Certain Drolls After Certainty — Nick Norton

1. Fable-function

Socrates took time to versify certain fables while imprisoned and awaiting execution. He was responding to a dream, a dream he remembered from long ago.

‘I thought it safer not to leave here until I had satisfied my conscience by writing poems in obedience to the dream. […] I realized that a poet, if he is to be a poet, must compose muthoi rather than logoi [‘‘fictional tales’’ or ‘‘fables’’ rather than ‘‘rational arguments’’]. Being no teller of fables myself I took the stories I knew and had at hand, the fables of Aesop, and I versified the first ones I came across.’ (Cited L. Kurke, with annotations.)

We discover that Aesop’s fables are what is at hand, they are associated to dream and memory, and we see that the fables have been exchanged ever since literature has been circulated and discussed. We can also observe that fables do not resist the interlocutor’s hand (in this instance, a modification from prose to poetry). They are continually reintroduced into dialogue and repeatedly placed before judgement.

Aesopic tales were printed as soon as the printing press was invented. They have never been out of print. Fable, as a form of a story, tells tales via an absurdist critique of the endless struggle between the weak and the strong, the entitled and the disenfranchised. A fable is a critical comedy drawn from the folly of shame, pride, vanity and greed. Fable-function has a present liberty, wherever it is found, a roving scrutiny simmering beneath the gathered personages, these strangely exact observations disguised by non-human masks or folly’s pantomime.

‘Aesop has two subjects – the exercise of power and the experience of the powerless who endure life and all that it inflicts on them. […] The discrepancy between the powerful and the powerless is a source of humour but it is also the basis of Aesop’s critique.’ (C. Gebler, 2019: 7)

Fable-function entertains relationality as negotiated non-equivalence. It is found in short-form critical tales, embedded in absurdity, or draped in comic tropes. Fable-function as an examination of power, a generation of humour, and then an application of the seemingly ridiculous as means to disguise its exacting evaluation.

The fable, as carrier of the fable-function, can be seen as part of a persisting lineage. Its form is an ever elaborated presence. Yet in this manifest appearance there is also an inferred tale of the lost and the vanished. We do not get to read Socratic verses derived from Aesop, for example. If an implied authority is sought in the lost source material, a philological quest, this is a truthmaking that operates via lacuna. A bridging tale, scroll, or book is presumed; even the invisible is worthy of transmission. 

This is not a search for unerring purity however, these are not sacred texts. From their earliest transcriptions a fable was considered as an object to be gathered in the manner of a bricoleur’s passion. It holds some of its meaning by being found in an assemblage of yet further significance. The Aesopic canon might be continually written and added to, allowing for an ongoing adjustment of meaning with regards to the contemporary context. 

A normative ending to a typical fable is a separate phrase distinct from the fable’s story. The moral of the story: an editor or commentator will muster their collection and then add a lesson, conclusion, or their own thinly veiled opinion. This is the ‘epimythium’.  By such contextualised presences a further speaking can be electively drawn forth. An ethical armature is added, and on occasion this pithy ending may be quite divorced from the apparent action of the fable.

Some of the durable potency of the fable, as a story form, results from this material being doubly available. It is an ethical literature responding to the context of choice, and it is an absurdist critique of endless power struggles. As a critical comedy drawn from folly, all of this material is both changeable and enduring. It is motile to the point of vanishing, and yet it is availably embedded among broad swathes of culture, wherever one finds discrepancy between the powerful and the powerless.

2. After Certainty

…not to leave here until I had satisfied my conscience…

Imagine the everyday as a weave of recognised perceptual cues and habitual conclusions. To be imprisoned, to be enchained, to be ill, to be put into quarantine, or simply to be sent elsewhere: if the cloth of normalcy is continually woven by our movement and clamour then this cloth is now ripped. We encounter stillness and hear silence. The stillness is not still. It vibrates with allusive potency. 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 other than ‘silence’. A cessation of mass movement. Zoonotic and panzootic outbreaks call forth modification of posture and garb, our imagination adopts a dual hazard jumpsuit. This sealed up parade approaches; rubber boots calloo as if stranded ducks. This processional stomp is the only noise to be heard above one’s filtered breathing.

A bricolage with luminosity advancing through a pulled together fable-formed entity. 

This assemblage of words, reminiscent of an improvised clotheshorse, sat on a pedestal with spring loaded jaws attached. It is a device to catch the sun, an astral mousetrap. On the ground, its shadows look like letters. The light shines through and it is not hindered. A celestial object sheds flakes over the sky; elongated curls which mirror our first writing. My calligraphy wriggles this way and that, enveloping my head. My first writing is of shadow and cloud. I am bedazzled by calligraphies of ground, air, and page; an asemic punctuation of the unknown. 

We will start with a book before getting to the world. 

We must start with the world, before creating a book.

The sensed environment is always uncertain. We are creatures of necessary anxiety. Pop-eyed lemurs who fluked it this far. If our environs become too certain then body movements are likely to seize up in self-consciousness. Certainty outside insists that the regimen continues all the way inside. 

When one is in such a concrete situation the swaying of our processes seize up. There is now little room for the jaunt, jig, or a waltz. We are enclosed by that which we understand. Intimacy is reduced to a model distribution of airborne water droplets.

After the scything aside of fixed-up certainty, if the cloth of our everyday is woven by our returning movement and clamour then, notice, holes are occurring and apparently the holes are a part of the pattern. An original pattern that cannot yet be claimed: a plague will do this to patterns. It is a complex, unsettled set of perceptions which are foregrounded and then vanished; meeting stillness which is not still. 

A somewhat queasy revelation. In an instant, down the holes. This cumulative silence of being is so easily the intimate of death.

A great sheath of unaccountable particles. There is one, there is two, there are billions.

While our intimate cessation is guaranteed, the ghosted possibility surrounding it remains a vibrant uncertainty. Our death offers a teasing hint that it may belong to somebody else. It will happen on another day, perhaps not at all. If you are rich enough, perhaps death will look the other way.

There are certainly drolls after certainty. Fable-function is after certain certainties, chasing them down the hole. Every sealed surface contains a multitude of holes. Enclosure is broken. Our skin and our masks are dangerously permeable. Therefore, despite the unyielding surface of the conceded-real, beneath the skewed dreams of an unguided star – a rogue orbit, magnetised to misnomers – silence answers silence. Our perception has moved through a hole. Perhaps several holes. Obliged to the warren, holes and tunnels, aligned to White Rabbit we call out: Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late.

3. An Aesopic Body; patterns and intensities

… in obedience to the dream.

An Aesopic Body acts as a performative extension of fable-function. A bridging theatricality; an ambivalent melding of non-equivalent relationships. Gathering, storing, patterning memory and narrative – for intimacy and detachment – an Aesopic Body allows connected-distance. A weave of memorable image pressing towards a future. With persisting memory – which is to say, persisting acts of imagination – these collected symptoms, patterns, and fable-function, allow literature (a narrative symptomology) to echo forward bearing a predictive statement: memory shall also be in a future. 

An Aesopic Body sneaks its tales of futurity beneath Power’s stops. It prepares a reader, or listener, to be a partaker in change. A fable-function engaged with a pattern of preparedness for change; is this literature? Rather than any preservation of an existing state, it is by responding within and from its shifting possibility that memory recalls a future.

Memory slips into literature; literature as nomadic recollection.

The storying urge remains, narrative persists, a brutalised body is never exactly silent. The seeking of distance and connection, the difficult transactions of terror and aporia, all open into a thought-space. Here there can be active discovery and contemplative exploration. A connected-distance – active closeness, studious focal lengths: this thought-space, where you are. 

The picaresque adventures of The Aesopic Romance underline this point of the brutalised body. Aesop as a slave is bullied, sold, and then re-sold, flogged, treated with disdain, and – although by wit and wisdom the slave becomes free and gains many plaudits – in the end Aesop is cheated and summarily executed. The condemned fabulist is seen telling fables all the way up to being thrown from a cliff.

Via this biographical seed (be it an imagined event or otherwise), a continual relation to death can be expected in fables, in carnival, in the sottie play; in the fable-function as short story, or as performed foolery, or as found in numerous aspects of literature, performance, and art. The fable-function use of persona – of animal actors most commonly in the Aesopic canon – are speaking of authority, controlling interests, or the powerful by using an atemporal setting, brevity, or a coded ambiguity. The rise of folly, or of the abject, is applied as an actively comedic means by which to relay such nested relationality.

F. Goya, 1799, Caprichos no. 47 Obsequio á el maestro (A gift for the master).

‘The performance of humour acts as a form of social criticism. […] humour works in the interstices between narrative and discursive structures […] reminding us of the presence of a law that we no longer have reason to obey. In doing so it undermines the law. It makes us feel the uneasiness of living under a law – any law.’ (Eco et al., 2011: 8)

Humour works in the interstices between narrative and discursive structures… Valeska Gert, discussing her ‘Dance Pantomimes’: 

‘I bend my knees slowly, spread my legs wide and sink down. In a sudden spasm, as if bit by a tarantula, I twitch upwards. […] I’ve been exploited. […] I was dancing coitus, but I ‘alienated’ it, as people say nowadays. Art is always an alienation of reality.’ (V. Gert, 1993: 16)

This is a grief work for ‘the whore grown old’ (1993: 16), a prototypical figure who possessed Gert, as it were, during the dance. A choreography of pathos, and rage. Its grotesquery was a manipulation of desire and memory, form refusing to forget, a pattern – simply – of refusal. An idea of female prostitution, of age and desire, of sex and abjection, is transformed into a bodily challenge. 

To understand lamentation as a role in an Aesopic Body is to try to comprehend its visceral intimacy coupled to distancing; to try to understand its complex performance as a service both to the dead and to the living; lament has within it a functioning quality: connected-distance. It is preparing the aggrieved to become partakers in change.

Connected-distance relates to ‘Alienation’ as lensed via Bertolt Brecht. Alienation, or estrangement, or distancing, as a twentieth century symptom resonating with the older performative tradition of lament.

To alienate (verfremden) applied theatrically, has to be associated as a quality intertwined with the nature not just of the staging – décor, lighting, costume – but also the actors’ performance. Gestus should be quotable, not just in words but in a stance or presence. Audiences recognise a character’s core function by a quotable gesture. In Brecht’s theatre, Gestus gave out knowledge of a character’s operation in their extended relationality. Brecht was asking his actors to inhabit and articulate a patterning of connected-distance, a dynamic precursor to, or doubling of, the Aesopic Body. Gestus as gestural resistance; a narrative presence set against aspects of society in order to quote its continued story (a brutalised body not silenced). 

Gert claims to have created ‘Dance Pantomimes’ independently, before working with Brecht, operating in a cabaret setting at first. Yet Brecht and Gert each may have drawn from a similar range of influences such as vaudeville, sports spectacle, and circus clowning. For Brecht, in particular, there was a well-documented interest in cinema with Charlie Chaplin approvingly discussed and overtly influencing his notion that ‘the actor’s face should be an empty face written on by the body’s Gestus.’ (C. Weber, 2000: 42). The gestural intervenes in the social to produce a performative sense of alienation. The cinematic clown is in play.

In ‘What is Epic Theatre’ Walter Benjamin gives an example of a cinematic freezeframe or a doubletake, pointing to gesture and alienation as means of articulating this interruption, reminding us that: ‘Interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all structuring’ (W. Benjamin, 1999: 148). We have thus a coincidence with literature, cinema, and theatre: a clown’s interruption structures our approach to understanding. 

The editing process as slapstick. An interval is glued into communication alongside another gap, the cut as interruption. Disruptions, intervals, passageways and scene changes rhythmically structure the tale-telling, and hence the stage is transformed into a thought-space. 

As Gestus is a patterned image, articulated with the rhythms of movement, so does the gesture re-present; the interruption re-members. An art of interruption; a means of reintroducing the fable-function into cultural production. A manner of critique that examines ‘discrepancy between the powerful and the powerless’ and finds that this ‘is a source of humour’ (C. Gebler, 2019: 7). 

A gathering and shaping of metaphor evokes the Aesopic Body as a viable embodiment (a metaphor of metaphors), taking fables from the twenty-first century toward new literatures. Within such patterns time is gesture compressed into memory; this compression produces melancholy. Personal loss accumulates over time. It is an incremental collection of absences, a correlation of aging. For melancholy not to become a trap then some further element must be introduced. To lament is an act distinct from grief, bereavement, sadness, or melancholy. To lament is to craft a mode of fable-function: the discrepancy between the dead and the living becomes a source of transformation.

The Aesopic Body has pockets, some pockets are for discrepancy and some for certainty. 

The lamenting body is part of an tale-telling lineage, its form is an ever elaborated presence of life spoken through death.

4. A gutful of sadness, a bag of laughter

…compose muthoi rather than logoi…

Given that Aesop was described as a slave, socially disempowered in all but tale-telling, it can be said that fable-function is a lowly creation. Fable-function as the language play of exclusion. If you are already at the bottom, it is inadvisable to punch down. The observation of eagles, lions, bulls, and so on, are therefore a manner of aiming one’s humour-salted criticism towards the larger and more dominant personhood. The comedy of slave-masters becomes restated as those masters allow the fable to be told to their children, as an amusement, or when fable is deployed rhetorically, as a means of making an ethical or diplomatic point.

What then of this lineage of lost books? Cultural imagination, as a broad term taken as a means of articulating memory, is full of gaps. Cultural imagination, when seen as a cloth riddled with holes, acts as a fair representation of memory and imagination in relationship. Memory is a special expression of imagination. This holds socially as well as for an individual. We dig around memory, plant roses here, erect barriers there. But – like fable – memory is fragile, mutable, and nomadic. Remembering the excluded exclusion might produce a disguised critique, a humorous reflection upon a bull-like presence, or our own eagle-like pretensions. It may show a hyena dressed as a wolf, dressed as a sheep, duped into acting as sheepdog. And then this might be forgotten.

Rather than any actual philological realism, it appears that when considering a lineage of lost books – when telling a fable of a fable that is presumed to have originated in the cradle of civilisation – then, this spectral overhang of probable books and conjectured presences is connected to the fable-function of camouflage in a similar fashion as dream is to memory. The absence is part of the presence; the comedy of power relationships is being told in breaks and fissures.

The simplicity of form associated with the Aesopic generates a more complex afterlife. Fables become a recognisable pattern. At every rewriting or fresh contextualising anthology, with each modification of a tale’s intensity or nuance, so do the gaps in cultural imagination grow. Perhaps, one day, the liberty at play in this fabric will be entirely made of space. A phantom of possibility arises.

Even if a philological science could prove itself complete via a rediscovered parchment; fable-function will continue to hint at another book because narratives of the human realm and the nature of the relationships therein are the qualities that make fable-function current and active. 

Aesop was not a future-seeing visionary, the tales attributed to Aesop link to human experience as observation, not prediction. The fable took on a form derived from a slave perspective. To see was to see absurdity. Inside this form it is the fable-function that animates the telling, a critical eye looking at cruel discrepancies in relational exchange.

It should be noted that, in this tale I am telling, Aesop is also a gap. There is a roughly carved out hole, a space into which our cultural imagination pushes this particular tale-teller. There are attributed tales from this tale-teller. There is no definitive authorial hand, however. There are images of the tale-teller, there is not a proven portrait. A legend concerning Aesop’s death is available, but there is no grave. Indeed, he was – according to legend – accused of all manner of agitation and consequently thrown off a cliff. Like so many of the disenfranchised, for Aesop the Mediterranean Sea becomes a funeral home. This fluid mortuary rest flows into oceans. The fable-function slips around islands, squeezes beneath Gibraltar’s armed guards, and then runs unto all other shores.

Our relationality with the farce of dominion, or its absence, produces a freshly written passage – gap, interval – that foregrounds the resonant elements of this pattern. There is an emptiness that propels our plot forward. An absent book may be continually inferred, the flag becomes a fine gauze; each evolving context casts different shadows across past relationships. 

What is this emptiness? ‘It’s something that the characters in the film care a lot about, but the audience doesn’t worry about it too much’ says Alfred Hitchcock when describing his craft. Hitchcock consistently illustrated his notion of a MacGuffin by telling a short story, a fable: 

‘The word MacGuffin comes from a story about two men in an English train, and one says to the other “What’s that package on the baggage rack over your head?” “Oh,” he says, “that’s a MacGuffin.” The first one says, “Well, what’s a MacGuffin?” “It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish highlands.” So the other says, “But there are no lions in the Scottish highlands.” And he answers, “Then that’s no MacGuffin.”’ (A. Hitchcock, 2014: 137) 

In this tale, the humour is an evasion. This explanation is not an explanation, it is Hitchcock simultaneously telling and not telling us about the MacGuffin. And yet – this evasive lubrication of a process is what a MacGuffin is about.

5. Ghost stories for adults

…stories I knew…

These cultural imaginings can be told, written, and sometimes seen. Pictures and patterning within an image (which may be told, written, or seen) reveal a discrepancy between the power-full and power-less. Aby Warburg was an investigator of the passageways between patterns. Such passages became an ‘iconology of interval’. He once described his research project, ‘Mnemosyne’, as a history ‘to be told like a fable: ghost stories for adults’ (A. Warburg, 2012: 13). 

Suggesting it is a story to be told like a fable implies two qualities. First, it is told; there is a tale-teller preparing to intrigue our ear. Second, like a fable, history investigated in this manner has a fable-function. The dynamics between degrees of liberty are important.

A further question: what is the difference between a ghost story for an adult and a ghost story for a child? Maybe it is a simple matter of how far one is prepared to be scared. And what is at stake when one is scared through the actions of fable-function? 

Now there are holes, one must delve into these absences. Within each image, this play of lack and manifestation produces a spectral mist. We are forced to explore darkness. A phantasm creeps out to touch other images. An adult ghost story passes within this mist called fear, seeking the extent of this patterning. A ladder twisting around its gaps, a crumbling balustrade guiding one across a void.

A ghost perdures not by a material infrastructure but in a psyche (collective or individual) which is responding to a set of relational cues.  

An associative region of passageways embedded in the imagination becomes a manner of remembrance. Fable-function sets out to imagine and to make memory; a re-membering as body is the crossing between breath and heartbeat. Fable-function is to make memory a pattern that can be narrated – without getting caught. Hopefully, without getting caught. The lines between speculative embodiment (memory) and actual physicality (gestural resistance) prove difficult to undo. There is a crossing over in the in-between.

 A labyrinth is patterned around a cross at centre with a unicursal line folding and unfolding around this central “X”. A true labyrinth holds no stops to the line. Each apparent cul-de-sac is a turn, not a trap. If there is any trap in a labyrinth it is found at the centre, where mythic tradition has the minotaur as a marker of death. Even so, such death is perhaps not as it seems; it can be interpreted as an encounter with one’s own chthonic self – a hybrid composition of desire and revulsion. 

The instability of the passage disorientates the line. There is only one way in, one way out. This wholeness of journey is achieved in gaps; that is, the disorientation of the journey is made of sensed lacuna, confused perceptions. The holes force one toward a whole narrative. In Warburg’s terminology, I suggest, an ‘iconology of intervals’. The labyrinth is hence given an emblematic relationship to memory. Memory is a chiasmic structure, a space of crossing over. Imagination interleaves the crossings into a pattern around a central “X”. 

X marks the spot. X: where “I” am because the pattern is recognised. 

Imagination crosses to memory, memory crosses to selfhood.

The chiasmus and labyrinth join an array of forms whose task is to serve as perpetuating moments of intense encounter. For narrative, crossing and echoing forms trace out a circulation; a weaving together of patterns, images, and relationships. In chiasm two living wholes become, for the duration of encounter, a new and singular entity. Tale-telling begins in sounds exchanged: laughter, whispers, echoes. Warburg has left a note linking the sounding of exchange to memory, and therefore the sounding of memory to the greater cultural or social narrative.

‘Memory is but a chosen collection of stimulus phenomena corresponding to sonorous enunciations (loud or soft speech). (That is why I keep in mind a particular notion of my library’s purpose, namely as a primary collection for studying the psychology of human expression.)’ (A. Warburg, 2007: 313)

Memory, underlined in the original, shifts onto an oral, sonorous train of association. Memory is chosen, meaning that recall is here considered to be a deliberative act. “Mnemosyne” was a word Warburg had carved into the door lintel beneath which one entered his library. Mnemosyne, as mother of muses, carries the weight of knowledge and nurtures those who remember story. Memory in a library is a curatorial presence, the epistemological surrounds designed to stimulate a form of knowing.

Aesop wittily permutates a great store of fable, providing the listener with a daring balance of entertainment and subversion. Shahrazad is a paragon of deliberative memory, providing story nested within story. Her fables are told so that the hearer always demands more. Within this stimulus there is always a choice to be made; am I, for example, about to speak to adults or children? Do I use loud or soft speech? 

Patterns that survive the choices of how they are told and remembered may be considered as enduring intervals. There is an interrelational process within this edit, there is an intensity which this rhythmic interval, or passage, seeks to pattern and further communicate. The enduring-interval can be considered as a border crossing, an intensity organised aside from the hierarchies of normative control. A lineage of happenstance, a presence of arising absences; in this aporia what was normally fixed, and therefore unavailable for questioning, becomes less fixed and hence opened toward critical scrutiny. Fable-function helps the narrative construct a libretto for that shift. The tale-teller must keep telling tales until memory is properly entangled with a living future.

6. Gestural resistance

…and I versified…

This space is organised by intensities, more so than by hierarchy. A calligraphy of woundedness, a scrivener of absences. Fable-function works within aporia and hence opens a space wherein memory and critical scrutiny may cross  over and become entangled. An aporia under the gaze; an allowed instance of ludic community. Patterns of ridiculous incidence, emptiness and fullness, are critically re-assembling the memory’s labyrinth. Power might be elided via gestural resistance – when gestural resistance is considered as the performative presence of fable-function. 

Written language at its base is a tracery of gestural resistance. The body drags against a recording substance. The dragged furrow begins to enunciate sense. Writer and reader pull up sense from this materiality. Writer and reader weave together an imagined community, a dreamlike assemblage of meaning-making elements that produce a fictive world. Fable-function persists in providing continued story because narratives of human interaction, and the nature of those relationships, are the qualities that make fable-function current and active. 

Our relationality presents at a micro-performative level. Gestural resistance beginning in twitch, blink, a smile, or a tongued movement that may – or may not – produce a slip. This is a performance with the nonsense of power, or the absence of power, and it allows patterns of intensity. Patterns of intensity are re-cognised as image.

Image, and image in series, begets story. Story foregrounds the resonant elements of pre-existent patterns. Phantoms lacking and spectres holding; they cross and cross over again. Memory function creates patterns within perceived materials, upholding and adapting narrative intensities so to maintain a sensed reality. 

In story, paths are crossed between showing and the sense of an imagined community. Memory is expressed and understood by its narrativity. A dramaturgy described as cultural imagination. In this fruitive medium, for both an individual and a collective, fable-function is a distributed phenomena. The tale-teller bleeds a spectral liberty into the materiality of gestural resistance.

7. She is without end

Mother Bunch hoists forth her truncheon, and the drollery proceeds like this: What is at hand? A time of wise puppetry. What surrounds? The glove puppet fits. And what is in-between? Fables in cascades, tales within tales. 

This is a manner of time travel. This crone tale-teller has Chronos wrapped around her little finger. The snake was apprehended by the ravelling ways of that good ol’ gal, Mother Bunch. She has this piffling little tale rolled up with the other scrolls, on the top shelf. 

Amusement, intrigue, scandal: a stuttered telling marred the solid front. A gesture was made behind the curtain, but Mother Bunch shone a light. She made shadows dance all over that drapery. In J.’s court, the clue was deemed to be soiled, although other’s said that the gestures were themselves slightly dirty. These curtain-made shapes will reappear in another, more contradictory tale. This time, it is drolls time to tell.

When fanzines appeared at gigs, Mother Bunch punched the stapler. She was an alewife, and might be still. She is a teller of tall tales, a larder of jokes. Inns were once distribution centres for the chapbook trade. A matriarchal suture, she slips one in. A romantic suitor, she sets one up. 

The map and compass of this making; this setting of characters into journey, the slotting of an ear up against our thoughts. This matter of duration is a complex interaction between what is at hand, what surrounds, and what is in-between. Sometimes, when a tale for the telling is pulled from the scrolls, snaky surprises can be sprung. Crone interactions are somewhat rude. She has seen it all – said the government minister running for his briefs.

What is at hand, what surrounds, what is in-between? This process to vivify our apprehension of Squeaky and Fluffy. Listen to these toys and appendages. Are we hearing the high-pitched creak of Mr J.’s latex underwear? Or, are Squeaky and Fluffy cute cartoon characters? Their eyes become pools with vast sniffling teardrops leaking over the floor. Squeaky and Fluffy are seeking to make a gesture, despite the uniform expectations of grief. Squeaky and Fluffy are trying to swim in this Alice-made tsunami.

The selfish society is selflessly grieving. It mourns its senselessness. If seeking entertainment, or distraction, it will inevitably meet a tyrant. The tyrant will be intent on extracting value from this. Their newspaper once supported Mr J. They also employed Mother Bunch, however, and her tales got all the attention. The tyrant always wants more, and that includes more information on the nature of your want. 

Blue of beard: red is the tyrannical tipple. The nature of your want will be sealed in a vault. That vault will be impossible to enter, apart from by means of your temptation to enter it. (Mr J.’s temptation has got him locked up in a different prison.) In such a manner, the tyrant believes he has snared yet more of your wanting. Only, blue of beard cannot bear to have his secret shared, and Mother Bunch is forever secreting hidden tales in visible places. Mother Bunch will inevitably smear her photocopies with a fast acting hallucinogenic. 

Mother Bunch has taken the form of a crone teller. The crone teller is a temporary gathering station, a deposit that cannot hold. A figure which must, only and forever, tell. The crone leaks. This concerns more than a little piddle, side effect of age. Bunch forms around an imbricating telling, her interleaved subversions (stapled in the middle), and yet, as a mother, hers it is to bring a comfort blanket into this traumatic hiatus. How sweet, to cosy up with subterfuge. A comfort blanket may easily be converted into a rope. This transformed weave is the knotted companion of an escape attempt.

Squeaky and Fluffy got locked up with Mr J. They continue to insist on repeated escape attempts. For their most recent venture they have left a puppet in bed. It will sing the Frog Song all night, and hence dupe the guards. Attempt repeated; another escape thwarted. Turns out, the guards hate the Frog Song.

Blue of beard, red of tipple; the tyrant wipes grimy food splatters from his woolly bib and cues up his most evil laugh. The pattern of repetition is shaped into a recognisable picture. He cues up his most evil laugh – and at this moment of glandular self-satisfaction, Mother Bunch has provided the story with a vulnerability. Quick as quick, the princess rams his precious bloody key down his gallowing throat: Let the old man choke on his secret!

Perhaps if we savour one more story; let me know how this ends. 

A tabulation of liberty, despite the vanity of Power; what drollery is this? 

Squeaky and Fluffy set up a clinic in the alehouse. Their doctor, a most professional type, tweaks a dead-one and: Lo! arises they. Time comes again, Just like that. That’s the way to do it.

What is at hand, what surrounds, what is in-between? Simple things, made strange. Common desires that burn uncommon bright. 

The crone teller is a larder; a temporary gathering station, a deposit that cannot hold. It is a fools task. It is the inventiveness of desperation. An improvisation with inherited deprivations. This lineage of not ever speaking is unravelled within the sufferance of not ever being heard. And so, look here, Mr J. has just got out. He is now determined to tell it all. His is a peculiar persona, a most unusual figure. This is a crafty animal, a dullard beast, an obsequious creature. 

Animal, beast, creature: no subversion here, Mr J. insists. This is merely how a child learns their ABC.

Puppets can be made. A simple game. A sock becomes a snake: how easily one confesses to a puppet. A puppet is such a good listener. What is at hand, a soft toy becomes a co-conspirator. Some cloth, card, paper mulch, a few colours; a rock sometimes will do. 

What a hard head you have, Mr Punch. All the better to utter of one’s sovereignty – and to discover allurements therein. What did you say Mr Punch? Hang Mr J.!? No–no–no–didn’tsaythat. 

Mr Punch is so proper these days. A reformed character, you might say. Behind the tent they hold regular trauma clinics. Supported by fellow discards; Crocodile, Judy, Mistress Moon, and the Lamppost, they all seem to have turned a corner. And Mr Punch, he feels strong enough to get some education. He wants to be a doctor. He is sure he can bring back the dead.

The familiar truncheon becomes a strange stick; the silken sock has ideas above its station. Oh, sock of ligament! Oh, garment stitched of nerve-ending! When these coagulated feelings can be called vessel, then our pouring out will be never-ending. Ours is the libation. 

The embodied flow is not always in the body because, as flow, it is an interaction with others. All our tipples dribble red. 

Our body is not only our body, sometimes flesh figures as an animated object. Our flesh is imagination, our flesh is memory. This body is, sometimes, something so familiar that we forget how strange it is. 

Sunshine and violence in sandy solitude, a professor (swazzle in mouth) with a host of inanimate friends. That’s the way. That way. Get away from the outrage of brutalities, domestic and judicial. I take myself in hand. I take myself inside a puppet. I surround my senses. My sense surrounds me, and although I may be none of that, I am in-between…somewhere. The puppet mops up all my stray thoughts: Once upon a time.

What scrutiny of the pompous, what revelations of the powerful; and so, you say, the controlling are controlling. I say I say I say. Indeed the king, in his altogether, is always seen. Squeaky and Fluffy lock arms and dance, joyously chanting: The king, in his altogether, his altogether, the king is altogether nothing but his nudity. They are kettled, beaten, and returned to jail.

The people with the power are those who hold the mirror. Mother Bunch is polishing the mace. Do we dare to allow an alewife to grasp this symbol of state authority? Fear not, ‘tis but drollery. A crone will not, generally, be trying to become a king. But Mother Bunch is cleaning the mirror also, and eyeing up a nifty exit because, more often than not, the tale-teller will try to take hold of the mirror.

8. Epimythium

One must look to the centre for an ending. One finds ancient ends that are always beginning. To the extent that the fabular trope has infiltrated the centre of idiomatic language, so do we speak in the manner of the haunted. The ending is a crossing over.

Works Cited

Anonymous, ‘The Aesop Romance (The Book of Xanthus the Philosopher and Aesop his Slave or the Career of Aesop)’, in Hansen, W. E. (ed.) 1998, Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Benjamin, W. 1999, ‘What is Epic Theatre’ in Illuminations, London, Pimlico.

Eco, U., Ivanov, V. V., Rector, M. and Sebeok, T. A. 2011, Carnival! Berlin, De Gruyter Mouton.

Gebler, C. 2019. Aesop's fables: The Cruelty of the Gods, London, Head of Zeus.

Gert, V. cited: Senelick, L. (ed.) 1993, Cabaret performance: Sketches, Songs, Monologues, Memoirs. Vol.2, Europe, 1920-1940. PAJ Books, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press.

Hitchcock, A. and Gottlieb, S. 2014, Hitchcock on Hitchcock: selected writings and interviews.                           Volume 2. Berkeley, University of California Press

Kurke, L. 2006, Phaedo 61a5–b7, cited: 'Plato, Aesop, and the beginnings of mimetic prose.' Representations, 94(1) 01.05.2006, p. 6(47).

Warburg, A. cited: Johnson, C. D. 2012, Memory, metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

Warburg, A. 2007, 'Memories of a Journey Through the Pueblo Region' in Michaud, P-A. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, New York, Zone Books, pp. 293 - 330.

Weber, C. 2000, ‘Brecht’s concept of Gestus and the American Performance Tradition’, in Martin and Bial (eds.) Brecht sourcebook. Worlds of performance. London, Routledge.

***

Nick Norton is an author of novels, short stories, and a researcher into fable-function. His collection Shape Found For Living is published by MA Bibliotheque (2025), Building the Aesopic Body was published by SPTM! (2024). Other writings can be found in Minor Literature[s], 3:AM, The Happy Hypocrite, Soanyway and elsewhere.