29: Palace

Mrs Blandings ------------- Tom de la Cruz, an Argentinian stunt double who got into directing avant-coms. One particular com for a snuff brand, heavily influenced by early surrealist cinema, took on the perspective of the snuff's journey through the nose and into the brain with a spectacular pyrotechnic finale of tap dancing neurones. De la Cruz, researching his inner brain tap dance extravaganza, came across a short text in a book called Inner Worlds. Apparently an interview with an English eccentric called Ms Blandings … My sister, Mrs Blandings, has an extensive collection of badges. And she’s friendly enough. That is until you forget to return her messages, because you’re busy with something serious like an operation or a funeral. Anyway you'll find her outside when you return. She’ll be displaying a heavy looking face, a face so filled with blood and fury it is unmistakable what her intentions are: she is going to kill you. She will kill you. … So the text appears to have filtered through several anthologies of alternative ideas, occult thinking and minor histories of the present. Her invocation of an inner hill, with tunnels occupied by invasive wildlife, gave de la Cruz much food for thought, for what if we were indeed all miniature galaxies, each enacting our own brief infinity. So what is Innerilogy then? It’s a blend of psychotherapy and quantum physics, with frightful overtones of messianic shame. To manifest, to materialise, to matter the imaginary … er … transubu … no … transubstantiation through an unkempt messianisusms. What was that last word? Mmmm..mmmm…mmmmmee….mme Sorry there, we’re going to have to cut to a break, we seem to have got stuck in the boothall so to speak. [advert] Found some frightful stains in your big man pants? Well you know what you can say to them now? … Your first meeting with Margaret Blandings, badger lover, will flood back as she pulls out her twin laser cell expander, that's what she called it the first time she showed it to you. That first time you came face-to-face with Mrs Blandings, bandaged mother, she was burning buckets of sand in your garden. You pay her to burn the sand. She was, is and will still be, long after this event, the go to person for burning sand. She was leaning on your decaying pergola watching those three buckets, she held up a book as you turned from closing the gate. This time, the blood filled face closes an eye for aim and the two beams that your body unintentionally intercepts expands out from its smallest element. You will close your eyes to attempt to truly own this moment. But what is that nagging? Was there ever an irreducible element? This thing you fear will be lost is not lost, it is not reduced to a multiplicity. It becomes, again, indivisible. Something indissoluble in the depths of a preternatural meditation. The who you think is you finally sees itself as this pathetic multiplicity, with ever increasing horror at what it is, and tries to turn back through memories, but your physical body is served up on the hack now, the tiller gently pushes the aberration forward into dissolution. It’s looming now over those memories too, sweeping them all aside. This self, this apparition that has appropriated these events, wasn’t it once a young whippersnapper when you first required its services? Elastic in its interactions, that was why it was expedient, that was why you returned to it again and again. But once it had the reigns, it hardened, for though it was initially no more than an unforeseen but useful companion, the real contract was in the small print. For this habit, this self, is there now, opens up the gate to this forgetful place for the final viewing, this place it has built and renovated from the threadbare structure of what was perceived and turned it into a vast ramshackle palace on the silts. But it is built in a landscape cast in darkness now save for the light of the matches you have to strike, one after the other, taken from the small box you were handed by this self at the entrance, the one that held your hand at first, then let go and evaporated moments before you. The remaining mush will be tucked under the hay bed in the field where Mrs Blandings keeps her badger bones, where her husband Hugh grazed the chestnut mare he bought for his granddaughter to ride on whenever she visited, the granddaughter he will never see again … “Right, now, on to the next item, er, ok, so: I have the power of earth, a hill in my belly. The hill I'm talking about is an actual hill, you know? The sort that is hard to cycle up or has streams running down after heavy rainfall, a hill with its bronze aged mineshaft used only by badgers, foxes and all those sorts of things now. Well, of course, I could probably get funding to open it up myself to tourists rather than the earthy morsels and darting insects within my belly. It also has sky surrounding and a small area of beach at the bottom of the southern face, a little bit of sea lapping on the sands there. Well, ok, so, I think we should probably move onto the next item, which is the proposed building of a road down the southern edge of our village …”