1: Facticity
Sedated and semi-buoyant musings on consciousness from an East Anglian water park. A poet gets an amazing revelation forced upon him by his publisher. A cheese sandwich gets grilled. Librarians fight each other for fish scraps. A harvest song happens at the end.
First broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM, 10 Sep 2020.
After all, the poet Donohugh said he was once having such a hard time with his publisher, every manuscript he sent came back completely rejected with every passage scornfully annotated, struck through, rubbished. He said it was like entrusting the contents of one's home to the removal men and seeing the one-way flow of each item passing down the line pegged to their removal strings, hoisted out of the empty chamber one by one like old laundry on an assembly line. Until one day, one item got sent the other way, spared being heaped in the dewey memory dump.
The notebook was returned with one passage boldly circled multiple times. “Finally”, the annotation beside it read, “this is it!” And as Donohugh read the words inside the circle it was as if the literary temple he had been trying to construct for the last weeks, months — years, even — fell away like a cheap edifice; like the mere scaffold built around these resonant lines that seemed to pulse with every word's truth. And to think, in the scribble of composition he had barely noticed the scratch upon the page, but now here they were — a gleaming epithet for all times, crystallised in ink. The passage read: “Learn to say Hola! Live life to the Cola!
When Jesus taught his enemies how to fight underwater, they would always want to do it in the shallow end, where they could feel their feet securely on the pool's floor. “No!”, Jesus would assert, “you must fight me in the deep end, where your blows may slosh freely and your feet do not know the ground”.