On the Naming of Port Moresby

Ever since I realised that the protagonist in Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky is named for the capital of Papua New Guinea: Port Moresby, I've had a bee in my hat about it. In the following text, I will recount the common interpretation of this choice, my own uneasiness with it and finally reconcile myself with the author's choices in order to allow the bee to flee. Whether it does so or rather clings more deeply into my hair remains to be seen. This text contains spoilers.

Port identifies as a traveller, not a tourist, and - at the beginning of the novel - is in search of a place unspoiled by civilisation, an authentic and anonymous experience. Unfortunately for this wanderer, he possesses the name of a distant established place. On the surface, this looks like a joke. Or perhaps it is an admission from the writer that, yes, he is the puppet master and that he is determined to show his authority over the text, albeit capriciously. Most apparently take this as an irony. He wishes to wander aimlessly in the desert to find himself but his name is pinned to the map. And that may well be the fact of it.

However, I wondered if the symbolism went deeper than this. Readers of the Sheltering Sky will know that Mr. Moresby is ill-fated. He will get sick; his marriage will fail when his wife refuses to care for his disease-ravaged body, and then he will submit to death itself. Thus, does having a name which is 'on the map' imply that his end is also destined, that he will always have been travelling to this distant established place, a port indeed, an entry to another world? In that case, this novel, which was published in 1950, seven years before On The Road, will carry a similar message to its better-known cousin: that the search for meaning, although it can be seen as a kind of adventure story, does not inherently anticipate success. Indeed, gambling the coin of self-meaning in the casino of universal indifference may be an excellent way to ensure one's stake is not returned. (Kerouac, put your pen down!)

Well, this is all very well, very deep and very satisfying, but! -- this whole interpretation rests upon the eemis stane of nominative determinism. This is a school of thought whose most famous early exploration was by Plato in his dialogue Cratylus. The rolling 'r' sound of rho, ρ, is well suited to words signifying motion or flow, while plosives like 'd' and 't', which stop the tongue, are appropriate for words describing the end of motion, and so on, and so on. The reasoning that supports the link between the phonic item and its meaning rests in introspection, a feeling about a sound, which is to say - not an empirical observation, not a result found in a repeatable experiment. Try using the reasoning in the Cratylus on translations of the Cratylus itself! It therefore belongs in the group of intellectual activities that also contains numerology and astrology, often labelled 'pseudosciences' (for non-arbitrary reasons).

So what do we have now? A man with a funny name and a nasty conclusion. So far, so ignorable. But they remain together for the duration of the novel, like two words in a sentence. Bowles himself does not explicitly engage in any deterministic or other magical thinking (other than some elements of magical realism perhaps), but he leaves the reader in the company of the two, knowing - I presume - that 'This is a quirk' is not a result that will satisfy the reader of such a profound work. Coincidence places us in a dark room with two poles and allows us to connect them unobserved. It is rather insidious.

It is possible that that is it, that we, the readers, are simply the butts of the writer's dark joke. However, I will attempt a more optimistic conclusion. As can be seen by the inclusion of astrology in the group of pseudosciences, these carefully reasoned intellectual activities lean in the direction of mysticism, a system of religious belief which holds that there exists knowledge not accessible to the intellect. This is consonant with philosophical scepticism, a school of thought which, although secular, holds the same in a somewhat inverted manner, namely that true knowledge may exist but anyway is not available to us.

So, what if we employ this scepticism in our interpretation of Bowles' naming of his central character? Then it remains that the man is doomed to a miserable end and that, while his name may exist as a signpost to that destruction, the reasons forwhy Mr Moresby is star-crossed simply cannot be known. He just is, and it is his seemingly capricious naming, founded in the logically insubstantial practice of nominative determinism, by which the author communicates this impossibility.

This final interpretation may miss outright optimism. In fairness to the writer of his essay, I am looking for hope in a tragedy, but I believe I have found something resembling it. By this last effort at explication, Port Moresby's naming is neither caprice nor a joke on the reader but a meaning whose logic is seated deeply in the text and one in whose making we can be complicit with the author.

Hopefully that will be sufficient to release the bee!

The Sonic Slice

Imagine, then, another world, layered over this one, but separate and distinct, a slathering of peanut butter over tessellating pieces of cheese.

The first, you already know; things there take the form of mass, but in the second, things take the size of their sound in the first.

And so the mosquito, who is small and ugly in the first world, finds itself a large round ball of warm fuzz in the second, carrying with it a static charge that makes you shiver.

And people would be tiny stick figures, drawn by children, with giant mouths, and we would all be wrapped round the immense ticking of the clock, a giant metal cricket, breeping from the upper corner of the empty cubes we live in.

And when we walked, our heels would explode to the size of planets as they made contact with the ground, our Jupiter talons then shrivelling like party balloons as they flew up and returned to earth.

At night, an insomniac would slide into the three millimetres of space between the splashing, groaning merry-go-round of domestic appliances and the sudden roar that blasts through the city like a laser bolt, probably a motorbike in the first world, but in this one? More like a run-away jet-powered crocodile!

Flower Rocket

You can listen to me reading this poem here.

A rocket went up
Into the sky today,
And from its thrusters
There came
A great unbroken stream
Of potpourri,
And inside the rocket,
Every room
And every bay
And every locker
Was full of flowers:
Red ones,
Blue ones,
Flowers whose petals
Were shaped like bottles,
Flowers whose odours
Evoked memories
Of grandmothers.
Flying the rocket
Were flower-people in uniforms
With big flower-shaped heads,
And the two lieutenant flowers
Saluted to the captain flower
And smiled,
And the captain flower
Saluted back
And smiled,
And the rocket went up and up
And around and around.
And when it reached
Its apogee,
One of the lieutenant flowers
Wrote down
Their exact distance
From the directrix:
An imaginary line
Above their heads
That went out into space
And touched the edges
Of the universe.
And the lieutenant flowers
And the captain flower
All looked at each other,
And they smiled.
And then the rocket
began to fall,
And the potpourri
That came streaming
From its thrusters
Now sprayed upwards
Like the water sprinkler
In Piccadilly Gardens.
And it continued
To fall;
It plunged,
It plummeted,
It dropped like
A plump peach.
And at twelve minutes
Past four
On Tuesday, the 23rd
Of May,
One hour
And thirty-seven minutes
After it was launched,
It entered the waters
Of the Pacific Ocean
At Point Nemo.
But now,
Instead of falling,
It was passed from palm
To palm
By the great watery hands
That lie in the ocean,
And wait
For the signal
To applaud.
The ship tumbled
And spun,
And bubbles went up
To the surface
As it sank.
Finally,
Its nose hit
The bottom
Of the Ocean
And slowly,
As though bruised,
It lowered itself
And lay down
On the Ocean bed.
All the flowers
Were dead.
The flower-people had taken
Revolvers
Out of their holsters
And blown their heads off
Ten minutes previously.
And when the metal
Of the rocket
was no longer
Too hot,
Fish would come up
And look through the windows
And mouth words
That are not
In any dictionary
And will never be
Spoken.

Unsupervised One Saturday

At ten o'clock 
one Saturday, 
I sellotaped razor blades 
all over my body 
and wondered why 
I did not become 
sharp. 

At twenty past ten, 
I wrote myself in 
as the recipient 
on all my cheques 
and wondered why 
I did not become 
rich. 

At quarter past eleven, 
I cracked all the eggs, 
hundreds of them, 
into one vast bowl 
and mixed them all together 
in an effort to understand 
the questions of life 
and motherhood, but 
the vast gluey mixture 
just sat there 
and shone 
in the morning sunlight, 
froth like spit. 
It was neither water nor air. 
It was bodyful and knowing. 
I thought I could hear it 
laughing. 
I tossed in all the egg shells, 
but it did not make it better. 
In fact, 
it made it worse. 

At five to twelve, I broke 
a living room 
window 
and wondered 
why 
my home did not fill 
with air.

At half past one, 
I threw 
all the books on the floor 
and wondered why 
the words 
did not mingle and mate 
and make more 
books.

At five to two, 
I looked in the mirror 
and saw 
that I bled 

from the razor blades 
and the broken glass 
and had bits of dried egg yolk 
on my glasses. 
I took my glasses off, 
rubbed my eyes 
and wished 
that I hadn't done 
any of it. 

Then I went 
and I filled 
every container 
with water 
and put each one 
on the floor. 
I made a museum 
of water. 
I made a regiment 
of a water army. 
I kept doing it. 
I couldn't remember 
if 
I'd done it before. 
The water vessels looked 
noble and various. 
It looked like a forest. 
I felt like a giant. 

Soon, the water rose up 
like a tide 
and carried me 
and my sellotape 
and razors 
and my books 
and my eggs, 
and we all flowed 
through the hole 
in the window 
and down the hill 

and into the river

and away.

Symmetric Conditionals

If I'm your cousin, you're my cousin.
If I'm next to you, you're next to me.
If I'm across the road from you, you're across the road from me.
If I'm married to you, you're married to me.
If I'm the same height as you, you're the same height as me.
If I can add your money to mine, you can add my money to yours.
If I'm identical to you, you're identical to me.
If I share a secret with you, you share a secret with me.
If I dance with you, you dance with me.
If I'm upside-down to you, you're upside-down to me.
If I'm the opposite of you, you're the opposite of me.
If I've never met you, you've never met me.

Why I won't self-publish on Amazon

I have decided that my forthcoming collection of short stories and poems will NOT be published on Amazon. This is for, probably, some fairly predictable reasons:

• Amazon pays shockingly little tax relative to its vast profits

• Billionairism can only exist in a world with extreme poverty

• Independent bookshops are a precious resource which will disappear if not protected

• Convenience is not a good enough reason to overlook the above

Plus some additional reasons which have become clear since I published Glassworld last year:

• Writing is unlikely ever to provide me with a significant income, so I might as well make my work available in a manner that's in line with my values

• Publishing with Amazon involves filling in tax forms for a country of which I am neither a national nor a resident, which I consider inappropriate

• Even if I wanted to complete these forms, Amazon's labyrinthine customer-business interaction system has made it almost impossible and certainly very time-consuming to do so

The good news is that electronic and paperback copies will be available from numerous other outlets, including your library and local independent bookshops, and electronic copies will be available from me personally.

Finally, I propose a toast to the fearlessly independent creative! 🍻