All is well on Parnassus. The fruits are gathered in from the allotments on the lower slopes.
Here on the wooden bench that is delicately grazed each season by the jaws of wasps for the making of their nests, I reach down for a Belleville Rendezvous Pippin from the apple barrel, then draw and open a sailor’s clasp knife.
At this the voice of Sophia calls softly: ‘If you do not put that knife this instant in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, you shall hang at next assizes.’
The inn, not fifteen yards below, had been The Land of Cockaigne, but when Sophia Silver took command, she re-named it The Admiral Benbow in memory of her revered forebears, John Silver and the dark girl dressed in blue.
Sophia, a woman of parts with plentiful arrows to her bow, shot for her sling and ample balls to her musket, runs a tight ship at The Admiral Benbow. Her brewings variously: Gnats Micturation, Entropy, and Thundering Apoplexy; and if any complain of falling into flukes and agues after these, says sweetly ‘Men of England, Heirs of Glory, Heroes of unwritten story, them that die’ll be the lucky ones. Micturate off.’
If there are those foolhardy or deluded enough to try it on with Sophia, she tells them courteously to tie a knot in their manhood, and they wander off disconsolate to seek a sheep who is up for it, while Sophia busies herself for the morrow: the weekly conventicle of the stroppy poets.
From my vantage on the grassy knoll I can see all: The Admiral Benbow is fronted by the Fiveways, a wide circle space as of the outstretched palm of a Brobdingnagian, the gravel of fine ground limestone and bee droppings raked smooth each day by Sophia’s pot boy R. Jim Ladd, while five lanes stretch out from the sociable palm, ascending Parnassus this way and that. To confuse enemy parachutists the signposts had their directions removed long ago, each replaced with the same graven words: So flowing all from one, all one at last become; thus all routes leading back in their circuitous eventuality to the outstretched palm, and set in the palm is an artefact of cast iron known as The Black Spot.
Milady Sophia has licensed herself to sell sustenance for the mind and body, and on conventicle days she lays out on The Black Spot food for the mind printed with piquant seasoning on her state-of-the-ark, take-on-all-comers, take-no-prisoners, existential proofing press: squibs, broadsides, insurrectionary pamphlets, satires and satyrs, lampoons and pointy harpoons, posters of perilous poesy, and sansculotte gobsmackers.
Next door is the dead poets cemetery, where departed rhymers have the temerity to carry on dreaming up compositions while in a state of decomposition.
Beyond The Admiral Benbow is the very hem of the skirt of Parnassus, dropping down to the town of Necropolis Halt. There are all the old familiar places in their motley along Peep O’ Day Lane: The Zapruder Video Company, the offices of Wilson, Kepple and Betty solicitors, the editorial offices of The Delphic Utterance and Advertiser, and The Blacking Factory: headquarters of The Kamikaze Komics Kompany.
Further still lie flat clover meadows; beyond them the broad Elver, and blue remembered hills.
I have described to you what lies before me; no need to turn my head to tell what lies behind: Sophia in her workshop has made an enhanced Seebackroscope affixed to my drawing glasses. Now I can describe what is spied from this rearview mirror: Parnassus Avenue rises steeply with allotments on the one hand and on the other. Hereabout and all about was once the bed of a shallow sea, till tectonic plates pushed up its trillions of trilobites and sundry whatevers to make this modest limestone plateau, whose allotment beds on slopes of thin soil grow perversely well the local potato delicacy Billy Bones His Fancy, with purple markings on their skins, as of a tattoo, though never two the same.
The erth was voyde and emptie, and darcknesse was upon the deep: overhead from the vomitaries of The Shining City On The Hill fly born again battleships in this year x of The Rage, to bomb the Pacific Ocean.
Higher still in the heavens are the surveillance eyes of The Shopping List: not looking outwards to the starry welkin or to attack ships blazing off the coasts of Orion; but The Big Lebowski, The Agent Starling, and The Horse Badortie peer earthwards to probe the bedrooms of the mind.
I am a Figmentarian, and the figments of imagination are my new model army. The droll regiments are drawn up to engage the forces of The Shopping List, that is handed to all in infancy, and that is serviced by the Organisation Men, the formation dancers.
The highest point of the allotments of Parnassus is the hill known as Spion Kop, but in earlier times as The Spyglass (thus does history put layer upon layer) and here Sophia ascends with a brass telescope, to keep a look-out for the Organisation Men; though she need hardly bother, knowing very well that each month the bloodless ones arrive regular as the curse.
I am the narrative voice, I am the artist, I am Number 6, I am the writing on the wall, and other such poncey personalities as fancy takes me, and according to which of many disguises I decide to wear each day on waking. There is, though, what Sophia calls ‘the dailyness of living’ to attend to, and she is preparing for The Organisation Men. To Sophia they are passing trade for The Admiral Benbow, a source of disposable income, to fund the fire ships that set blazing sail from her buccaneering pamphleteering privateer printing press against the haughty galleons that fly The Shopping List from their peaks; accordingly she brings out the brew that is kept for The Organisation Men and no others – Old Recycled - and lays out the packets of Perineum Scratchings, along with Sophia’s speciality: pan-fried necrotizing fasciitis.
Shush. Here come The Organisation Men. Here they come now. S. and I slip easily into Polari, so that our miscreant verbals are as gibbering gerbils to their unknowing ears: to and fro our sea-mist words go, shuttlecock and battledore, passing to and fro a conundrum Sophia and I have conjured with oftentimes, viz: for an Organisation Man, which would be worse – to realize awfully on his deathbed that he had spent his life as an Organisation Man, and it was too late to do anything about it; or to die without ever knowing what he had been and what he had served?
Our debate wearies itself out, and Sophia tots up the takings – pieces of eight, Spanish, Portuguese, Georges, and louises, dubloons and double guineas and moidores; she is in good spirits at the day’s work and from her Parnassus nano-distillery in the petty pours us tots of rum – 3 month old Pyroclastic Flow. Then, as Sophia always does when life is good, takes me inside The Admiral Benbow to admire the figurehead of the Hispaniola which looms above the bar, and which Sophia swears was carved by her revered forebear the sea cook, using the clasp knife that had done for so many.
Thus talking about art as we are, and knowing that I created famed figments for The Kamikaze Komics Kompany, Sophia thinks to ask me who were my earliest influences. She is a little surprised – for I had never told it before – to hear that my earliest antecedent, who came before any other, and who left his mark on me for life, was the Florentine silversmith Benvenuto Cellini, in the pointy shape of his stiletto.
Though Cellini’s Stiletto was an actual steely blade that he used against artistic rivals, and my stiletto is metaphorical, they have this in common, that they are both meant to tickle the ribs.