4.
Standing on the edge
of her patio doors in full drag celebrity chanteuse Mary Mary called out for
her beloved Chihuahua Mitzi who had,- between being let out for a ‘tinkle’ in
her Swarovski collar and Mary Mary attaching her six layers of eyelashes and
fetching Mitzi’s customary bowl of Himalayan Spring Water,- been snatched by a
passing fox; Mary Mary’s evening was about to get a whole lot worse.
So, how does her
tale relate to anything so far? The
incident that night will have immeasurable unquantifiable effects on the lives
of others in a manner you would not believe possible.
I will attempt to
connect 6 totally unconnected things and see if you can follow how I am able to
make them all relate.
Mary Mary and Mitzi
Lord Raven and his
two eldest sons Amarillo
and Morado
The Bank of England ,
The London Stock
Exchange (The Old one)
The Hidden Casino,
(within and between and under The Bank of England and The London Stock Exchange...called...well The
Hidden Casino.)
Floy
This is a prime
example of the ‘distracted taste’ or stories for those of the internet age who
have the attention span of a fruit fly; or Lord Raven’s Tale with all the
daedalian vagaries and vicissitudes required to reboot a comatose imagination
and allow you to meander wherever Lord Raven’s fateful fate meandered
before...well, his fateful fate.
There is indeed a
conundrum, a dilemma, a convergence of two roads, one Faustian, the other
ultimately sacrificial yet just- one of God’s mischievous games. A crossroad of
choices down which either signals a loss. I urge you to think of times in your
own lives when you have been thus torn.
Below, to hammer the
point of the randomness of ‘distracted tales’ home, are two objects used for
the purposes of our story to replace objects described and seen in both the
book and the film The great Gatsby, namely shirts:
Gold
Bricks. Like a smash and grab robber Lord Raven would return from long periods
away at his work, accounting the vast sums made at the Russian
roulette tables at the Hidden Casino of which he had been made treasurer,
and entering the door of his palatial familial home take ten paces into the
living room and hurl a dozen or so gold bricks into the air. His thirteen then
young children watched in delight as the bullion crashed in slow motion through
the glass coffee table and dinner service onto the floor.
Silk
Blankets. No part of the house was out of bounds for Mitzi’s bed and Mary Mary
had spared no expense regarding the quality of material her canine companion would
slumber upon; Imperial Chinese silk; a ragged tartan blanket would not do; too
Scottish, a towel was too common, no Mitzi would be dazzled by the confusing
sight of Mary Mary running about singing The Sound of Music throwing
slow-falling not very comfortable fabric into the air.
You don’t have to
have read the life of that tycoon Gatsby to realize that to him having a pool
and a walk-in wardrobe was, if somewhat strange, a statement about his libido;
throwing hundreds of expensive shirts in the air in front of house guests,
with insouciant abandon was better than the morbid yet dramatic thoughts he
harbored of diving out of a neighboring skyscraper into the shallow end of
his swimming pool. Like our protagonists Lord Raven and Mary Mary he had become
so wealthy he had forgotten that shirts were supposed to be worn and not thrown
about in a contemptible display of that wealth.
By no contrast
whatsoever both Lord Raven and the celebrity chanteuse drag queen Mary Mary
were at the peak of their game and their respective shower of gifts were
displays of their ample and prodigious cash flow, though at the time Raven’s
Ideation Quotient was distinctly Citizen Kane and Mary Mary’s intuitively Julie
Andrews. Proper uses for:
Gold
Bricks, (read also, copper, aluminium, zinc, nickel, titanium, indium, rhodium, praeseodymium): To shore up, secure and act as guarantor for delayed and balanced
reciprocity in the name of barter and peace; a currency under the aegis of
which inferior ephemeral bartered goods such at straw mats, palm oil, yams and
promissory notes such as money could be merrily exchanged with otherwise hostile lands. Traditionally held
by a person of seniority in age and rank having earned his respect through the
garnered knowledge that should that currency turn out to be a mere rumor trade
in goods would abruptly cease and all hell break loose.
Silk
Blankets. Absolutely useless in the ensuing war and famine once a system of exchange’s
basic currency has been hijacked by those not of sufficient seniority and
garnered knowledge to know that a rumor of gold bricks can only go on for so long
before people actually demand to see…well, gold bricks.
Where is the flow of
imagination taking us in our tale? This common and dysfunctional use of both
the brick and the blanket has to stop. And stop it does; Lord Raven’s two
eldest sons Amarillo and Marado out with a drunken party of fellow students
would meet up with Mary Mary out at night in a powder blue baby-doll night-gown
and slippers looking for her Mitzi. In the coming weeks and months- as news
reports of the violence inflicted on Mary Mary and the hideous witness statements of her death-by-drowning leaping from Chelsea bridge to escape her homophobic assailants, her disappearance fueling a bonfire of horror stories of her last minutes in the public imagination, - Lord Raven’s favorite and
most sensitive son Amarillo began to show signs of a nervous break down.
That Ofili’s The
upper Room is based on Floy’s idea gleaned from the description of the last
supper in Lord Raven’s biography is no coincidence for it was at the dinner
table at the palatial Raven residence surrounded by his thirteen progeny and in
the height of his power that his son Amarillo, suffering visibly under the
strain of guilt, confessed to being among the gang, which included the
unrepentant Morado, who inflicted violence upon and the death of the celebrity
chanteuse Mary Mary. In the interim between Mary Mary’s fateful encounter and
the last supper a man she had been seeing regularly enough they were about to
be civilly conjoined had been arrested, charged and found guilty of her murder.
Thus was Lord
Raven’s dilemma; demand there and then that this matter never be spoken of
again by the members of his family assembled and let an innocent man serve a
life term for the death of the celebrity Mary Mary while watching his favorite
son’s mental state decline irreparably before his very eyes, or hand his own
sons over to the police. For three days he brooded in his chair in a dark
corner while his family, having never seen him so drained of
cheer, whispered and tip-toed about. Then, one evening Lord Raven
stood up and left the house.
Lord Raven returned late
at night to his tall-backed chair. He sat motionless for days wrapped in an
ever darkening pall, his eyes stared out in a fevered glaze as his personality seemed
to dim and shift out of focus along with his posture which seemed to crack and
shrink into, and become part of the skeletal structure of the frame itself.;
his work phoned on several occasions, still he did not move. It was the news,-
the words of which, like a dull thud, somehow filtered down the extending
corridors to the startled inmates of the institution in which he had his mind
committed,- that Amarillo ,
in prison, had attempted to take his own life that sent Lord Raven into his
penultimate tail-spin. His remaining children and wife around him, he stood up
slowly and then, proceeded to cry out. A long wounded keening welled
up from a source his scrawny frame belied. As suddenly he rushed about the house smashing everything
he could lay his hands on, things he had worked so hard to acquire for his beloved
family and now, in his rage, grief and madness would have annihilated them too
had his wife not gathered them up and ushered them out of the house never to
return again. When Lord Raven’s tormented whirlwind had subsided he stepped
through the debris of his empire and retreated to the upper-most room of his
house.
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