dr M prepared himself for the operation. He tied a torn-shirtsleeve tourniquet around his right thigh, pinching off the femoral artery. He soused the serrations of his wood-saw with whisky to disinfect them. He stoked up the stove in readiness, making sure the tip of a chosen log was maintaining a nice white heat.

He hoisted himself up onto the kitchen table, stretched the bare right leg in front of him, took a few glugs of the whisky to calm his nerves and serve as a mild anaesthetic, then set to work with the saw, severing the leg.

He had remembered, vaguely, reading once in a medical journal about a German man who did this selfsame thing to himself in order to demonstrate that he had the courage and the willpower to go through with it. The man had had a friend standing by, poised to call the emergency services once the dismemberment was completed, and surgeons had sewn the leg back on and the man was able to walk again. Dr M did not have such a friend standing by, nor for that matter did he have a telephone. All he had was himself and his determined conviction that removing one limb was going to propel him to perfect quintessence.

Of course it was disgustingly painful. Hideous to hack through his own quadriceps muscles, to carve grittily through his own femur, to sit there writhing and howling in a sea of his own released blood. Of course it was. And of course it was awful then to have to grope for the log that was sticking out of the stove door and use its glowing end to cauterise the stump. He shrieked and gagged as the stench of his own charred flesh clogged his nostrils.

But he did it, that was what mattered. He carried out the amputation successfully, and when it was over he eyed the removed leg, which had tumbled off the table onto the floor and lay there leaking blood, and he was able to fix his sweating, reddened face into an expression that closely resembled a grin.

Then he passed out.

* * * *

Endlessly dreamless

Pure oblivion cradles

Dreamlessly endless

The adjustment to life with one leg was not easy. M hopped hopelessly about the cottage, waiting for the agony that was coming from his truncated leg to abate. It would not. He drank all the whisky he had and it made scant difference. He ate but was unable to keep food down. He struggled around like this for a couple of days, trusting that things would get better, but they did not, and he began to wonder if he had not made a dreadful mistake.

But the mistake was not, as one might suppose, the severing of the leg. The mistake was in unbalancing himself. The lack of a leg had made his life harder. Might not the lack of the other leg even things up?

So M put himself through amputation again, this time without any whisky to soften the trauma. (After all, he could not have cycled into town to buy some more booze, and he certainly could not have hopped all that way.) He perched himself on the table again, which was tarred with blood from the previous operation. He had a cauterising log ready. He tourniqueted his leg. He raised the wood-saw.

* * * *

Suffering teaches

We soon learn the true lesson

Pain begets more pain

Crawling on the floor, hauling himself with his arms and elbows, M perceived that he had attained equilibrium once more, but, sadly, at the expense of his humanity. He was now little better than a half-person, a shuffling creature, a dweller among the dust and detritus, an insect, a mite.

Perhaps that was no bad thing. Mites had few qualms and queries. Mites went through life simply as they were. This was a reduction in circumstances that could well prove beneficial to him after all.

After two days and nights as a floor-slitherer, however, unable to leave the cottage, pissing and shitting where he lay, it dawned on M that he had succeeding in creating more, not fewer, difficulties for himself. Foolishly he had thought leglessness a boon, but instead it had had the result of transforming him into a Thing himself. Were he not living isolated, alone, he would now be in a hospital somewhere, having to be cared for; and when discharged from that hospital, he would be wheelchair-bound and would forever after have to rely on nurses and physiotherapists and home helps and all sorts of other aids and assistance in order to be able to survive.

M was ashamed. He had become one of the very objects he had striven so hard to escape. He was now useless baggage. A living hindrance. An appurtenance, an excrescence.

How could he live with himself?

* * * *

A blade turned inwards

Brings truth with its cutting edge

A man faces himself

As the blood purled out from his radial and ulnar veins, washing over his forearms, gloving his hands, dribbling onto the floor beside the discarded kitchen knife, M had a glimpse, a revelation.

He saw the world not as a place of traps and snares and dragging encumbrances but as a finely spread web of connection and interdependence. Everyone balanced everyone else. What affected one person in…this web affected his neighbour too, and so on and so forth, ripples of event shimmering out through strands of relationship, the whole delicate artefact quivering with mutual incident.

He turned his head and with failing eyes regarded the sky through the window, where clouds bumped and jostled together against the blue. Fraught by winds, the stratosphere teemed with collision. Nothing up there existed in isolation, not even the sun, whose exertions warmed the seas that spawned the clouds and whose refracted light generated that backdrop of unvarying azure.

His gaze dropped and he beheld a woodlouse, making its careful way along the floor beside the expanding blood puddle. Its myriad legs on either side rippled in perfect succession. M admired its segmented carapace, strong enough and flexible enough to protect the wood-louse and enable it to roll itself into a ball when it felt threatened. Just a tiny, insignificant insect, but it was an emblem of longevity. Its species had survived, in various evolutionary incarnations, for millions upon millions of years.

There was confluence and eternity all around. The two were one and the same. M saw this at last. Life entailed not separation but immersion. Life was an epic poem that never ended. Life was too complex for words.

The poet drops brush

His dream both freed and captured

His work is now done.

* * * *