Pyramid Shots
Mummy it as the Opening of the Mouth. To get back speech, sight and hearing. Two girls bend over a bundle of gold leaf wrappings. De Chirico haunts the square opposite. He's leaning into himself as the old master, when before it was What shall I love unless it's the Enigma? This parcel contains Zoser's butcher. Like his master he thinks he's with the Sun. Wrapped up in a crude arrangement of bandages. Or not so crude it it goes for seventy days. The professor in the fez would say Djoser. Three-stepped to a four stage and finally a six stage pyramid. John Soane's Garden Temple 1778. Emery's working in the sand. The French in parallel and without Napoleon after all... it would be one half of this dream of a dream. A third of the cabinetmaker's Egyptian designs are the library funishings. George Smith: 1808. Just before the Hall in Piccadilly, demolished without the zeppelin or V2. If it wasn't glib I'd say tiredness equals war. Revival calls down enemies. It shan't live a memorial for every beggar's dust. Let all die and mix again. This is the fallout of Personal Landscape. Return to Oasis. On the word EXILE should be added a rather special limitation of meaning. Musing on the suicide—or was it—of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Geoffrey Wagner cites the figures for Seattle, Washington which has the highest mean rate (43.7 per 100,000 of the adult population) in a country where 22,000 people kill themselves each year. 'Britons, bores and Buttered Toast; they all begins with B'. Scrutineering, John Danby sees Mars and Venus as a filmic adjustment: a mixing of shots with so much panning and tracking. Her distress over his departure cuts through the scene like a knife. The vital done for by perverse war and sensate love. Rome (as in room) or Alexandria? Do blocks melt in the river? A critique of judgement, deliquescent, though it's difficult to get dialectic back from Hegel. LOVELIGHTS in your hair tonight. Not a soap or a harsh chemical but a fragrant liquid-creme. Against deep-pile cosmic red, her hair billows sculpturally into curls or scrolls. She faces down, her cheeks chiselled into the perfect mask.
Harold George Shakespeare Hart, eleventh in descent from Shakespeare's sister Joan, is tracked down by P.W. Montague-Smith, assistant editor of Debrett, to High Wycombe, where he runs the family engineering works. "The Last of the SHAKESPEARES" is photographed eyeing the bust of the playwright in the Gallery restaurant, Stratford. Flame of national identity, a muse of fire. Dreamed through war, this cask or cockpit set against infection. The World's rich garden. Another descendant has Shakespeare's walking-stick which is a plain vinewood stave without ferrule or knob. It tapers from two inches at the top to an inch at the bottom, and is slightly bent. Is this Time's prop from the mouldy tale? CLOTHES RATIONING ENDS. Sigh no more ladies. The mystery of the woman who never grows old. BIOCELLE. She has eight changes of dress in STAGE FRIGHT. In Paris optimism fizzes up out of the lemonade. The cooker every woman wants. The home-help lives in! Mr. Therm burns to serve you. Hero has Leander but he's started to philander—Miranda. Updated Anna Magnani attends the premiere of ANGELINA. She is greeted by the padrone of Gennaro's in Soho. In Rome the part earmarked for her is rewritten for Bergman. British Gas is nationalized. Karin talks to the island. Blinded by volcano gas she wakes and sees. It is lovely. Sam Wanamaker sees only a grimy black plaque marking the site of the Globe. It is set in the wall of Courage Brewery which hides part of Maid or Maiden Lane. Now Park Street. Burnt out of Hollywood he thinks he can set the Bard up again: FOR SALE. REDEVELOPMENT. If I had to do it again I would do it again and I would do it the same. Another advert says CONCRETE GARAGE for £50. 100 miles free delivery BUILD IT YOURSELF. Like those pill-boxes along the coast which my father explained. Against the Nazi menace. The comic frames accentuate the helmet and reduce the language to donner und blitz.
They drive a tunnel from the corner, cutting into separate compartments. Gravel down to rock. The magazines are plundered and replundered. Sacrilege is obscured by fire that rages and smoulders for weeks. Mud-brick walls are burnt red throughout. Baked. Each time the chamber is cut deeper. The more wealth, the more isolation, the more temptation to share. Means take. A false portcullis groove. Roughly dressed limestone. A false floor of clean sand. But the gutting makes things last, oddly, as the superstructure collapses and rubble piles up. What doesn't get out? Charred fragments of a coffin, a skeleton with a jar resting against the skull, a flat blade of copper, ivory bracelets, a pink-veined alabaster pedestal cup. A small hardwood chair almost destroyed by white ants. A tall jar with rope bands around the shoulder. Jars standing up like people in a crowded room, others knocked diagonally in disarray. Matchstick wall decoration. Corn bins. Seal-impressions, some overlapping. Emery explains in his first volume, a massive folio: These are the hard facts revealed by the pick. Any theories come later. She is wearing a long clinging dress with wide shoulder straps which leave the breasts uncovered. A green dress. She is sniffing at a lotus flower. A war discovery being taken in. You pick up the threads after rainstorm. Turbaned workers stand in a pit beyond the bull heads bench. A man dressed in English clothes stands at one end of the east outer corridor. He is consulting or writing notes, is absorbed but solid and casual in his command of the situation. He is wearing a hat and what looks like a tie. The axonometric projection distorts to show the whole: regular niches and slots reaching up to a double roof and mastaba with a palace fa‡ade. An image of up-ended girders perfectly aligned. Modernist grid for cellular frenzy.
A collector has tactical instinct. It is a way of remembering. By a certain passage in Strabo. Came through the desert thus it was. The sand baffles like water. Wind heaps up dunes. An avenue half-glimpsed, twisting away. Sphinx territory. So much is so. You climb the steps to survey a strip five miles long. You gauge the boxes and channels which lie below. You dig and sift, recording each detail. Feel wonder and something like remorse. Can one be anything but a spoiler? Rifling chambers with trust or devotion. The god of this city is Sakr or Sokkar, the hawk. A shaft of light breaking through low cloud at sunset—an inspiration for the triangle in reverse. The body in a safe place to support the ka. Two sets of identical rooms. Eyes wrenched out, the place retains form. Zoser walks his stairway to the stars. A job well done, vizier, magician, healer. The hieroglyph for foreign country is a sign showing mountain peaks. The corridors are lined with blue glazed tiles suggesting reed work. Gilgamesh is, roughly, his contemporary. Thirteen entrances are set into the walls, which are recessed in the Sumerian style, but only one is real, giving access to the complex.
The staples rust and pop out. That's the logic in this arch business. THE KISS OF FATE. SMITH AND THE PHAROAHS. THE TALE OF PHILO. Pictures that thirty years won't wear away. Ayesha: She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. A kiss of welcome and his hood falls back. On which ring was cut the cartouche. He's a boy turning the page. The hawk that has spread its wings. Opening the last continent. An apprentice to marine engineers, Liverpool. Exactness with a pencil. Accounts for that skill at the drawing-board. Overcomes any bite on the ankle. Molly and the mudir at home is a tent shared with sand-flies. A partnership, he insists—living soft and feeding well through barren days. A roll of drawings is the everlasting house. The walker puffing contentedly at his pipe. Bluff warmth. England figures as a ghostly pylon: extended fuel and making the best of it. Vim on the tiles, feet up by the sofa, the New World silent beam. A pound that has to slip.
The company is sealed: each with food and the tools of a craft. Do they go with joy, lined out in the scheme? A decision to take poison or an order. But hardly a surprise. The vase-maker plays with stone as if it is clay, turning in lips towards the centre: schist (form the layers you split). The design says here it is but whatever you mark shifts into something else. The slippery serpent of the old Nile. Dusk rides on frail papyrus. A dummy boat is cut into the rock and encased with limestone. Journeys beckon where nothing moves. Dummy granaries and storehouses.
Between campaigns he sits in the embassy: at a desk behind battered retaining walls, dressed stone. Intelligence requires parallel skills. Patience, intuition, the joining of fragments. A nose for the way things are. Air photographs. Broken plurals. Allegiances. A fig-hawker in the bazaar may be of the Brotherhood. Buy or sell as the stars peep. They want us out but they need us. Canal investment stirs the haggard's every feather. Kindly counsel over a barrel. Whispers in a labyrinth where the coffee tastes like syrup. with bitter fumes at the bottom. Wailing notes of the call to prayer. Petrol fumes. Stepped house-fronts like a negative pyramid. Still there's the palimpsest—what's beneath the Koran, the Bible and Herodotus.
Idiom of wireless traffic. No ineffectual adjectives. BULLSHIT is an army word. LET HIM KEEP BUMMING ON. THE TANK'S ABOUT TO BREW UP. WELL BLOODY WELL WAKE UP AND ACKNOWLEDGE. It's not so easy to say it's finished. The echo catches in the passage. Half a face blown away. Holbein's signature. The nature of the beast. To balance the factions. How about a Scotch at the Turf Club or the Semiramis, a shared joke. What in this case is 'They'? What is 'We' for that matter? Whose interests to secure. When will things get going again? You can't reach into your pocket for ever. To survive interruption you plot in dreams. The Exploration Society taps out numbers for The Department of Antiquities. The news sits for its portrait back home. THE THIRD MAN. A game played out in the sewer. Shepperton dubs Vienna with the king of dykes-the Fleet coursing through a tunnel fourteen foot high. Fingers grope at the heavy lid. Zither music.
Page(s) 70-73
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