He has carved various gnarled forms with knives inherited from his silent father and forced his friends to sit in them in hideous contortions like Cubist sculptures. James shuns all visual and auditory disturbances: the rooms where he does not work are blanks of neutral space. Voids. The studio itself contains a table rent in two by an imaginary comet with its gaps maintained by wires. Around the table are two chairs that flinch and their metal legs twist whispering round each other and James has titled this type of chair 'the mermaid'. It groans under slight weight and produces aches and blisters in the previously well-bodied. James has worked also on a bed which terminates at the waist of a grown man into a series of dot-dot-defeats. The smears of a dead fire lie on the floor and contain (approximately) shards of a failed door, what I thought was a rug but after inspection was definitely a muddy cat carcass punctured by air rifle and a photocopied map of an isolated region in Scotland where hermits perform nocturnal magick to satisfy a god who feigns involvement through casual downpours, so they say. James has no ideal audience in mind and no desire to find a real one. He puts on mittens and burns his post. He uses the speech tool on his computer to consult a medical textbook as he does not care to read. He lifts a plastic sack bulging with rusty leaves and adds them to the fire. A wife stands sulking on a chair. James is becoming thinner, to me, from here.
Image by Sergei Pankejeff illustrating a childhood nightmare. Pankejeff was a patient of Freud. No copyright infringement intended.
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