10 Jan 2025 / {Not} Fiction

Grandfather’s Monocle On A Gimlet Eye

Have you encountered Mephistopheles?

I actually met him. Briefly, in brush past and cursory glance as I rushed to board the train to Battersea. London 1960. True to form and continuity, the day was grey; greyer than usual, black almost. Heavy and weighing odious, a depressive overhang without a sliver of sun. Such a set stage, all prepped up for the great demon. I know he tries half-heartedly, but he cannot be missed. And once he chooses to reveal himself, he does not want to be missed. Those who behold him must beseech him for release. It is seldom granted. I am that rat on a glue trap. He was the toff in a Savile Row suit. Mephistopheles hurried to urgent business of shredding the world to ribbons. Spared me a sparse glance. Our eyes met; in an instant he poured disdain into me before quickly stabbing me in the ribs. Swift upward motion reaching the heart. As he punctured, his fetid breath said the words “Stab when occasion serves”. Eyes are windows to the soul, I forfeited mine to Mephistopheles. He pocketed it neatly in the left breast pocket of his double-breasted suit stitched by the Cad & the Dandy. What followed then and thereafter was an extruder of ethereal futures all contained in the present.

I must also tell you that I liked to wear a monocle. Liked to, because I used it electively. I am fortunate that the one I had was an astigs. It fitted with a precise prescription lens perfect for my astigmatism. A condition inherited from my late grandfather albeit in the opposite eye. When I liked clarity I put it on, when I preferred the blur I let it dangle. Life, I believe, must alternate between blur and clarity. It is easier to negotiate the path this way, because it calibrates the view. I wore the monocle as affectation mostly. And meagre measure of affection for my grandfather. Besides, the cast gold rim gave it character, or a Dame Edna Everage type of ridiculousness, or both. Between a wink and a nod, the monocle remains heirloom. Not entirely retro, nor very pragmatic, my adoption of the old monocle was also by design. A hipster’s head should explode at the thought of a monocle, but I gleefully adopted the device which should actually join the Dodo because it gave the impression that I knew everything. On the upside, it also made me look rich. A surprised expression, and I could cause it to drop for emphasis. A monocle carries that air of conscious elegance. Mine kept falling off because it was unaccustomed to my contours and I had to use facial muscles to hold it in place. It caused a sneer, now permanent. That more than explains the use of a monocle in the swinging sixties by a man in his thirties. Out of context if you may, but that’s what I remain. With the brush grandfather’s monocle had been singed by Mephistopheles. The contraption had then fallen during the stab as the demon hummed Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris. That he should choose Latin was unsurprising. That I should understand it, was alarming: It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in misery. Mighty line indeed. The monocle fell off. It dangled and yo-yoed before the pendulum settled to less agitated swinging and momentum spent itself to inertness. I paused to pick up the ocular aid and affix it to the eye more by reflex and habit, less by necessity. It now stuck to contours of my eye socket like a vacuumed object. No chance of falling off.

I did not tell you this, but think I should. I am an admirer of Andy Warhol. This, because as a quasi-mad chemist, a student practitioner of psychedelics. Like much else in my life, I am a dabbler and a dilettante. Typically this gets you nowhere. In my case it transported me and then cast me and chained me to a place which is indescribable. I have free will but in as much as the tether allows. Notwithstanding this condition, I retain both admiration and practice. Warhol and psychedelia in special appearance, something like the Psychedelic Theory. An enhancement of perceptual limitations from their common degradations. A guiding, disembodied voice told me it was taking the monocle eye to a radiation receptor which had wider aperture than normal. That it was introducing me to several bands – electromagnetic, metaphysical, morphogenetic, Akashic, geomagnetic. I likened it to the old transistor radio set my father had and the bands I played with as I tried to tune it amidst the crackle. What I knew for a fact is that the human brain is much like a radio receiver for consciousness. Psychedelics played the game of selling portals of new tunings to fresh perceptual frequencies. These, I knew, could be quantum or higher. Pretty heavy stuff, but it made intuitive sense. I had, and I believed I had, spectral advantage with increased photosensitivity and fair degree of visual acuity. I also understood that kaleidoscopic vision is unbearable. And it carries a lot of the sludge of malevolence sprouting anxiety.

With chaos as information and intimacy as weariness, I was drawn to the journeys. Dark, dank, fiendish creatures were gathered in a great collective. They cannot be described, only encountered and experienced. With the monocle as pull portal, sulphur tinged drug-fumes as media, I tripped on the demon’s whiff. A strange whirl of several worlds, each tied to the state of being. Embedded in the mucous of moulded misery. Self-perpetuated and self- flagellated. Impossible to transpose in descriptions. Deluded doers thinking themselves separate from the deed and the done. Skateboards of snakes and ladders with wool pulled before every rider’s eyes. A slow burn of metaphorical Godzillas and Giger Counters. In this sanctum sanctorum, was the God of Chaos. Inexplicably amorphous entity in an impossible posture, sitting-floating-standing in a cross-legged stance. Unimaginable haunches stretched across the ether. This strange pier, this form of the formless was surrounded by all manner and description of thought and concoction, cause and effect. It appeared entirely pointless to me, but this simulation was the cosmic mind turned upon itself. Behind the terrible churn was an overactive distiller of misery. It was accompanied by the apparatus of affliction into which it poured and stirred gerunds of terror. Uninterrupted and incessantly without pause or reflection. A fever pitch of consistent and implacable prepositions and predispositions to infinite states. Existence at the centre of them all. Existence, consciousness and sufferance with spurs of perpetuity. A fantastic creator of creatures and all there is as we know it, poured concoctions into innumerable forms. A grim game which constantly gained velocity. Concocted forms assailed each other, and therefore themselves, in a merry-go-around of misery replicated endlessly. The serpent devouring itself amidst a phantasmagoria of shadowy creatures. The mash which is the world. The terrible entrapment. Familiar nausea in the quagmire. Impossible escape. Not one knew itself much less the other in this war of shadows. Birthing seals and murderers, a seal waving at me: sealers began shooting the seals, and then beating them, and hooking them to drag them to their boat so they could skin them. The seals were stacked in the boat in a bloody, lifeless pile. That's when I saw the waving seal. I first I thought he was dead too. He lay on his back on the bottom of the boat, cut open by a knife from his throat to his belly, his eyes to the sky - like he was looking straight at me. Then he waved his flipper. Just once at first, then over and over. It was as if he was saying to me "please help me, please help me." I watched in anguish as the boat motored on...and still the seal's flipper waved. The sealers kept shooting and clubbing seals and throwing them in the boat...and still his flipper waved. Then finally, mercifully, the waving stopped…People in white coats, studious, officious looking people among monkeys with electrodes embedded into their skulls, joined by wires, and cats in auditory tortures and guinea pigs…limbs in jungle traps festering as those to whom the limbs belonged writhed in agony for days, weeks…scalding waters and crabs and lobsters and octopuses and monkeys boiling alive…a baby elephant snatched away from her mother for slavery and service and display and demonstration in faraway lands…lions shot through the heart in the savannah in a game called canned hunting…gentle giraffes felled as killers grinned and posed…entire forests burned to a crisp, mountains blasted and rivers poisoned…I saw slaughterhouse floors and I saw animals tied in streets waiting for their murderers with the simple prayer of a sharp blade and a deft murderer…I saw crushed bodies under wheels, writhing and waiting to die…I saw and I saw. And I saw again, the agonizing indescribable pain. Incessant pain. Concocted forms senselessly collapsing into each other. All of them bound and gagged and tied by a single string of suffering. The terrible clothesline stretched from blood red horizon to blood red horizon dripping with screams, shrieks, broken bodies, free floating body parts. I swayed in the gusts of foul winds which wailed whispers of fear, anxiety, anguish, pain, memory, dread, astonishment and kept at it even as vocabulary ran dry. The soaked black sun of doom with rays of gloom scowled at the clothesline in the laundry of Hell. Crinkled and ironed everything with rage, greed, malice and relentless torture. This was the scene I saw. Characters changed and remained the same…everything ever created dangled on the clothesline of woe. No one thought of relief, much less redemption. There is none to be had. Diablo is the Divine. All creatures are condemned wretches…It was impossible to stay on. I managed to reach my flat. The first thing I did was to wash my face. In rising from the basin I recoiled. My face in the mirror: the left eye had disengaged to independent line of sight. It went hither or it went tither as it pleased. I quite like the eye’s consummate artistry now, but I was baffled then. I did not realize attempts at escapement. From alignment with the world. The condition is habit today. I look here and I see there. What for everyone is the merry-go-around of soaking in the sights of the world is for me, the full circle of a doomed hopscotch. It was maddeningly, frustratingly exhausting. I saw all and everything for the dank dark drudgery it is, neither boon nor bane.

Always outsider to insiders, I am now completely othered; I belong nowhere. The desert I occupy is inexhaustible but I don’t resent it. When the mirror had shown my face dripping with dribblets of water, the eye which had worn the monocle had turned opaque. A milky white countenance, fascinating and repelling at the same time. The monocle is necessity now, a core need. Terribly scratched, but still resplendent, It cloaks the seared eye which sees, but not this world. My monocle eye sees the extruder of ethereal futures all contained in the present as inexorable conveyor belt run by ministering intelligences. They start to sing as one is carried without a twitch, excruciatingly slowly into an Eternal Loop of Cause and Effect. Ministering Intelligences sing. They begin with a cappella before moving to cantata. The song, if one can call it a song is not a song. It is a chant: Build God a Church and Laugh His word to Scorn... They chide the rider of the Eternal Loop of Cause and Affect endlessly. Over and over, again and again. The words are an earworm now. They fall like knives. Several in succession. Very precise. My moment of Madness. Laugh or panic? Tray or stack? Go cross-eyed or jolted upright? A straightforward affair. Fait accompli. And I didn’t know it. I am after all, a languid drop dripping from the clothesline of Hell falling into in the cesspool of being. Mephistopheles, terrible demon of ribbon ribbed rubble, harvests souls. Casts them as grain and granule for the extruder of ethereal futures all contained in the present. Playing along, I am mere dark servant of destiny.

I have said whatever I had to. I rue the fact that you are spared the condition which rules me. And can actually hum Bobby McFerrin’s opiate. That you Don’t Worry, Be Happy.