Page 159 of Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Against the Day’, a book nobody’s finished reading yet, introduces us to, “the mysterious shamanic power known as bilocation, which enables those with the gift literally to be in two or more places, often widely separated, at the same time”. It’s a very convenient device for a writer like Pynchon – a man who likes to blur truth and fiction, all in the name of having a bit of a laugh, taking us here and there in history and space, “and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all”. Though of course what really is and isn’t on the map is a matter of opinion. Antarctica, for instance, is on the map – but what about the “time gate” that apparently opened over the continent on January 27th 1995, taking a weather balloon back to the same date in 1965? Whose map is that on?
And what about the “Strange Creature from Azov” discovered by Russian fishermen and found to be “moaning like a human…[and] rotating its eyeballs”? You won’t find that so easily on google earth. Still, keep looking, or take your lead from ‘Map of the Strange’, a repository of strange things on google maps.
It’s not just in the ionosphere over abandoned continents or deep beneath the seas of international waters that unusual things are going on. Take Mr John Jones, a 62-year old welshman killed by his rubbish after compulsively collecting every bag of rubbish he produced over the course of twenty years. According to the local coroner, Peter Brunton, poor Mr Jones probably died when “part of the rubbish in his bedroom collapsed on his body, which caused him asphyxia”. If you think that’s tragic, add to the equation the fact that Jones “was seen a week before being found dead at his home in Aberyswyth, Wales, the cause of death was unclear because his corpse had composed too much”.
Still, you might expect that sort of thing in Wales…but Manchester? Well, maybe: yet my attention’s been drawn to two stories from local newspapers recently. One, a clipping from The Manchester Evening News (though, OK, it happened in Bristol, but that’s halfway between Manchester and Wales, so the segue works perfectly, actually) which oddly I can’t find on the website so I reproduce it here:
“The body of a man believed to have been dead for a decade has been found in his flat where his former friend still lived. The corpse was found by council workers on a sofa in the lounge after neighbours reported a foul smell. The dead man was believed to be in his 70s. Police are not treating the death as suspicious. It is believed the remaining tenant, also in his 70s, failed to report the death because he suffers from severe mental health problems”.
The second story comes from The Advertiser. Here’s the extended version that appeared in print:
“A 45-year-old man died from hypothermia after collapsing on waste-land on Northridge Road, Blackley. Terrence Hennessey’s badly decomposed body was discovered by two boys, aged eight and 10, playing in woodland next to their home last June. He has been missing for three weeks. An inquest heard that Mr Hennessey of Whitehill Drive, Moston, used to suffer fits dues to his heavy drinking. He was identified by his fingerprints and pathologist Naomi Carter said it wasn’t possible to say how long he’d been dead. Dr Carter said Mr Hennessey could have developed an acid imbalance that caused him to collapse – and while unconscious his body temperature dropped and led to hypothermia. Recording an accident verdict the coroner Nigel Meadows said it was clear the deceased had had a long battle with alcoholism”.
What brings these stories, and the story of Mr Jones, together is this: consumption. Is not a man being killed – literally – by his own rubbish, the waste product of his consumption, a dark and sinister metaphor for the evils of consumerism we’re all thinking about these days? The consumption of too much alcohol has literally killed another man before his time too: and the mentally challenged old gentleman who left his flatmate to decompose for ten years before anyone else even noticed…was left alone to consume himself. It’s all rather uplifting really.
And needless to say, the Russians who caught the strange human-fish hybrid we met earlier, when interviewed by the press, said they’d eaten the creature, “and admired its taste”.
Thomas Pynchon / cartography / over-consumption / mystery / fish / Weird Fishes / time-travel / fiction / heart failure / asphyxia / Manchester
3 Comments
April 17, 2008 at 9:01 pm
I think they ate an alien.
Consumption…there was a lot of that at the start of the Industrial Revolution, wasn’t there?
April 29, 2008 at 11:42 am
thats one weird fish!!!!!!! WAAAAAA
May 20, 2008 at 3:29 pm
that fish at the top is proberbly a skate, see the eyes, they proberbly arent its eyes, they might be its nostrals, its kind of like a manta ray, its eyes are on its head, skates are a tipe of sucking fish, they stick to rocks and suck all the bacteria off it