THE CLAY HORSE - Inspired linguistically by Finnegan’s Wake

Claycome, horsecold, morningblind, it stood. The grass had already turned, and the village woke to find in its square a thing of rivermud, nobody's, shaped horselike, eyes pressed smooth and smelling of the deep-below-ground. The preacher Josias-called-Brent looked upon those eyes and felt the old longing move through him like season, not to know the horse; to be known by it, which is the crooked want beneath all worship, the skinless need - see me, feel me, thinness of thy self reaching out to the thickness of the other. But thy horse had no other. The horse had no in.

They called it the Hearer. The Knower. God. It became the thing. Talk of the town. Doeg was present in the naming. The trouble with the village, as with all the Harrow holloways of all the worlds since first-and-always, was not wickedness but the simpler, sadder, more survivable feeling to forget how to feel into one another. In-feeling, had any German found themselves in this October mist, in this particular shambles. Einfu hlung. Into-feeling. The lost thread.

Adoregoldglorifyhallow! Josias-crowned, Josias-king, Josias-unking…and not one of them asked the other ‘how goest thou, truly?’

The smallgods never ask. They only receive.

They have always been us.

Marged sat hush-humbly in the humpty rocking chair, tapping lightly on the wood, watching the light move from first to second, and she felt (she did feel, this is the necessary point, she was among the last of the feelers) the cold coming off the square, the mudhorse cold, a particular loneliness of a thing being loved that cannot love back. Outside the fableboy lurked in his wash of rays, light gone mole-esque, and she marvelled. Here was a face. Here was an inside behind the face. She did not yet know this was the rarer thing; she had not yet learned it was the thing being lost.

Down deep-diving, the Watchers watched. The Purity Committee purified. Sacred objects have always been useful to the disappointed, for a man who cannot feel into his neighbour may yet feel above him, and the clayhorse made this easy, made the looking-down feel like the looking-up. The coins went green soon enough.

The barn burned first. The widow Cleve pressed her palms to the cold window and looked out at the horse and felt nothing come back and burned her house. Ash. Snow on the ash. The horse stood: perfectly unmerciful, things that cannot suffer cannot comprehend it in others.

They dispersed, each into their separateness, which had been there all along. The clay horse remained, watching east, rivver run, same cold light on same story. We give our empathy to the things that cannot hold it and withhold it from the ones who could, the ones right there, tapping, tapping, looking to the morning yarn, waiting, just waiting to be felt.

A commodious vicus of recirculation.

If only she had been a wiser butterfly. The clay was always wet. Entered by our warm embrace. We chose the clay.

by Cai D