NICK NORTON
Strings 3
‘tongue for water’
May 2025
A Scarlet Enclosure
1. spell flocker
Our magus is a man ever near to bankruptcy. He seeks a living as a profane codifier of the social space. He cannot draw a pension and so he will draw maps for a living.
Spectral parish boundaries, the plague dead are in arrears.
The common land for pasturing flocks has now vanished. A great magus indeed, superb sleight of hand.
Plague runs down the fervour for change; authority is equated to the walls. These vast stones are stood and protected in order to prevent disease.
Dream and counter-dream. Hung drawn and quartered, this is the mandala of a state’s revenge. Corpses are decoration for the huge, buttressed walls. A stark ectoplasm beaten into baroque shapes.
The red death has devastated this country. A pestilence fatal and hideous. Blood is its seal, the madness and the horror of blood. There are sharp pains, sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease is over within half an hour. Scarlet stains on the paralysed flesh of the newly dead leak out in the manner of a very good claret. The dark stains cling to stone, and rot any fabric they touch.
Out of the royally appointed familiarity, an unrecognised space appears.
Some set out for a guessed at providence, and they endured until they fell.
2. inliterate life in the field
Borboros: slime, the clay digger’s cess. There is no reason to admire these bodies which we shall now dig up. We give them the name of the field, Borboros: slurry and filth. These corpses are mud, they belong to the shedding discards. Their habits were lewd, they were heretics and have rotted accordingly.
We are the rosy Borboros, a glinting scarlet sheen.
We all rot thus.
3. tyger
Offshore; an island. On the island a ruin. In the ruin a tiger. In the tiger a person. This is not a cat who has feasted. This is a man in an old disguise.
The hermit is in a tiger by dint of ink. A hermit in tiger stripes. Tyger the Tattooed Talent – or so he was once. Now, they have not eaten for days.
They lick the walls of their ruin for both moisture and mineral sustenance.
The burping earth is propelling their island toward rocky company.
Soon this spit of solitude will mingle with a greater flow. Rock to rock, a path will be made. And the hermit shall stand, wrap cloth around their tested nakedness, and armed thus in Tyger Tattoo and decency they shall walk into the nearest village.
In the village he will buy a packet of tea, a pouch of tobacco, cabbage and bacon. The wild animal living in the wilderness is pleasant, collecting post and dole money, welcomed by the villagers without alarm.
Hermits are often eloquent when well met. Tyger tells tales of yore. A farmer discusses the planting of an orchard. The postmistress brings up the matter of the earthquakes, and all three are quiet before this mystery.
Soon the hermit will need to tiptoe home along a strangled extrusion of rock. The ground is still bracing against its own grit. The texture of rumbling makes patterns zigzag over the soles of his naked feet.
The earth shall spill over itself and break itself.
The land shall pull itself apart.
Scarlet scorpions will arise and Tyger the Tattooed will discard their clothing and scream for hours.
In the poor shelter of broken walls, a hermit lights a fire and boils water for cabbage and tea. He snarls at the world as it rolls away on the back of a muddy sea. A taciturn hermit ill met by the cold and annoyed by that buzzing noise which dwells even in the flame and steam; in the rain, in the brick, in the bracken, in the thicket, in the thump of the rabbits, in the buzzard cry and the persistence of midges. Buzzing, the rocks below every ruined wall leap toward the buzzing.
The hermit lights a cigarette and waits for this nonsense to end.
4. by my hair, by the hair of my hairy eyeball
The mazy is.
The amazing mazy is.
And one by one dropped the revellers, in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of their fall. And the rumble of the flood passed by.
The processes of solitude; there are town hermits and countryside hermits. There are feral hermits and there are sanctioned hermits. Sometimes a hermit will be installed for ornamental effect. Sometimes a hermit will hide behind snow and ice, an absolute stillness in stillness. They are cared for by a family of loyal mice. And every once in a while, all the hermits gather for the games.
An occasional and remarkable moment of sporting outrage. A sweeping of solitudes: anchorites pitch their football squad against the united recluses. The ball they kick is a saintly head, donated by the solitary especially for this moment. These retiring types argue volubly and at length about the rules. There is no offside and only one goal.
It so transpires that their goal is faster moving than any of them. Venerable yogis form tag teams, sprinting with the disconnected head. They need no breath. They only run. Even so, victory is shy.
In the absence of illusion, defeated, all the hermits retire to the beer tent and sing lewd songs about the mud of being.
5. the cessation
If the cloth of normalcy is continually woven by our movement and clamour then this cloth is ripped – and plague will do that.
We encounter stillness and hear silence. The stillness is not still. It vibrates, a buzzing potency ever alluded to. Silence is not silent, the sounds heard through this torn fabric are no longer familiar. Silence as a self-evading thrum of that which was previously beyond notice. For this we can find no proper name.
These holes will not seal of their own volition.
Check the mirror, practice your lines, repeat your affirmations, and thus it becomes certain that your voice will be heard. The confident persona now bears a certain reality. The magus bears a noble visage. A mask must nonetheless be provided with apertures. Every sealed surface is a pitted multitude, an abyss in disguise.
Enclosure is broken.
Our skin and our masks are dangerously permeable.
Scarlet enclosure, claret slippage beneath our smeary toes.
Seen through holes, moved through passages; we seem to be wandering in a book.
This uncertain stitching down the spine, a wartime surgery.
Unspool the sewn-up line, and this thread can be used to patch up a cloak.
Our garb in rough, clothing fit for a pilgrim, a beggar, or a corpse. We are rolled Borboros in a patchwork threaded of doubt.
Each book fails. Every closed book fails.
The scything aside of manipulated boundaries, the collapse of a corpse bedraggled wall. It is as if the cloth of normalcy were woven by misplaced bewilderment. This return to an unrecognised space.
We turn and turn again, setting off into fated speculation.
Apparently these gaps are part of a pattern.
The clamour of holes.
A scarlet enclosure.
NICK NORTON’s Shapes Found for Living is available from MA Bibliothèque. Building the Aesopic Body was published by SPTM in 2024. Other work can be found in Socrates on the Beach, Minor Literatures, 3:AM, and elsewhere.
