Strange Days #1 - Strange Days are here... | Page 6
Theo Mercer
Ghost-man leaves a mark. He is hit by a car and is on the
news. His name is mentioned. The footage is archived, kept on
an external memory device. It persists. It is stamped. Ghostman is named. Terry Appleton. The illusion of intimacy is
born for those few seconds on the West Midlands news, when
everyone knows Terry, remembers his presence at one time
or another. The ghost-man becomes human in death. Death
marked his presence in a way his life never did. Ghost-men.
Ghost-women. Ghost-children. Destined to be known when
it is too late. So it goes.
C
oming straight out of the Black Country, Theo Mercermay not have travelled far in space to get to
where he is today, but that rootedness stems from a
pathalogical attachment to the place that mixes equal
parts fervent affection and distaste.
This paradox of attachment and rejection has become a
central theme in his writing as Theo has tried to tease
out thoughts on love, society, acceptable behaviours and
the implications of what a literary life might be. For a
person so intimately tied up with the words and works
of others, his own writing often displays a contempt for
culture and an endearingly earnest fatalism that belies
his outward personal politics.
Influenced in part by the scatalogical, filthy brilliance
of Burroughs, and drawing on other 20th Century marginal writers like Henry Miller and Hesse, Theo Mercer
‘s collection of personal writing can be viewed on his
blog:
ilovegettingpost.wordpress.com/
---
Self-criticism
of an organic reproductive apparatus
I ask you, what am I? A supposed intellect of merit some
have argued. This is a cause of great concern, as I feel it misses
some concrete realities regarding my mode of activity. I am
by no means an intellect. I would be more fairly described
as an automaton, or an organic apparatus of mechanical reproduction and regurgitation. I commit heinous acts which
subvert my own professed aims, and this inspires in me, at my
lowest, tremendous guilt. The most disturbing act committed
by me, the automaton of incongruity, is the commodification
of critical theory. I appropriate the works of those I admire
more than any and I enslave these works in the pursuit of abstract measures of worth which, on the whole, serve as nothing more than steps towards what could be best summarised
as a life of falsity.
As a scholar (and a scholar of the most base sort) I have enfeebled my mind through becoming enamoured with abstract
values. It is under the sway of such values that I have turned
to critical theory as a crutch; I have debased critical theory by
utilising its insight to mystify the nature of my being which is
a being of self-estrangement. My creativity is stultified, mutated and rendered ugly and partial. I act as nothing more
than the fleshy lens through which fragments are passed and
subsequently sullied. There stands here a puppet animated
briefly by the echoes of the past and the vibrations of the present, but nothing more than that. I cannot turn what I pass on
to any service I consider noble. I cannot create. I am a scholarbee. In short, I am consigned to the rubbish heap of history as
I have succumbed to the abstract value before even becoming
a mortality statistic. So it goes.
?
---
Ghosts.
He wonders through the halls, into rooms. He slips through
door-ways and bedsheets. He brushes past jumpers and masks.
Everything is left slightly out of place by his presence. Undetectable in any substantive sense, he leaves only clues which
may build to the conjecture that he does indeed exist. However, these clues are often lost in the flow of time and bodies
through space.
The ghost-man. He goes to the shop, he purchases his tins
of food and packet of cigarettes. The shop assistant looks
him in the eye and sees right through him. His presence as
transient and anonymous as shelved goods, he fades in and
away. The streets leave no trace of his movements, nor does
the net which he inhabits. There is very little of the ghostman. Fragments of displaced elements which may be pieced
together in the form of a crude map to his being. But no one
has the time nor inclination to do so. Nobody really knows.
Nobody cares. Not because they can’t, or wont. They simply
don’t. There is nothing magical about the ghost-man, he just
happens to move through days and nights without leaving so
much as a bad smell. He pulls the strings which envelope him
like a web, dragging them through the tick-tocks. Like a net
the strings trawl the earth. They catch not a soul. Maybe a discarded wrapper on the bottom of his shoe. That gets caught.
Gets trodden into the carpet. A mark of a foot. But not his
foot. Any foot. The cleaner comes along and sweeps it away,
the history of the wrapper gets forgotten, tied up in a black
plastic bag and left on the side of the street for collection.
Ghost-man feels. Ghost-man is a person. He is. Like you
and me, he is. And yet, he moves with stealth. Not due to his
own efforts, but through the pre-occupation of others. Their
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