Schwantz Drinking Schwantz Dreaming

The Entrance of the Gadfly

Professor Schwantz samples and later puts paid to a bottle of very questionable poitín laid down under the turf lumps in the fuel shed last winter by myself to be used in case of emergency as a possible rat deterrent. It in no way deters him and he soon sinks softly and for once utterly silently (silence with no sort of utterance is a miracle in the case of Schwantz) into the soft plenitude of my padded writing chair. He now slowly flows out in all directions at once like spilt pancake mix on a tabletop as he travels to that ethereal ‘other place’ we visit when putting pen to paper or brush to canvas. Along with the poitín, and according to his own characteristic predilections, he is subsumed into the bravado and impertinence of a gadfly-in-love and dreams a dream of implausible omnipotence and rattling good yarn-ness.

You will note, reader, gentle or otherwise, that this is a blog, and in a blog everything is backwards. That is to say today’s instalment will be yesterday’s tomorrow and tomorrow’s will be today’s when the present one is yesterday’s. This should help you understand what is unfolding but it is only a part of the paradox of the space-time-continuum and really nothing at all to do with me.

First Appearance of the Gadfly

At that moment there was a small commotion in an adjoining clump of reeds. A gaudy personage poked his head into sight. He seemed not to notice the presence of the Spider and with bravura addressed himself to the Fly.
-Madam, he said, inclining his head in a most genteel manner, -I knew you would be here.
He raised his gaze and turning his eyes like a heliotrope in her direction, winked salaciously through a thousand lenses.
-Well, thought the Fly, -who is this then?
-I, said the newcomer, as if reading her thoughts, -am the Gadfly.
And emerging from the rush stalks he bowed again, this time a full and aristocratic bending from the waist, and smiled condescendingly as if bestowing his flattery upon the whole forest.

The Fly noticed that he was certainly beautiful to behold. He smiled out from a strong moustachioed visage and wore a gleaming black neckerchief studded with what appeared to be diamond pins. Below this his wrestler’s chest was encased in a turquoise breastplate from which dangled an extraordinary array of brightly coloured ribbons and bronze campaign medals. Fine veined wings of opal hue and iridescent gauze and a blue flashing cloak which winked and shimmered like a lighthouse in the shadows of the rush bed completed this first, and, in her opinion, very favourable impression.

It seemed to the Fly that the sun was suddenly brighter, the air sweeter and the musty woodland smells more enticing than they had ever been before.

The Spider, sitting passively in his silken web, grimaced.
-There is not much to him at all, he muttered.
-All is show and no meat. Nothing to quench the hunger of the body and no sustenance for the soul. He is a flyboy pretty thing, all armour and certificates. There is no juice in this one, and no broth in his bones. He might as well be fish food for all I care.

But the Gadfly had a trumpet to blow and it was soon clear that it was his own.
-Madam, he began, -allow me to introduce myself, for I am no lowborn dung heap botfly. His eyes glittered with the sharp danger of a handful of broken glass.
-They call me the Tormenter. I am of Noble and Ancient Race. My ancestors caused dinosaurs in the rampant fern forests of aeons past to trumpet despairingly and lash their tails with brute fury against their very own flanks until they dripped red with blood.
-Me oh my, gasped the Fly. The Gadfly continued.
-I myself, as infant, stampeded horses by the herd. I have caused turf cutters to go mad and leap to their doom in bottomless bog holes. I have upturned rich picnic parties and driven even genteel ladies to tear off their undergarments in frenetic and panic stricken scratching.

By now the Gadfly had risen from his reed stalk and hovering in the air before them with the assurance of an operatic tenor delivering his seventh encore of the evening was clearly enjoying the wrapt attention of the whole Universe and perhaps other and parallel worlds far beyond that.
-I have caused proud generals on the reviewing stand to slap their own faces in the very presence of a hundred thousand disciplined soldiers under their command. Wherever I go I panic the elephant and stampede the rhinoceros and torment the crocodile until they jump through the forest like young frightened gazelles and soar into the air in their torment as do the flying fish of the far and unvisited tropics. Even the pike sheathes its razor teeth and hides its stern eye beneath the safe skin of the water when I come visiting its pool to drink!

During all this performance the Fly remained spellbound; all thought of philosophy and arachnid wisdom and witty conversation vanished from her thoughts.
-I wouldn’t mind having his maggots, she thought. –he looks mighty enough to breed a plague of locusts.

The Fly by now was so captivated by the display being enacted for her benefit that she failed to notice what was happening behind her in the silver web.
(To be continued and probably to be preceded.)


I catch up with Monday Morning


I need a hoist today to raise me from the bed. I grip the iron bedhead and heave. Cold! Cold iron! Cold tiles beneath my feet! Hard to get blood out of my fingers for the test. Stone fingers of a statue. And tired! Tired! Tired! Criss-crossing the bog all night and the moor and mountain. Like King Wenceslas. But a successful day for the painting sales. Me, drained as a well-diked field. And Rain! Rain! Rain! The washing put out two days ago to dry is washed again and again and again, drooping heavy into the lawn which I had managed to cut wet that day during an impromptu sun storm. The red sheets flap disheartened and no bull comes. Not even the donkeys, bedraggled in the barn.

I pull my dressing gown on and tap the keyboard as I pass towards the kitchen. But no broadband comes. Broadband is off. There must be water in the works or cyber pirates. Suddenly the plank wobbles beneath my feet. I am to be cut loose. The bee-buzz of voices around the world that cocoons my first awakening is abruptly silenced. There is nothing in the house now to accompany last night’s ragged dream scraps. Only shreds of distant bird song in the garden and the dripping of the universe against the bland artificiality of the running bath.

I am days behind in my blog. But I have had sales at last and I do have a new commission. Back to the studio? Write first and then paint? My driving arms ache and my eyes weep bleary from the night roads over the bogs. Better to have too much to do than too little! In the company of young men I confirm to myself I am no longer of that generation. The wheel has turned. The great boulder has moved and settled deeper into the ground. But a kind of fitness flows in me. Success is a tonic it seems. I could be thirty. A slow thirty however. But not wiser, I think.

It seems odd, without broadband. Like a death or a separation. I am surprised! It is as though a casual lover grew into a friend unexpectedly and then just as unexpectedly vanished. No note. Only an empty space. There is a startled feeling of loss. Having recorked the bottle and flushed away the rizlas and eschewed the gurus it appears I am addicted once again.

A Spit and a Handshake

But no blog for a few days. Between bailing out my attic and rowing around the potato patch looking for the start of the concrete path, and diving down to where the flower beds used to be to see if there is any truth in the pots-of-gold-and-rainbows story (my garden is overwhelmed by rainbows and now by rainbow trout as well), I have been frequently away on mercantile peregrinations.

I have crossed high ground unflooded for the moment, high bogs and valleys and the sheep grazed rhododendron forests of Erris in search of lawyers to buy my paintings. They are the only people whose heads are still above water. No contracts, for my stars warn me against legal entanglements. Just a simple promise to pay down the line is enough. Through the nose would be better but we are in the midst of recession and if I had gills I could dive down-Derry-down to the real world and see if that story is true. Since I do not have gills, not even a snorkel, I have to take a lawyer’s word for it.

No contracts, but a spit and a handshake will do. If swine flu is not a topic to bring a man out in porous nocturnal emissions (which it is) then this is a time-honoured Hibernian deal-sealer. I am happy to use it as long as it is my spit and his handshake. I am become Gombeen Man and once a name is written in my little Book of Debitors the debt will incubate snugly as a Favour Rendered to the point where soon I might consider running for Political Office myself. For larger paintings, a quick cut with a penknife in the palm of the hand can suffice but since blood swapping outside closed family groups can cause feuding or even death; I prefer gob.

As for rationing and the attendant descent into the lower circles of the 1950s, the Opposition (whoever it may be) is adamant that this retro-measure is the future if the present government (whoever it may be) continues at the helm. Helm? I hear most of the important decisions are taken in that part of the ship of state known as the head where, if not entrails then at least other steaming and recently generated fecalities are readily available for the national augurs’ ponderation so that they can make their usual coprophilic predictions. So says Schwantz anyway.

And as for spitting, though now banned in most of the civilised world apart from China, the practice in commercial scenarios is closer to us than we imagine already. When I enter posh emporiums in The Big City in my Bog Garb of caipín and Wellington Boots I already discern in the attendants Ur-frigid pronouncement ‘Can I help You Sir’ the underlocution ‘Pig-brained filth, I spit in your eye!’ Not much distance from eye to hand. (That is the shoplifter’s motto, by the way.). It is all part of the same incomprehensible paradox forced upon us by the use of language and the droolings of the left hand side of the brain. More of this later. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam. Ad Hoc.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have been away.