Addison

I'm not sure how I'd classify this - it was the product of last night's insomnia high.
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Memory
By Addison Hart

Now let us admit the truth as we know it to be: a good cheese is sometimes worth a world of sorrows; a draught of wine burns away the care of a whispering night – bread is cheap, they say, until it rests in the mouth. Such is the dream-life of the idler. Lithe fingers tied round their still bodies, these things wane with the hours spent in his company. Know this much – the term had ended, and there would be feed for all.

Straw boat-hats bobbed in the dark, light blue streamers imbibing shades of pale moonlight. Fireflies danced a little above the spat-torn clover – the resounding din of a dozen clambering college boys hung listlessly in the sweet empty blackness. Where green gave way to mud and stony path to cucumber garden, white trousers swung over fence gates; a trickle of youthful laughter echoed in the hollow of the ash grove at the end of the walk. Drunk on the dew of the evening damp, they sang to the sky ballads of glory and wine, long-dead gods, and sympathetic women. Sallow, heavy stones peered down upon their shaking caps; rooks on limber twining feet followed the glint of greened bottle-glass embowered in light straw baskets. Into the great house they went, plucking gut-strings and rollicking in belly; the cellar within was admirably stocked.

A stout table was the revelers’ chiefest need: this soon they found; the desired object was discovered standing within an aged room, unused for myriad years. The table was itself notable in age, the sport of centuries, the bearer of a dozen carven names and thousand-thousand amber drippings. It was hewn from one of the ancient ash trees of the estate; upon one of its hoary boards was writ a poem: a drunkard’s graven hymn, a burning echo of thoughtless lust – a nightingale’s song to his moon-gazing hen. Below it read a name – obscured by time and candle-wax – and a date – shades of Shakespeare and Jonson. There were chairs, high and stolid, bearing the crest of a stag in recline upon a sunbathed Arcadian hillock. The boys sat round the table, clubbed it with clenched fists, flailed arms above its girth, and spilled mightily upon its mellowed frame.

Time here failed to pass; no singer among them aged. The span of an hour died within the springs of the moon-faced clock and sank unseen into the glasses. Bottles with fading labels inscribed in French were fast made empty and naught remained of the cheese but leaf wrappings, discarded and browned even before the eyes of their warming abandoners, all feckless youths with minds drifting into laze. The demand arose from these joyfuls for further refreshment, and presently two among them were dispatched forth into the bowels of the ancient house, venerable casks within its gut to seek. Down deep in the dank and chilling cellar could be found all manner of web-encrusted vintage – here discovered emblazoned upon dust-clouded parchments were the names of every one of the fine wine-making houses of France and Italy.

The elder boy, his mind drowned in euphoria, clacked his limpid tongue and thrust well-cleaned fingers in amongst the oaken frames; an oil lantern burned in the steady embrace of his fellow wanderer. An awkward ditty rolled forth in slow release from his fatted, purplish lips –

I beg you, swift let my fingers fly
Here where reposing casks do lie;
The Hand of Glory I clutch in mine:
O! hear me, Lord, and grant me wine.

From so earnest a prayer no ear could turn; the bottles rose, plucked from shelves in steady succession: a bundle grew in his arms – there would be a mighty drinking, the fruit of drudge and burden, of Latin and Greek and mathematics, of a dozen lashes from the brute in office; bursting with vitality, ears clogged against all-pervading cant, collars loosened, strands of tawny hair left swinging in the zephyr, and faces reddened by oar-wrenching, these kings of another day would batten now on spoil.

From the corner of his reddened eye, the boy had seen it: a great and shimmering urn, as of hallowed antiquity – some mighty prize, the jug of Anacreon. Thinking in his haste to grab the thing, he smote an overhasty digit upon the oaken frame, recoiling with the sharp horror of pain before turning his gaze away – a glance at the finger, pink and hot; a glance at the floor, dark and gray and pale and cold; a glance at his fellow, quivering and wan; a glance at the wood – empty! The thing had gone – was this but some hazy dream? Bottles, it is wisely remarked, do seldom walk alone, detached of their own accord from place of repository, wriggling free in some ungainly swaying motion, dismounting said engine to stalk moonbeams and roam in treading pace the far corners of this globe like so many mournful shades. And yet to what agency could this disappearance be attributed? Had the gnarled hand of a mighty Olympian lord snatched unseen the cask to warm the throat of some lyre-twanging poet, his silvered locks bedewed by dripping laurel boughs? The boy in haste withdrew from his exuberant conquest, scuttling as does a rat down the hall, clanking glass dancing feebly in his sturdy grip.

The excited tunes of the singers rang through the room and hung heavy like a cloud in the air. Dripping wet chin-sproutings partnered with grubby cuffs and dust shook from rafters writhed with candle-flames in a mirthful jig. Here they were now, the two who had made the dash; the wine from their arms was seized by their greedy companions. All had been forgotten on the brim of their glasses, yet nothing to them now remained a secret. Laughter and song died away in talk, and talk in thoughtless rumination, and that still in lark-cry: the grounds were alive with the movement of beasts and the swaying of branches. Finally all was lost in the depths of one voice: the young man sang of two flowers; his was a sad song, pained but not bitter, and seeming in its lucidity to pierce like a knife the folded mantle of time itself. There was a rose: a young lover – meek and silent to all – held it in his hand, peered at it, and dreamt in his silence of giving it to She, who spoke and never heard, whose hand brushed the petals of a thousand flowers and saw nothing in a one but reflected beauty. The song wore on – there was a lily: the young lover – his passion caught always beneath his tongue – held it in his hand, dropped here a tear upon it, and placed it in the shade of the beech, beneath which now She slept alone, company forever to the dust and the fallen leaves and the time-dimming stars, which silently smoldered in their courses.

The revelers had grown silent with the coming of the song, and now they peered up from their glasses to regard its singer. As they did so, they stopped all motion, their hearts skipping beats and eyes ceasing revolutions: the room was no longer empty. A dozen others across the way regarded them with equal shock and curiosity: they were the youths of an altogether different ilk and age, carrying upon them lutes and the fashions and trappings of three centuries past, sitting at a stout and ancient ash-wood table, drinking from a great urn and a steaming bowl of willow bark. They gazed upon one another, these two parties, and not a word escaped from any lad’s shaking lip. The boys – their jaws slackened and loosely hanging – did little more than gape over the flickering candlelight at their strange company. There these fellows sat still across the room, the watching revelers of an eve killed by countless thousand rosy-fingered dawns. The undying sun had long since tamed and harnessed time: had ploughed and harrowed in the field of memory. And still for what moment this window of centuries remained askew, they peered in upon one another, and shared for an instant the voiceless calm of the long night.

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Great God, how frail a thing is man; how swift his minutes pass:
His age contracts within a span, he blooms and dies like grass.

cacafire

You certainly have a way with words, addison. I believe this is the first time I've read your work. This piece went a little over my head, but I think I got the jist of it. Is it a college party, (I doubt it) or one of those londoner, snooty parties?(most likely). I wasn't sure, because of the trickle of youthfull laughter. eheheh... I do hope you'll write something down to earth soon, though. I'd like to read it.

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Critique my pieces, and I'll gladly return the favor: Mita of the sky: II, Gloving_Country, Shared Qualms(check this one out!), Gloving country-II, , Capoeira, Father and Son, Silence Come, The Lad I Knew

FollowingShadow

Very aristocratic.

I like your sense of art in your writing. Poetry in paragraphs, this was. Your style is very scattered, but eloquent without being flowery.

If you're going retro (Harding, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, eh?), I'd say this: they didn't use the semi-colon that much back then. The way you used it seemed increasingly to me like a gimmick to separate and connect your thoughts without using such lowbrow conventions like periods and commas.

As for your story, I couldn't find one. Beautiful words and colorful scenes-- but all too ineffective to convey a plot. Things were happening, yes, but they were too well hidden amidst wonderful gems of vocabulary for me to find and connect them.

I'll conclude by saying that I consider it a mark of an amateur if a story beings in prosaic description. Especially: "The (blank) were ((blank)-ing."

-FS

Addison

cacafire,

Thanks for the response; this "story" is, I hope, atypical of what I shall write, for obvious reasons. As for being down to earth, I try to rein in my prose style in other stories, but generally allowed it to run free in this piece. In future I'll keep it on a rather tighter leash; the above work is merely a curiosity. I fear, though, that I've never really enjoyed writing "down to earth" in the sense of cutting out the element of the fantastic; my favourite fiction genre, for example, is the ghost story, so I naturally wander into the realm of the dreamlike.

The situation rather loosely described in this piece is somewhat representative of a particular college environment found in England throughout the 19th and very early 20th Centuries.

FollowingShadow,

Thank you; the style is certainly scattered, I will admit - it is rather like stream of consciousness writing at times. I am somewhat prone to writing in this way, though in a few other of my pieces it's rather more forgivable due to the presence of a narrator. Here it only works because the piece as a whole is simply, as you say, prose poetry.

Point taken, though I'm not going so much into retro as writing in a style I find pleasing. This piece isn't really representative of most of my stories, but my obsession with the semi-colon is unfortunately a recurring aspect of all of them. I'll try to rein that in as well, though I have some peculiar affection for the little guys.

I'm afraid that in this case, there really wasn't meant to be much of a plot - it was just a sort of artistic indulgence on my part. Nothing really happens at all; a few chaps get tight and peer into the past, where they see a few more chaps getting tight - that's about it. The lack of any real characters or even dialogue further separates this piece from being a conventional "story", hence my remark above that I had no idea how to classify it.

__________________
Great God, how frail a thing is man; how swift his minutes pass:
His age contracts within a span, he blooms and dies like grass.

Addison

A very good point, which inspired the change above. Is this any better?

__________________
Great God, how frail a thing is man; how swift his minutes pass:
His age contracts within a span, he blooms and dies like grass.

FollowingShadow

Well, then-- congratulations. Excellent stuff.

And yes, the change is much better. I enjoyed that sentiment much, the 'good cheese worth a world of sorrows,' and then yes, the description does nicely to set the scene.

As far as I'm concerned, you have posted a tip-top work of art.

-FS

Daniel Malone

Well, I'm not sure how to comment. It sounded like poetry. It did confuse a bit, but I liked the images and descriptions.

Very good for an insomniac spat.

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EcanusVotum

I wish that high would visit me during bouts of insomnia. Very will written, you have a great way with words. A good example of prose poetry one of my favorite forms of writing. Sometimes a plot or story gets lost in it though. I really enjoyed it will come back to it again Im sure.

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"While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living" Cyril Connolly.